After they left, I tied down my lawn mower and other things in the yard as I usually did for each hurricane. I usually stayed home for hurricanes. Around 2:00 I walked on over to the beach and saw the Gulf was getting rough. Although it was windy, there still was no rain and the electricity had still not gone off.
I decided to go to my friend, Ignace Santiny Jr.’s house, about a 5 minute walk from my home. We all called him Junior. I decided to pass the storm with him, because, although I usually stayed at my own house, I could see by the force of the wind that I should leave my own home. His home was in a more sheltered area, right behind the new Catholic church, which was a strong building. His house was also a house on pilings, as mine was not.
At about 5 PM I started getting ready to go there. My girls had a little brown and white Chihuahua named Susie. She had stayedbehind with me. I didn’t feel it was right to bring a dog into someone else’s home so I decided to put her in a basket, then I thought better of it and put her in a Number three tub. I figured she would probably float if water came into the house. Then I went on my way to Jr.’s house.
But first I went out to the beach first to check on the situation there one last time. . That was around 6 PM . At that time the police were going around announcing a voluntary evacuation. I knew then that Betsy would be a threat to the Island. Grand Isle was only 7 miles long and at its widest point it was MAYBE just a mile.
Right about the time I got to Jr.’s house, the wind and the rain really picked up. We stayed at his house for about 4 hours. In addition to myself, there were members of his family—his sisters, Cora and Laurencia, her 12 year old daughter Frances, their mother Callolle Santiny, his brother in law and wife, Nelson and Rosalie Trahan.
About 10 PM that night, they decided we needed to get out of the house. We all walked on over to the Our Lady of the Isle Catholic Church, which was about 11 feet off the ground and had a cement foundation.. The priest let us in and talked for a while then left for his apartment that was attached to the church and told us he was going to bed and would see us in the morning. By that time there was no electricity, no radio , no form of communication.. All we had were flashlights. We just sat there and waited. It wasn't long before the force and sound of the wind let us know that Betsy had arrived. It was unbelievable.The church windows and doors were closed and we couldn’t even hear ourselves talk. The walls were shaking and the windows started breaking. (My father DoDo (Felicien Vizier) was at the Coast Guard Station on the same street I was. The station had a wind guage. The guage broke at 180 mph winds. This we heard the next day.) We really began to wonder and were afraid that we would not survive this storm. I had never been through one that bad. I never gave a thought about how my house was holding out. At that point it was my life I was concerned about. We didn’t think the church could take more of the wind.
Then the eye of the storm passed over us and everything was calm. And we walked out onto the porch of the church. We could see the moon and then the water started rising fast, although the rain had stopped.We could see the homes near the church begin to come off their foundations. They started bumping into each other and moving away. We stayed on the porch for a while as mattresses, bedspreads and pillows drifted up to the porch. The wind and the rain started to pick up and we went back into the church, shut the door and sat down.
We were all very quiet. The noise outside and the shaking of the walls resumed. We thought it would never end. We just sat quietly until around 3 AM it started to calm down somewhat. We finally reopened the church doors at 6:00AM on September 9th. The priest came out of his apartment. We had not seen him all night. We suspect he slept through it.
I finally left the church at 6:30 AM to see about my home. I had to walk through up to 2 feet of water, I had trouble finding my street because almost everything –every structure –on the beach side had been destroyed and in most cases washed away into the bay—washed clear across the island. A tidal surge had destroyed almost everything and had damaged what it had not totally taken away. In the short distance I had walked, I realized about 23 buildings just on the beach side were gone—never found. It looked like a bomb had hit. I didn’t know where I was. There were no street names and the buildings at the front of each street were the first to go because they were the closest to the Gulf.
When I did finally find Santiny Lane, houses were in the street, some gone, and some moved to the property next door. I met up with my brother in law Richard who had also stayed behind and as we walked down the street, our Chihuahua Susie heard us talking because we could hear her yelping and barking. My brother in Law Richard Brunies stopped by his house which was still standing, but was in such horrible condition. The tidal surge from the gulf had knocked it off its foundation and it was filled with mud and everything inside destroyed.
As I walked a few houses down. I walked around a house in the street and saw my house was gone. It had turned around and moved onto John Bradberry’s property, our next door neighbor. His home had also moved to his daughters property and her house had moved onto an empty lot.. All that was left on my property was the garage, the cement block foundations and 2 cement garden squares. And some old oak trees. The back door to my house was torn off and I walked in.
Susie was still sitting in the number three tub in the living room on a blanket of mud. Everything in the house was thrown down . My daughters’ bed was on top of a new record player the oldest one, Janis, had just bought. In the mud of that bedroom her Beatle dolls were found which she still has today with just a little bit of that mud still in the creases of the faces. We had 5-6 inches of mud throughout the whole house. Everything was ruined—family pictures , furniture. We had no electricity or telephone for three months. It took many months to get back to normal living. Ever since that day, I have always evacuated.
