By Quin Hillyer at The Washington Examiner;

As Hurricane Florence nears landfall, I hope whatever communities it hits will have people there like a guy in New Orleans who helped his neighbors in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina provided this guy with his proverbial 15 minutes of fame. Most of the fame involved humorous stories.

He greeted Washington writers Tucker Carlson and Matt Labash on the porch of an Uptown mansion (the house of a friend), wearing nothing but boxer shorts, a brace on his sprained ankle, and a big gun he didn’t really know how to fire. His clothes had accidentally been locked inside while he took a dip in the pool.

Michael Lewis, author of MoneyballThe Blind Sideand Liar’s Pokerwrote about the guy refusing to leave the city because he didn’t want to leave some feral cats sleeping under his house unfed, and also because he hated the traffic with which evacuees would contend. Not in print but in person, Lewis also told about the guy holding a gun on an intruder in a darkened hallway in a neighbor’s house, ordering the intruder to emerge with hands up — only to realize the “intruder” actually was a life-sized cigar-store Indian stashed in a nook under a stairway.

Yet, funny stories aside, this guy deserved to be anything but a foil for laughs.

He knew he lived in one of the few neighborhoods in New Orleans actually above sea level. He had a good working generator. He was behind in work anyway and, as an insurance agent with clients across the country, he thought they might need help filing claims. So this guy figured he should stay with his client files and computer and get some work done, even if the hurricane proved as bad as predicted.

Sure enough, his house was undamaged and his street unflooded. But he still didn’t get any work done. A few friends who had evacuated knew he had stayed behind with a working computer, and they emailed to ask him to swing by their houses to assess the damage. Word spread to other neighborhood friends, who also emailed him to ask favors. Several had pets who had scampered away when they were evacuating and had to be left behind — so they wanted this guy to see if their pets had returned, and if so, to feed them….

[Please read the full column.]

 

 

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