Katrina Survivor Stories

Meatball therapy in the Ninth Ward

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

Hundreds of Minnesotans have gone down to New Orleans over the past year and a half to gut houses and otherwise help out in the flood-ravaged Ninth Ward---most volunteering through their church or synagogue. Now the private sector is pitching in: Last weekend, 30 construction workers from Minnesota companies flew to the city under the leadership of the Twin Cities-based River of Hope. Created last year by Red Cross therapist Dr. Rebecca Thomley, and funded in part out of savings from the nonprofit she heads, Orion Associates, the organization has brought some 300 plumbers and roofers to work on more than 35 homes for the poor and elderly. Thomley, whose Red Cross truck was among the first into the city in October 2005, has since returned seven times. Last year she put Sen. Mark Dayton to work. "Whatever criticism you might have of him," she says. "He worked hard."

Two months ago, River of Hope opened a mental health center in a gutted dry cleaner in the Upper Ninth Ward, open Saturdays with volunteers flying in every weekend--Thomley warns new recruits about the rats. Most of those walking-in just need to be heard. "Services have not been restored to this area, and there's certainly a feeling of having been forgotten," says Thomley. "The government is not there, and these are our people, these are Americans." Volunteers can call Zenith Services at 763.450.5000.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at March 6, 2007 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

 

New Orleans House Party: Bring in the lumberjacks

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

Our final day in town, a group of 13 of us went back to Larry's house. First, we took down all the drywall and ceilings. Larry also had a list of stuff he wanted done. We cleaned out the tool shed in his backyard. Larry lived with his dad, who is in his 80s. He had quite a collection of tools and unfortunately most of it had to be thrown away. Some of the other teams of volunteers finished up their houses early and then dropped by Larry's to help out.

One of the guys from the other team, Scott, came with a chainsaw. He climbed up a dead tree in the backyard and removed it from the top down. It was leaning right over the neighbor's fence so we had to be careful. After he cut a few chunks off, three of us pulled the tree in the opposite direction. There was one scary point where it was leaning toward Scott. We were lucky that we pulled hard enough to send it toppling in the right direction.

I also got a chance to talk more with Larry, who works for the local water and sewage board. He went to Baton Rouge to escape Katrina, he said, and moved back to the New Orleans area about three months ago. "The hurricane was nature taking its course, he said "This area of New Orleans is supposed to be water." The city couldn't handle another hurricane, he explained; a heavy rain over a 24-hour period could be big trouble.

Larry was eager to keep in touch, and handed out his email address. He also gave our team a bunch of CDs he burned: some Bob Dylan, Beatles and Elvis Costello. He also left us with a video his neighbor put together. We watched it that night. His friend stayed during the flood, holing up in the second story of his home. There, he took digital photos of the water rising around him. Later, he had added an electronic soundtrack to the footage. The music was eerily upbeat compared to the devastating photos. And that's a pretty good analogy for how I felt at the end of the week: frightened by the speed at which you can lose everything and oddly hopeful at the end of much hard work about what might be regained.

Words and pictures by Adam Craven

Editors note: Last month, Adam Craven, a graphic designer for City Pages, barreled down I-55 to New Orleans in a caravan of five rented minivans. Along with a crew from his Minneapolis church, the Rock, he spent a full work week cleaning out houses in Louisiana. This is part five of a five-part series.
Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five

Posted by Corey Anderson at April 7, 2006 8:48 AM | Comments (3)

 

New Orleans House Party: The death of Dylan

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

Rose, whose house we cleaned the day the day before, turned up in Slidell. She's a tour guide and quite knowledgeable about the history of N.O. She showed us the main two breaches in the levees: 17th Avenue and London Avenue. We also went to the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish, where there was an 8-mile breach in the levee. The main hurricane storm surge came right up MR GO (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet), which is in this area.

We couldn't really go into the Lower Ninth Ward, as Rose said they are still finding bodies in that area. We did see a huge shrimp boat, beached right in the middle of the street near where Rose lives. It was so strange to see it still there after seven months--a monument to the destruction that Katrina brought.

