It happened. About a year after Florida was hit hard by four hurricanes, New Orleans finally lost the gamble that had been going on for decades.

I can't get my mind around the destruction, and I've experienced something similar first-hand.

I haven't ever written about what it was like after Charley. Part of this is because I left the area almost immediately for a two week trip up the west coast, so I didn't experience the full effect.

Even so...

The strangest thing about a hurricane is that it takes so long to happen. Most disasters are instant: a fire, an earthquake, a tornado. You have little warning, there are a few minutes or hours of terror, and then you can immediately begin the recovery process. Hurricanes are gigantic slow-moving agents of destruction. You know it's coming, or could be coming, at least a week in advance. The first bands of clouds come a day early. The thunderstorms begin hours after that. And then... it just keeps getting worse.

For hours, you sit in shock watching the news and your own window as the atmosphere itself tears the world apart. The rain starts out badly and gets worse. The wind rises constantly, whipping rain sideways and then steadily bearing larger and larger debris as more structures succumb to it. You hear the eaves of your house strain in a gust, and then the howling returns to slightly higher than it was before. You make a game out of trying to figure out what just hit your roof.

You still have hours more of this.

Eventually the power goes out, followed by phones, and you're left in the darkness (they always seem to hit at night). You watch as what few lights are left outside wink out one by one. Left alone, your sense of hearing and your imagination are all you have to understand what's happening to your world. Your house is moving. You wonder, perhaps for the first time, if it will withstand the forces tearing at it. You wonder if you've prepared adequately, after all -- and realize that there's nothing you can do regardless.

At this point, I was exhausted. I fell asleep for a few hours, waking every now and then as something loud blew into or by my house. It was fitful, at best.

Then the sun rises.

You're not supposed to leave the house. You know it -- everyone knows it. It's dangerous, but you feel like you have to see it for yourself. After the hours of the unknown, there's this thirst for information that's unquenchable. After I finally located an operating radio station, I put on my headphones and started walking around outside.

I found myself staring, disbelieving, at what was before my eyes. I couldn't fully comprehend the widespread damage, even while looking at it myself. I was lucky: I didn't have serious damage to my building. Other places in my complex had their roof stripped down to the plywood sheathing. Parts of the structure of the next apartments over were in my parking lot.

The corrugated steel over the windows of the grocery store was mostly intact, though the corner was peeled back, I guess from where the plywood had come off the restaurant next door. The awnings were hanging in tatters. Fences, light poles, power wires, and trees everywhere were torn down, seemingly at random. The magnitude of it tears at you; coupled with the restless night, I found myself exhausted and went back home.

After an hour of trying, I finally got a cellphone call through to my family, letting them know that I was okay and my apartment was still intact. At this point, I still had hope that power would be back soon. I kept the refrigerator closed and the windows shut, trying to conserve the precious remnants of coolness. I went back to sleep, perhaps naively hoping that the extent of the damage would be known and a plan to rebuild would be in place by the time I woke up again.

It wasn't. The news just kept getting worse.

I had a stockpile of food, but no way to prepare it. I tried to fill up on crackers and fruit snacks. Water filled any and every depression in the ground, and a day of sunshine had turned the heat and humidity up to brutal levels. I opened my windows but couldn't catch a breeze. My clothes were soaked in sweat. And the power wasn't coming back on, anywhere. They didn't even know where all the damage was yet. I started thinking that I needed to conserve my battery power, so I turned off the radio. I read books by candlelight until it was cool enough for me to fall asleep again.

I woke up starving. Still didn't have phone service, and I was trying to save my cellphone battery to communicate with my family. The grocery store still wasn't open, and wouldn't be open until power was back -- the one manager there said that all of their cold stock had spoiled when their generator failed. People were calling in to the radio station when they found restaurants that had food and power, so I decided to try to drive out to the closest one.

I was low on gas. Nobody had more -- most stations didn't have power, and there were dozens of cars lined up outside of the ones that did have power. I tried to conserve as best I could, and made it to a restaurant. It took forever to get seated and served, but by this time it was just a relief to be out of the heat. They had TVs on in the dining room, and I saw my first shots of the parts of town that had really been damaged.

I basically coasted back home, A/C off, praying that I'd be able to make it. The needle on my gauge was below the E when I parked at my apartment. The phones finally came back on, but there still wasn't any indication about power.

That night I had to throw out everything in my refrigerator and freezer.

I had plane tickets to fly out west in two days.

I woke up just after dawn again -- with literally nothing to do, I'd adjusted my schedule to match the sun. I had my cold shower and walked to the grocery store at 6 AM to see if they were open: they were, and I bought beef jerky and dry cereal to eat. On my way back I saw a pump truck at the Mobil station and drove back immediately to fill up; I put 15.8 gallons in my 16 gallon tank. I heard later that they'd run out of gas again by 8 AM.

I still had no power, no hot water, and no way to cook. The airport would return to "normal schedule" the next day when I had my tickets, but I had a very early flight and they were recommending that you be there early. I began calling airport hotels, and somehow managed to find a room for the night. My taxi driver said he'd been working for 18 hours and couldn't afford to stop, because he wasn't sure he could get gas the next day.

The hotel and restaurants around it were surrounded by felled trees and chaos, and populated by stranded travelers. One of the largest had a glass facade that was completely shattered. Everyone was in a daze. The news was full of stories of destruction and looting, although power was beginning to come back, slowly. I enjoyed the luxury of a hot meal and a shower before leaving for my flight at 5:30 the next morning.

I've told this story not to get pity, but to explain how incredibly disruptive a hurricane is even if you're one of the lucky ones (and I certainly was). I didn't lose my roof like my neighbors, and I didn't have my car crushed by a tree (like several in the hotel were). My home wasn't looted. I lost several days of power and a freezer full of food, but nothing serious.

It took three weeks for power to be restored to everyone who lost it in Charley. It was months before repairs had even begun on all of the damaged buildings. It takes a long time to recover from a storm like this.

New Orleans has it a hundred times worse.

I'm having trouble comprehending it.