Government officials are telling Louisiana residents displaced by Hurricane Gustav to come back home, but April Suttles waits.
The 29-year-old waits to hear from her employer, Avis Rent A Car, that her job has opened back up. She waits, watching the local news, to catch a glimpse of her neighborhood. But mostly, she waits to hear from her fiancé, Kevin Boisseau, whom she had to leave behind.
Boisseau, a member of the Louisiana National Guard, had to stay behind.
Because Suttles can't contact Boisseau, she sits waiting for a call from him. Suttles hopes Boisseau soon will get the chance to go to their 2-story home in Bywater, La., which is ten minutes away from the French Quarter. Then, he will call her to let her know if everything is alright.
While she remains optimistic, Suttles doesn't know what to expect when she returns home to the New Orleans area. Suttles says although she is satisfied with the government's response to Hurricane Gustav, the media is not helping to ease her tension.
"No one's showing the damages, no aftermath, no images of the city," Suttles said. "After the storm passed through, there's no concern anymore."
This is a complete change from just three years ago during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Because of the devastation from Katrina, news coverage seemed to never end. Suttles, a University of Memphis graduate, lived in Memphis at the time of Katrina, had a relative in college at Tulane University in New Orleans. She received constant updates of the storm from the media.
Hurricane Gustav's damages have been speculated to cost from $5 - $10 billion, but not close to the $41 billion cost of Hurricane Katrina. The levees were not breached as they were during Katrina, and the devastation has not been on the same scale as during Katrina.
Suttles and Boisseau began making plans for her evacuation on the Thursday before the storm made landfall. Suttles has family in Memphis, so she knew she could stay with her mother for a while. They didn't board up the house and never panicked. She packed two weeks' worth of clothes and left her home Friday afternoon.
"We were worried about the house flooding, so I moved things, like all of my photos, up to the second level of the house," Suttles said.
Although traffic had started to become congested, she made it to Memphis in six hours. She was amazed by what she saw on the interstate while evacuating the city.
"There were people driving with lawn equipment hitched to their cars," Suttles said. "I drove behind a man pulling a trailer with four horses in it."
Although Suttles plans to return home by this weekend, she and her fiancé are making arrangements to move out of the New Orleans area completely.
"My fiancé's mother told all of her children that they should enjoy the city of New Orleans, but they should start looking elsewhere to move," Suttles said.
Amid the debate of whether residents will evacuate for other storms, Suttles says that she definitely will. She says she believes the people of New Orleans will take heed of any type of weather threats. Suttles says that because of the devastation of Katrina, her family knows to take all threats seriously.
"They're rebuilding the levees, but that will take another five or six years," Suttles said.