After the tour, we went to Larry's house on Catina Street. He lives in the Lakeview area of New Orleans. Larry is a white man in his early 40s, with a goatee, glasses, and a Harley shirt. He'd had hundreds of Bob Dylan CDs and albums, he said, but they were all trash now. He was pretty cool about losing his collection and stated that the collecting was the fun part.

At Larry's house we stripped all his drywall and bathroom tile. We were told to change our respirator masks at least every three or four hours. Some of us had developed coughs from breathing in all the mold and mildew.

We went out that night to the French Quarter. We ate a place called the Gumbo Shop, which was very good. We walked around the parks and the promenade that leads to the Mississippi. It was beautiful and appeared untouched by Katrina. It seemed weird that only a few blocks away there was so much destruction.

Words and pictures by Adam Craven

Editors note: Last month, Adam Craven, a graphic designer for City Pages, barreled down I-55 to New Orleans in a caravan of five rented minivans. Along with a crew from his Minneapolis church, the Rock, he spent a full work week cleaning out houses in Louisiana. This is part four of a five-part series.
Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five

Posted by Corey Anderson at April 6, 2006 8:48 AM | Comments (4)

 

New Orleans House Party: How to find a filthy angel

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

All around the New Orleans area there are these X's painted on people's houses. In each section of the X there are things written. The upper quadrant is the date the house was checked, the left is the unit that did the check and the lower quadrant is the number of dead people found. I mostly saw zeros, but I did see some ones and twos in some places that were hit badly.

Today we tore down drywall at Don & Rita's house in Slidell. They are a couple in their 80s. Don is in a wheelchair because of a stroke he suffered a few years ago. In Slidell, they had 4 to 5 feet of standing water for a 24-hour period. In some of the low-lying areas in New Orleans they had water for a month. That water had to be pumped because it had nowhere to go. In Slidell they have trailers provided by FEMA. Still, you have to have electricity to get a trailer. Rita said, "Don probably wouldn't have survived if it wasn't for the trailer." She thanked us effusively for the work we did.

One of the other groups went to a house on Charles Drive in the Chalmette area east of New Orleans. The neighborhood had a Murphy oil refinery near it that had a spill, and so the land was contaminated. The cleanup crew had to wear full protective suits. The owner of the house, Charles, had a Purple Heart he wanted removed from the mess. One of the volunteers, Robert, found the room where it was. There were overturned shelves and everything was pretty well destroyed. Robert located a badly damaged case and inside was the Purple Heart in perfect condition. Charles was overjoyed by the discovery.

In the same house Charles's wife, Rose, had an extensive collection of porcelain angels. The bookcase where they'd resided was overturned and they'd gotten covered in filth. The team kept finding the angels throughout the day, preserved in the mud. Rose gave each of the girls on the team an angel to keep. Charles and Rose, who were in their 60s, insisted on working right along with our crew. They bought everyone Po' Boy sandwiches for lunch.

Words and pictures by Adam Craven

Editors note: Last month, Adam Craven, a graphic designer for City Pages, barreled down I-55 to New Orleans in a caravan of five rented minivans. Along with a crew from his Minneapolis church, the Rock, he spent a full work week cleaning out houses in Louisiana. This is part three of a five-part series.
Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five

Posted by Corey Anderson at April 5, 2006 10:04 AM | Comments (1)

 

New Orleans House Party: Drywall keeps fallin' on my head

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

When we pulled up at East Hermes Street this morning, some city workers had the street blocked off. They were sorting through all the trash we had put by the curb. They were wearing full protective body suits and masks. We wondered if we should have the same gear to protect ourselves. They told us they were looking for any hazardous materials. They quickly finished up the work they were doing and let us get to the house.

We took down all the drywall and ceilings in the house. It was dusty and dirty, but a lot better than yesterday. One of the guys in our crew went up into the attic and kicked the ceiling down from above. This seemed to work pretty well, you just had to be careful not to get hit by falling debris. A few big chunks of drywall hit my head. It didn't really hurt; it was just surprising to have it come down so unexpectedly. The rooms were quickly becoming unrecognizable. We worked quickly and efficiently. Around noon we finished the house.

As we were leaving a van pulled up. Two guys and a boy hopped out and started sorting through the giant pile of trash. I'd say one guy was around 50 years old, the other was in his 30s, and the boy was probably 10. We didn't talk to them because they seemed pretty rough and not too proud of what they were doing. It wouldn't have surprised me if they had also slept in their van the night before. They were looking for any salvageable metal: Their van was filled with scrap of varying sizes.

