Colorado woman reflects on enduring Katrina, as she still rebuilds from Black Forest fire

Saturday marks the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall but the memory of the storm still hits Trudy Dawson hard.

“I get goosebumps,” she said.

She grew up in New Orleans and until the hurricane hit, her parents lived there too.

When the Category 3 hurricane made landfall, they evacuated to her house in Black Forest. Two weeks later, they wanted to go back.

“They asked me to take them back so they could see what was left,” Dawson said.

When they arrived, they found a condemned home.

“As I turned the corner, I looked in the rearview mirror, I looked in my parents’ eyes and I could see tears in their eyes,” she said. “This was the home I grew up in. My family’s house was turned upside down.”

Her parents never moved back. They live in Georgia now and everyone tried to move on.

“When we grew up in New Orleans, hurricanes were sort of exciting,” Dawson said. “You took out the hurricane lamps. No one ever anticipated the big one would hit. Sure enough Katrina was the big one.”

But that wouldn’t be Dawson’s only brush with disaster. Just eight years after she lost her childhood home to Katrina, she lost her adult home to the Black Forest fire.

“Similarly, living in Black Forest for 30 years, we were always told, some day there would always be a fire. But just like in New Orleans, knowing something could happen, it took us by total devastation,” she said.

Dawson is a clinical psychologist. So both natural disasters forced her to suddenly practice what she had preached.

“You become somewhat, not immune, but resilient,” she said. “In terms of learning, trying to find what’s good in all of that.”

And she says is proud of all the rebuilding in her hometown.