Regis Progress. Photo by Ian Walton
Hurricane Milton is currently wreaking havoc in Florida.
More than three million homes and businesses are without power, scores of people have been injured and two people have lost their lives.
The hurricane, which was a Category 5 storm at the height of its destruction, is now listed as a Category 1, but continues to cause damage with heavy rain, wind speeds hitting 90 mph and tornadoes battering Florida.
Former two-time junior welterweight titleholder Regis Prograis knows all too well the trail of devastation such a natural disaster can cause, having lived through the atrocity of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“The biggest thing you can do is pray for those people,” Prograis told The Ring. “Being displaced and losing your home is a terrible thing to go through.
“I hear a lot of horror stories that people can’t even leave because there is no gas and the traffic is terrible.”
Prograis, who moved 16 times with his family in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which was responsible for a billion dollars in damage in the region, knows all too well that the implications of what is happening are staggering.
“If I have any advice for them, it would be to make the best of it, because if anything happens like Hurricane Katrina, it’s a terrible situation,” he said. “When we got displaced, when I was 16, when Hurricane Katrina hit, I never went back to that lifestyle.
“Most people can’t even fathom it. You live a certain life, and that life is taken away in the blink of an eye and that’s kind of what happened to us. That’s what happened not only to me, but the whole city of New Orleans, your whole life is gone and you’ll never ever get back to that lifestyle.”
As soon as possible, Prograis and his family returned to their home in an attempt to repair what they could.
“My grandmother and mother cried because our houses were destroyed,” he recalled. “My grandmother had 13 feet of water; we had eight feet of water. In my grandmother’s house, everything was gone. It is not about material things; it’s pictures and memories. All that was gone. In our house it was eight feet, so most things were gone, but we were able to save a few photo albums that were high, and clothes.
“It was more difficult for my family, the adults who had houses. For me it was just a new beginning. Of course my life changed; everything you know is gone. It’s not like you have a fire in your house and you have to move to another part of town and still go to the same school. You have to move everything.”
The now 35-year-old, who has a big fight with Jack Catterall on October 26, in Manchester, England, hopes Mother Nature is kinder to the people of Florida than she was to the people of Louisiana.
“Sometimes with those storms the hurricane makes a slight turn and it misses, if we can get it that would be a good thing, or it slows down or weakens and you might not get the whole thing,” he said . “It’s a terrible thing to go through.”
Questions and/or comments can be sent to Anson at (email protected).
