“We just lost our chimney.”

I remember my mother sharing those thoughts with me while we talked on the phone as Hurricane Katrina was ravaging the greater New Orleans region.

I was comfortably sitting in Jonesboro, nestled in the relative safety of Jackson Parish and central Louisiana.

My mom was riding out the storm in Abita Springs at her sister’s house. She had left her home on Transcontinental Drive in Metaire and figured a trek 40 miles to the north to St. Tammany Parish would be enough to avoid the worst parts of Hurricane Katrina.

As we all know now, it wasn’t.

Soon after my mom uttered the words, “We just lost our chimney,” the phone went dead and it would be more than 24 hours before I was able to speak with her again.

Hurricane Katrina struck with such ferocity that it caught tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents by surprise and resulted in the deaths of more than 1,800 people.

I was unprepared; everyone seemed to be. After losing contact with all significant family members in the 24 hours after the storm struck, I loaded up my truck with a full tank of gas and ventured toward the city in hopes of making contact and confirming everyone was OK.

The closest I could get was St. Tammany Parish.

My Dad, brother and sister were riding out the immediate aftermath at their home in Covington, spared serious damage as surrounding trees fell but spared their house.

Their neighbors were not so lucky.

Three near-by homes were struck by falling tress, one pummeled by three separate tree strikes. There were so many downed trees, it took an army of the neighborhood’s residents with chain saws all of the next day to clear a driving path just so vehicles could get by.

After visiting my dad, I headed to see my mother-in-law at St. Tammany Parish Hospital. As the head of their environmental services department, she had been at work for more than 24 hours and sported the look of someone who knew they had 24 to 48 hours more to go.

Nightfall set in the day after Katrina struck by the time I made it to my mother. She was still at my aunt’s house. No power. No running water. They were just like everyone else, lucky though, because the most serious impact was the home’s destroyed chimney.

I convinced my mom and step-dad to follow me back to Jonesboro. My brother-in-law and grandparents eventually followed.

It was a week before my mom returned to her home in Metairie. It was ruined after being flooded from front to back.

The household items were lost; anything not waterlogged was covered in mold — something thousands in the River Parishes experienced firsthand during the Hurricane Isaac.

She wasn’t able to move back home for seven months  — the time away included four months living in a FEMA trailer in her front yard.

About a month after the storm, my mom and I took a drive into New Orleans to visit the locations of our childhoods.

No one had returned to the New Orleans East neighborhood I first grew up in. None of the streetlights were working and there were spray-painted markers on every abandoned building.

Those markings were tags from search crews. They indicated if a home had been searched and if a dead body had been found.

The most unsettling aspect of the trip was seeing this ugly brown line on everything. It was marked anywhere from six to 12 feet high on each structure. It took me a minute to realize it was the flood’s watermark, signaling how high the storm surge reached at each section of the neighborhood.

In truth, it was the line of the living. If you were lucky enough to stay above it, you survived. If you didn’t, you drowned.

I still think about that ugly watermark ten years later. I imagine I always will.

Stephen Hemelt is publisher and editor of L’OBSERVATEUR. He can be reached at 985-652-9545 or stephen.hemelt@lobservateur.com.