After lunch, two men and I helped out around the church, which is in Slidell, where they had around 3 to 4 feet of water. It had receded more quickly here--in about 24 hours--sparing many of the houses the worst of the damage. We cleaned out a ditch along the south side of the building. Since the hurricane, even hard rains sometimes cause flooding. We found: Styrofoam, water bottles, boards, metal, coolers and even a TV.

Words and pictures by Adam Craven

Editors note: Last month, Adam Craven, a graphic designer for City Pages, barreled down I-55 to New Orleans in a caravan of five rented minivans. Along with a crew from his Minneapolis church, the Rock, he spent a full work week cleaning out houses in Louisiana. This is part two of a five-part series.
Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five

Posted by Corey Anderson at April 4, 2006 10:21 AM | Comments (3)

 

New Orleans House Party: Welcome to the ghost town

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

Editors note: Last month, Adam Craven, a graphic designer for City Pages, barreled down I-55 to New Orleans in a caravan of five rented minivans. Along with a crew from his Minneapolis church, the Rock, he spent a full work week cleaning out houses in Louisiana. What he found wasn't pretty: scrap-metal vagabonds and spectral streets, hundreds of trashed Dylan CDs and a lost Purple Heart. He also found out that interior demolition in mold-infested houses is not friendly to the human respiratory tract. The labor left the Minnesotans wearing clothing that was only fit for the incinerator--and harboring a resilient sense of optimism about what might yet be salvaged from the city's ruins.

His story begins below and continues throughout the week.

Day One

A team of 16 of us arrived at East Hermes Street around 9:00 a.m. to do our first "mud-out." A mud-out consists of dragging a home's complete belongings to the curb and then cleaning and tearing down all the sheet-rock. The house was in East New Orleans; in an area that had about 4 to 5 feet of standing water after the levees broke. The street was silent except for a dog barking next door with no owner in sight. It seemed like a ghost town.

We broke the door down in back and peeked into the house, not sure what we were in for. It was hot, dark, and muddy and it smelled like moldy rotten food. We first started dragging furniture and appliances out. The house hadn't been touched since Katrina hit. The fridge was full of food and there was still a load of clothes in the washer. It was hard seeing some of the family mementos and photo albums. It all had to be trashed. We were only able to salvage a few things that were in a Rubbermaid tub and some trophies.

I came on this trip with 23 other people from my church, the Rock. We were stationed at the First Baptist Church in Slidell along with over 250 volunteers from across the country. Each morning we would receive an assignment and split into teams. We then would head South across Lake Pontchartrain, watching the destruction increase as we got closer to our assigned house. We worked around eight- or nine-hour days from Monday to Friday. Over a course of a week, our team was able to completely mud-out five houses.

The first house was owned by a man named Charles. Charles was a very tall black man in his early 40s. He was wearing a large FUBU sweatshirt and black shades. He works for the local housing board, he explained, and he'd lived in the house with his wife and two sons. Charles stopped by sometime mid-morning asking who authorized the work we were doing. We quickly explained where we were from and that his wife had been consulted earlier that morning. Once things were sorted out, Charles proved to be surprisingly optimistic and open.

We were able to get all the furniture out and about half of the drywall torn down. Around four o'clock our team quit and headed back.

Words and pictures by Adam Craven

This is part one of a five-part series.
Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five

Posted by Corey Anderson at April 3, 2006 4:41 PM | Comments (4)

 

Mission from Minnesota

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

When Hurricane Katrina hit on the last day of August, Diana Knoble felt compelled to take some kind of action to help the people whose lives had been turned upside down. "We were depressed and feeling guilty that all these people were suffering and our lives were totally unaffected," Knoble recalls.

The local filmmaker and a group of friends began hastily organizing a caravan to ferry supplies to the stricken area. One of their emails soliciting support for the effort happened to reach photographer Quito Ziegler in New York City. Ziegler had just finished driving a 26-foot truck emblazoned with her pictures of immigrant life in Minnesota around the state. The truck was currently sitting idle by her Minneapolis apartment. She arranged for Knoble to get a key and agreed to let her drive it to the impacted region.

