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Man hopes to repair ravaged home with tape65-year-old spent three days alone filming Katrina, its aftermath
![]() "Oh man, that's all my stuff coming out the door," Kennard Jackley says while filming from the second floor. RELATEDSPECIAL REPORT
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NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- As a quick-shifting sea filled with trees and debris engulfed the first floor of his home, Kennard Jackley unwittingly took measures to help save his Slidell, Louisiana, residence -- not with boards and tarps, but with a video camera. Jackley is hoping to use the proceeds from selling the footage to help repair the thousands of dollars worth of damage to his home. When the warnings came that Hurricane Katrina was barreling toward the Gulf Coast, Jackley's wife, Dookie, evacuated with their dog, Maggie, to Dallas, Texas. But Jackley, a 65-year-old retired merchant marine versed in the violence of heavy torrents, thought he and the family cat could weather the Category 3 hurricane that would become notorious for its destruction of New Orleans, just 30 miles southwest of his home. (Watch Katrina ravage Jackley's neighborhood -- 1:56) As he filmed the flooding, his emotions changed as quickly as the tide outside his house, which at one point creeps under a second-floor door, prompting Jackley to bark, "Get the hell out!" As he watched his neighbors' belongings and chunks of nearby homes float by, he laments "poor Charlie" whose boat next door is smashed repeatedly into the carport ostensibly there to protect it. "A lot of people's treasures floating down the stream here now," he narrated. He sounded almost stoic as he watched his own belongings escape from the lower level of his home. "Oh man, that's all my stuff coming out the door, them sliding-glass doors down there," he said on the video. "I just seen our TV going out the front door." After the storm passed, Jackley estimated that he would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to repair his home, as he had no flood insurance. After realizing that his videotape was more than just a historical record, he decided to cut his losses by selling the tape. CNN was among the news agencies that purchased video from him. The video essentially documents the three days Jackley spent isolated before officials rescued him. It includes footage of the area after the storm, when the water receded and he finally had the opportunity to call Dookie and tell her that he -- and the cat -- survived Katrina. CNN's Laura Bernardini contributed to this report.
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