Lawrence-based musicians Katie Euliss and Mike West and their four children are pictured in this promotional photo for the couple's band, Truckstop Honeymoon.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the nation’s southern coastline 10 years ago this week, musicians Mike West, his wife and bandmate Katie Euliss and their two children were on tour in Florida.

With initial reports trickling in slowly and short of any hard information, West recalls, he and his family originally planned on making their way back to their home in New Orleans.

Soon, however, news reports confirmed their fears, West says, as he and his family recognized a shot of their Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood on television.

“We started to realized that things were not what we thought they were,” he remembers. “The part of town where the weather reporters were, and the people were screaming on the roofs and the water was 15 feet deep, we realized that they were talking about our neighborhood in particular.”

With more incoming coverage giving West and his family a fuller idea of the damage to their neighborhood, their concerns turned toward their roommate and their dogs, who were in New Orleans when the hurricane hit.

“Suddenly you’re cut off from everyone you know and care about, and then not knowing what’s going on with them and there being the possibility that they may be in very dire straits,” West explains. “When there’s no information, no lines of communication, you just want to know and you can’t know. Nobody knows what’s going on and nobody can help you.”

Still working their way through Florida and back toward Louisiana, the family caught a portion of a news broadcast after a cafe gig in Tallahassee, Fla. There, on the television, they saw their roommate being interviewed on the Weather Channel.

“He even had our dogs with him, he refused to leave our dogs,” West says. “I believe he swam out to the levee, the high point, with the dogs floating on a door.”

Unable to head back into New Orleans, the family drove north to Baton Rouge, La., and stayed with a friend at their record label. There, they hunkered down until the start of another tour, which had already been scheduled.

At the same time, their roommate was able to escape New Orleans after about a week and hitch a ride up north, West says.

“We stayed in Baton Rouge for a few days and reunited with our roommate and our dogs and left for the tour because we needed the work,” he says.

With New Orleans still reeling from the hurricane, West and his family were on tour. As reports continued to come in, the family began to realize the home they knew was gone and they would not be able to return.

It was time to look at other options.

“We were on tour all through the month or so after the hurricane, then we realized we didn’t have anywhere to go back to,” West recalls. “And a friend of ours in Wichita called us and said, ‘Why don’t you come up to Kansas and give it a go here?'”

Taking their friend up on the offer, the family couch-surfed in Wichita for about a month, then decided to search for something a bit more permanent, a bit better fitting. On a whim, West decided to drive east and check out Lawrence.

“We had worked up here before and the band was sort of well-liked in the area. It was a viable place for us to make a living,” West says. “We didn’t know any people here or anything. We came here as a shot in the dark.”

And the payoff was better than anybody could have imagined, he adds.

“People were just so good to us. People we didn’t know,” West remembers. “We went into a neighborhood, didn’t know anybody there, and they were bringing us pie, beautifully old fashioned things. It was just way more than we expected. We were shell shocked.”

Now the family has grown to the couple plus four children, and they’ve long since settled in. West and Euliss continue to make music, and in 2007 they even started a Mardi Gras parade to bring a bit of their old home to Lawrence. Each February, West and his family call up their friends, dress up in their silliest outfits and march up and down Massachusetts Street, entering businesses and picking up more participants along the way.

That parade continues to this day, with dozens of participants each year.

Thinking back on the hurricane and his family’s transition into Lawrence, West says, they don’t like to occupy themselves with past tragedies. Rather, they give thanks for what’s happened and look to the future.

“We don’t dwell on it,” he says. “We’ve got 10 years of living behind us. Many wonderful things have happened. We’re just very grateful for that.”

Straddling the line between the South and the Midwest

Biloxi, Miss., native Mike Ford has lived in Kansas for quite some time, but he’s made regular trips back south since 1974.

Although he was already in Kansas when Katrina hit, Ford says, much of his family was still living down south at the time, and he felt much of the damage firsthand.

“All the ocean front that I saw as a child … it’s all gone,” he says.

Growing up in the South, hurricanes were a common occurrence, something residents were largely used to, Ford explains.

“I slept through Hurricane Cindy,” he says. “There was a hurricane every time you blinked your eye.”

Every now and then, however, a hurricane would come along that would rock the coastline’s very foundation, Ford remembers. In his childhood, the system he most often heard of was 1969’s Hurricane Camille.

“My grandparents had been through bad stuff. I remember hearing stories from my mom’s family. She had family all over Mississippi,” he says. “And you would hear horror stories about Camille, but Katrina made Camille seem like nothing.”

After Katrina hit, much of Ford’s family was left without food, shelter and other basic necessities.

Heading south to help in the storm’s aftermath, Ford recalls, it took the Federal Emergency Management Agency entirely too long to set his family up with shelter and supplies.

“For months they were homeless, bouncing between houses. I stayed in the FEMA trailer two or three times with them.”

In the storm’s aftermath, his family battled poor emergency management, deceitful contractors and bureaucratic insurance agents, Ford says, and he indirectly blames the hurricane for the death of both his grandmother and his mother.

Now living in Lawrence, Ford hasn’t been back to Biloxi since his mother’s death in 2009.

Every now and then, he’ll catch a car with a Louisiana or Mississippi license plate and wonder whether they relocated after Katrina. But Ford said he’s the only member of his family to live in the area and the standalone witness within his social circle to the deadly storm.

“I’m pretty much the only person in my family holding on to the memory in this area,” he said. “But I grew up in that culture for years.”