AFTER THE STORM

10 years ago Hurricane Katrina abruptly changed the lives of one neighborhood couple

When Mark and Tiffany Manson talk about “home,” they don’t mean their new house in Dallas, which they renovated and moved into about a year ago. They mean the home they left behind in New Orleans during Katrina, the 2005 hurricane that ravaged the Gulf Coast, busted through flood walls and washed away neighborhoods across Louisiana and Mississippi, upending innumerable lives and ending almost 2,000.

Mark works at Richardson Bike Mart on Garland, and Tiffany pet sits in the neighborhood. They say the East Dallas community has embraced them since their arrival.

New Orleans was “a true community where people looked out for each other,” Mark explains the kind of place where they could walk down the street and neighbors would be outside on their porches, and they’d say “hello.”

In August 2005, Tiffany owned a dog-sitting business in New Orleans and Mark worked in a bicycle shop where he was known and respected by the cycling community.

Hurricane Katrina wasn’t the first time the government issued a mandatory hurricane evacuation for New Orleans, but it was the first time Tiffany felt that clench in her gut.

“It happened around Thursday afternoon and Friday morning that my intuition started clicking,” Tiffany explains. “We’d never evacuated for a storm but something told me, ‘We have to go for this one,’ and [Mark] believed me.”

Mark questioned why they needed to go all the way to Dallas, but Tiffany insisted they should visit her mom in Mesquite for a few days. It would be like a vacation, she said.

Mark gave in, and they spent Saturday “battening down the hatches” at home and the bike store, packing backpacks with enough necessities for three days and preparing to haul four dogs — two of their own, plus two furry guests Tiffany was pet sitting.

Before they left, the Mansons ate at SidMars, a famous New Orleans seafood restaurant, and they sat around the table chatting until the employees kicked them out, warning the city’s floodwalls were about to close. They didn’t know it at the time, but they would be among the last to ever eat at Sid-Mars.

It was still dark on Sunday morning when Mark locked the front door on their way out of the city, and it struck him that he might not see home again, he recalls.

“You have to at least consider it,” Mark says. “It’s always a possibility.”

They drove to Mark’s workplace to pick up his boss, Alfred Wang, who traveled to the Dallas area with them. All highway traffic was outbound during the mandatory evacuation as the trio headed west. It wasn’t until Shreveport that the Mansons began listening to the news reports.

“They were talking about a category 5 and 250 mph winds, and I started freaking out,” Mark recalls. “Those 200 miles between Shreveport and Mesquite were terrible. For the first time I was thinking, ‘We’re going to lose everything.’ ”

They got to Tiffany’s mom’s house and the three of them settled in. Then they learned the storm would not directly hit New Orleans.

Relieved, they went to bed Sunday night only to wake Monday morning to devastating news: Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge had breeched the levees that protected New Orleans from flooding.

“By the time we woke up, our house was already flooded because of where it was,” Tiffany says. “We were on the North side, and all the flooding came from the North.”

Even though they were prepared for the worst, when they saw a satellite image of their