Along the way Knoble and her crew picked up donated supplies from companies and individuals: 12,000 pounds of water, diapers, tampons, toilet paper, apples, squash, corn. They eventually ended up in Biloxi, Mississippi, one of the towns hit hardest by Katrina. There they set up a relief operation at Main Street Missionary Baptist Church, doling out supplies and food to people in the area.

"We're not religious people," says Knoble. "We don't belong to a church. We're just tapping into our own intentions to be a benevolent force."

Dubbing their organization Mission From Minnesota, Knoble and various partners have now made four trips to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to aid relief efforts. They are in the process of organizing another caravan to New Orleans and are looking for recruits for the Thanksgiving week trip. Working with First Avenue United Methodist Church, the group intends to spend a week cleaning up and helping rebuild the surrounding New Orleans neighborhood. "Ten weeks later there's no clean up going on in these neighborhoods," says Knoble.

They are also, naturally, seeking money and supplies. "Right now our greatest need is to get mold respirators," notes Knoble. "They're like fifty bucks apiece."

You can find out more about the impending trip and watch Knoble's interesting documentary in progress about the relief efforts at the group's web site.

Posted by Paul Demko at November 11, 2005 1:10 PM | Comments (1)

 

New Orleans: Survivor Stories--now live

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

The entire package, parts of which were published here at Blotter in the past week, is now live at citypages.com/neworleans, and my accompanying column about the fate of the Katrina diaspora is here.

Posted by Steve Perry at September 20, 2005 12:57 PM | Comments (0)

 

Survivor stories: "Once the press came, things changed."

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

Derrick Tabb, 31, stole five vehicles on the Wednesday morning after the hurricane, and transported dozens of elderly evacuees from flooded neighborhoods to the Convention Center. When it looked like no buses were coming, he coaxed reluctant family members into his stolen van and drove them to Houston, where they stayed in a church shelter for two days. A native of the Treme neighborhood, Tabb plays snare drum for the ReBirth Brass Band, the legendary New Orleans second-line group, which reunited ten days after the storm for a concert in Memphis. By the time his band mates were telling the story onstage in Minneapolis three days later, the van had become a bus, with a police escort to Houston.

A lot of my family, they didn't even want to leave. Everybody in New Orleans didn't really think it was going to hit. So I had to make them at least go to a hotel with me. It was safer than the house, and I didn't have a vehicle large enough to handle my whole family. It was my mother, my aunt, my sister, her children, my children, my wife, my mother-in-law, and a couple of grandchildren. The Baronne Plaza Hotel was almost packed, but I got three rooms. In the midst of all that, the hurricane came.

After the storm, I got in my car to ride around, checked out a few places in the city, went by another band member's house to see how he was doing, because he was the last person I talked to before the phones went out. I was on the interstate when I seen that he had water above the first floor of his apartment building. The police was making me turn around. You couldn't go any further on the interstate.

I turned around and went back to the hotel. I told my wife, "They have a lot of water by the trumpet player's house." And I laid down and went to sleep for 45 minutes to an hour. When I woke up, the hotel was in about four feet of water. I was real surprised. Everybody was trying to leave the hotel, because they didn't have any lights or any water. I told my wife I wanted everybody to leave, but I wanted to make sure everybody leaves. A guy took his truck and brought my mother-in-law, my wife, and my children to my mother-in-law's house. But the truck took in a lot of water and he didn't come back for another trip. We was stuck in the hotel Tuesday night.

We sat down and listened to the news, and around 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, they said that the water's going to rise to 17 feet all around the city because of the levee breaking. That drove me crazy, man.

In the morning, I was like, "I have to get my children and my mother-in-law." With 17 feet of water, they weren't going to survive. So I stole a van. It was a Ford 15-passenger van in the parking lot of the hotel.

In the midst of me stealing that van, as my family was loading up, they had a lot of other families, elderly people, in the hotel, and they wanted to get in the van. But we didn't have enough room to put everybody in. So they had like a couple SUVs and another van, and I stole them, too. Then the people and their families drived the van out of the hotel.

