Hurricane Katrina

Things have been really hectic around here as I'm sure it is with everyone else at this time. We hope that everyone safely weathered the storm. We will definitely have stories to tell baby Jernigan when she/he gets older about its "first" hurricane.

Here's our hurricane story:
After much convincing, Jeremy finally agreed with me that we would evacuate from Biloxi. We left Sunday morning and headed towards Mobile. Traffic was really bad getting there so we decided we would not try to go any further. My sister Jennifer (who is 8 months pregnant) and her husband Scott live in Mobile. We thought we had the hook up through Scott (he is an anchor for the NBC station in Mobile) with a great place to stay during the storm. Family members were allowed to stay at the station for the storm so the four of us spent Sunday night on 2 air mattresses in a sales persons office...nothing to complain about there. The next day the storm hit. We didn't hear much going on outside because we were in a large, secure building. The power went out mid morning while Scott was on the air and the generators kicked on. These are massive generators that can run a whole tv station. After a short time, the generator CAUGHT FIRE and the fire department was called to put it out. Needless to say, we no longer had the luxury of cable, a/c, lights, etc that we were expecting. We ended up staying in Mobile until Wednesday and we still REALLY appreciate Jennifer and Scott putting us up for the hurricane. It was definitely much better circumstances than if we would have rode out the storm at home.
Once we made it back to Biloxi on Wednesday, we were thrilled but shocked to see Jeremy's clinic still standing with only minor shingle damage, a broken light and parts of the fence down. Not bad for only being a mile from the beach. Our house did not do as well but we are so happy that it is still standing. We got about a foot of water in the sunroom and garage and about 4 inches in the rest of the house. Just enough for us to have to rip out carpet, insullation and sheetrock but very fortunate that not much else was ruined. Here are before and after pics of our house.















Notice the full trees in the backyard in the before picture and nearly a bare sky in the after picture. We lost 1 tree in the front yard and 7 in the back. With all that being said, we are already making repairs to the house and hope to have it looking even better than before in the near future. Then we can finally concentrate on the BABY!