For one Blair County native, riding out Hurricane Katrina is a first time, frightening experience. Michelle Oubre is riding out the storm an hour west of New Orleans where she now lives.

She tells Channel 6 News by phone Monday, "We're getting squalls every 20 minutes and then we have showers. We've got quite a few branches in the yard and in the driveway. We took a walk through the subdivision.

Just maybe 5 or 6 houses down, some of our neighbors have a tree that collapsed inside their house. It broke through their garage and through the bricks. And then a few doors down from there, another tree went through another neighbor's house. We consider ourselves very lucky though. It was quite a shock. In fact, we were scheduled for a soccer tournament in Mississippi this weekend and late Friday night we got a call that the tournament was cancelled. We played a game of Scrabble and we're building paper airplanes for the children and that's pretty much it. We just listened to a report from the Parish Department office and they're telling people to stay off the roads because there's quite a few trees down and it is very dangerous if the power lines are down you're not sure when they'll be live again.

There's no actual curfew but they said they may get creative with determining different methods to make people stay off the roads. They actually said by late afternoon the winds should die down to where they think it would be safe to actually go outside and assess whatever damage you might have."

James Myers is a Hattiesburg, Mississippi resident riding out the Hurricane. He tells Channel 6 News by phone Monday, "Imagine driving down the road at about 100mph in a rain storm. Now imagine that, but you're standing still. It is stinging rain, winds that will knock you down and blow a tree over. That's what you've got right here. It is almost the strength of a tornado but it is huge. It is getting pretty intense. I've only seen 2 cars on the street in the last hour. One was a city vehicle; the other was a passenger car. I don't know what they were thinking."

Johnny DuPree is the Mayor of Hattiesburg. He tells Channel 6 News by phone, "There are no deaths right now. We have 860 people sheltered. We turned Interstate 59 into a one way coming north from Louisiana."

Miranda Beard is a Journalist at WDAM-TV there. She says, "Basically everybody is back in house because the weather is so severe right now. We cannot even allow our crews on the street for safety reasons."

DuPree says, "Roads are really becoming impassable because of the trees that are down. We have a tree across Emergency Management now. No one can leave because a tree is across the driveway."

Myers says, "Right now we've got candles lit and were just sitting around talking and playing cards in the hallway."

DuPree explains what is next, "We're now waiting to see, to get through this, to make an assessment and see how things will get back to normal."