ASU Student Spends Weekend Evacuating Family from New Orleans
For Alabama State University senior, Ashton Pollard, this past weekend was not the first time he had to evacuate his family from their hometown because of a hurricane threat.
“My mother and siblings and I relocated to Atlanta back in 2005 because of Hurricane Katrina,” said Pollard, “this is probably the third time I’ve evacuated my family.”
Once the city was issued a mandatory evacuation, Pollard immediately went to New Orleans to help evacuate family members.
“To Atlanta it’s usually about 6 to 7 hours, but due to everyone trying to evacuate the city at such late notice it took us about 13 hours.”
Though Pollard was able to evacuate most of his family, some members chose not to leave.’
“Everyone who wanted to evacuate, we did get them out of there. My grandmother was the only one who wanted to stay, being from New Orleans she’s lived through a couple of storms. So she just felt like it wasn’t going to be as big, as everybody was making it seem.”
