Sitting in the lobby of the Super 8 Motel in Westbrook, 21-year-old Angelica Nguyen held her boyfriend’s hand for support as she talked about seeing the wrath of Hurricane Katrina firsthand.

Nguyen and her boyfriend, Justin Sivret, 23, both from Slidell, La., a town about 30 minutes northeast of New Orleans, are in Maine hoping to find work so they can help support their families, who are still in the south trying to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of Katrina. They are one of seven families who were displaced by the hurricane staying at the Super 8.

In the days before the storm hit, Nguyen said her family wasn’t going to leave Slidell, thinking Katrina was going to be just like other hurricanes that had hit the area in the past. “We weren’t going to leave,” she said. “I’ve been through eight or nine hurricanes, and we just sat on the porch watching the wind and the rain, and that was it. We thought ‘aww, it’ll be nothing.'”

As the weather reports got more and more dire, and the massive storm was upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane, she said her family realized this was not going to be like any other storm, and quickly got out to a ranch owned by her father’s employer in Columbia, Miss.

Sivret, who is originally from Readfield, was living in Slidell with his mother and stepfather, who also escaped ahead of the storm, going to Chattanooga, Tenn.

In Chattanooga, Sivret said they escaped most of the storm, getting just a little wind and rain. Nguyen wasn’t as lucky in Mississippi.

The eye of the storm

“The eye passed right over us,” she said. “We got hit hard. No power for 10 days and no water or food. We had to scrounge for everything.”

She said she went outside at one point to close a storm door that had blown open, and the wind threw her clear across the driveway of the house she was staying in before it slammed the door with such force she thought the glass was going to shatter.

The other thing that Nguyen remembers clearly is the sound the trees on the ranch made in the wind. “The trees were just cracking,” she said. “It sounded like bullets going off.”

Eventually, they did get a break when the eye passed overhead, but Nguyen said she knew it was just false hope, and that soon the other half of the storm would be passing overhead.

“The eye passed over, and it was just calm,” she said. It looked like a beautiful summer day with no clouds in the sky for about 20 minutes, and then the storm started to pick up again.

Riding out the storm in Tennessee, Sivret said he and his family went back to Slidell as soon as they could so they could survey the damage. It wasn’t easy getting back into the town, as all the roads were shut down, he said. Eventually, thanks to a series of unblocked back roads, Sivret made it into Slidell, and was amazed by what he saw.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he said. “There were trees down all over the road. You had to swerve to miss trees. I didn’t recognize anything.” Sivret likened the damage to the ice storm that caused so much damage in Maine in 1998.

When he got to his family’s house, Sivret said he could see it was a total loss. Four or five feet of floodwater had backed into the house, and while the water had receded, there was still at least three inches of mud all over the house.

Nguyen went back to Slidell about five days after the storm. She said her mother’s house was blown right off its foundation. “The person that lived next door to my parents had a 70-foot tree come right out of the ground and was upside down, with a picket fence still stuck to the tree,” she said.

Her grandmother’s house survived the storm in a little better shape, but not much, said Nguyen. A tree had smashed into the roof, and while the roof needs to be replaced, it is still in livable condition. Nguyen said 10 members of her family are staying in the house as they try to rebuild their lives.

Leaving the south

Looking at the situation in Slidell, Sivret and Nguyen came to the difficult decision that the best way to help their family was to leave and find work. The storm destroyed the area’s economy and jobs are few and far between. Nguyen said she would do anything to help her family who has lost pretty much everything and is struggling to support themselves.

“They need money, and we need to help,” she said. “We can’t help them there; we had to go away so we could work. I worry about my family because they don’t have any work. My grandfather is a tour guide in New Orleans, and New Orleans isn’t there any more.”

So, with their minds made up to go back to Sivret’s home state, the young couple packed up Nguyen’s car with everything they could salvage and began the more than 30 hour drive to Maine. They had less than $100 in cash, so they had to do the drive almost straight through, stopping once at a relative’s home in New Jersey for the night.

Once in Maine, they contacted the Red Cross, which gave them some money to live on for a short while and put them up for two weeks at the Super 8 in Westbrook. After that, they will be on their own to find a place to stay, a fact that Nguyen admits is a scary one. But she said they are both trying to remain optimistic.

Sivret and Nguyen are still looking for work in the area. She said she has a potential job offer in Portland, and he is looking for jobs in local restaurants.

Looking at Sivret for support, Nguyen said she is getting homesick. “I’ve never been this far away from my family,” she said. “I’ve never even left the south in my life.”

One of the other things on her mind is the radically different Maine climate. Nguyen said she has never seen snow before and she is not really fond of the cold.

With an obvious affection, Sivret said he would make sure that she would stay warm this winter. He did, however, have one mischievious thought. “I can’t wait to hit her with her first snowball,” he said with a smile.

Angelica Nguyen and her boyfriend Justin Sivret left Slidell, La., after Hurricane Katrina to come to Maine to find work to help support their families.