Ricky Murray was having a miserable year long before a storm named Gustav started threatening the Gulf Coast area. Now he’s afraid he will lose his family because of a previous hurricane.
Ricky Murray, his wife and their three children live in a few hundred square feet of a FEMA trailer.
It has been three years since Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people, scouring Mississippi beach towns down to bare sand and rupturing the protective levees around New Orleans, Louisiana.
Eight feet of floodwater left Murray’s home in Slidell, Louisiana, uninhabitable. He’s been working on the house, but he and his wife and three children have been living in a FEMA trailer.
Murray also lost his job. He recently suffered a heart attack, brought on in part by stress, according to doctors. But what’s really agonizing for him is that his wife of 16 years says she is considering a divorce.ยป
“My whole life is my wife and my kids,” Murray said.
Louisiana has kept figures on almost everything Katrina-related: the number of people who died, the number who were injured and the houses that were damaged or destroyed.
But the state is not keeping statistics on the number of divorces in a post-Katrina world.