This was my first time ever stealing a car. I know you don't believe it, but I have a lot of friends with car shops. I had two cars that were stolen. One of them I found on the street, and I had to use a screwdriver to drive it back. A friend on mine came and told me how to put it up. The thief had just gone joyriding.

I got five cars [from the hotel] altogether. One SUV Yukon, two 15-passenger vans, and two Ford Explorers. I had to start the cars for people. A couple of them knew how to start them once I popped it up for them. Then I loaded up my family and I left.

I dropped off my mom and them at the Convention Center, then I went to look for my wife and daughter and my mother-in-law, because the last word was they had to get up out the house. When I got there, they wasn't there. I went back Uptown to the Garden District and kept looking for them.

In the midst of me riding down St. Charles Street, they had a lot of old people just walking with canes and stuff. I was in a 15-passenger van, so I gave them a ride down to the convention center. I made three or four trips from St. Charles and Louisiana to the Convention Center.

Meanwhile, a friend of the family picked up my mother-in-law and my wife's aunt and brought them to the convention center. But my wife went to the Superdome. When I walked into the crowd at the Convention Center, we spotted my brother-in-law, and he brought us to our mother-in-law. I stayed at the Convention Center overnight because I couldn't find my wife and children. I didn't find my wife until two days later. She was in Houston. They made her walk across the Crescent City Connection.

I had to sleep on the ground outside Wednesday night, right by the Convention Center, because we had the children in the van. Before that I was making trips back and forth all day. It was me and my sister-in-law the whole trip.

It was horrible. It was just wild out there. It was all right 'til the police came with the press. Once the press came, things changed. The police was down with you taking food and all that, 'cause they was trying feed everybody. Then when the press came, they made it look like people was just looting. A lot of people wasn't looting just to be looting. They were really feeding people. You didn't want to see a lot of old people and babies crying for water and stuff. I watched my mother-in-law cry for some water. That part was just sad. I had to watch a couple people die. I watched more than a couple, I watched like about five people die, because I was walking back and forth the whole night. The police shot a couple people. It was about the worst situation in my life. I have never been in a situation like that.

I seen people dying like flies. Everywhere I went I seen somebody dying, 'cause in the midst of all of that, I'm still looking for my wife. Back and forth at the Superdome, on the bridge, at the convention center, back Uptown, I never stopped running until about 10:00 that night. And I had took the van at 8:30 in the morning. I got about an hour of sleep.

The next day I got up, and I couldn't take no more. My mother-in-law, she didn't want to get into a stolen van, 'cause in case the police stopped us, she didn't want to go to jail and be in a worse situation. I was like, "We gotta get out of here. They're never gonna come with no buses." We stole a van just to get out of the hotel to the convention center. We didn't plan on stealing a van and going all the way to Texas.

My mother-in-law never got in the van. I got my mother and my aunt, but my aunt even got out the van. I ain't going to say we have a big Christian family, but when it comes down to consequences with the police, they not gonna have it. I was trying to get them to get in, with my mom and my sister, her children, my sister-and-law. We got in the van and cut out.

We headed straight to Texas. With the ReBirth Brass Band, we travel six months out of the year, sometimes longer, so I know the road. I didn't come up against any dead ends. I knew Houston a little bit, too, so I knew how to get to the Astrodome.

The police searched us when we got to the dome. I told him the van was stolen, and they took the van. They didn't arrest me at all. The police treated me like a hero, damn near. They took my gun. But to tell you the truth, they treated me real nice. They didn't handle me bad in any kind of way. But they was searching everybody and doing all the procedures, just doing their job. Especially one of the cops was like a real, I would say, redneck. He was really cool to me. He was chewing his tobacco and everything. He just wanted to tell me the rules and regulations of Texas, that I couldn't have my gun.

Everything went smoothly. He gave me all my equipment, 'cause I had brought all of it. I do tracks. So I moved all my equipment to the hotel on Monday. That was one of the reasons I didn't want to move without my equipment, neither. That was like $15,000 worth of equipment.

After they took away the van, we walked right across the street. I had heard that they was having trouble at the dome, so I was going to get a room at the hotel. Just then these two ladies walked up, the sweetest two ladies in the world, Minervia and Kelly, I think their names were, from Champions Community Covenant Church. And they said, "We looking for some families to adopt." They had shelter and could help us get housing, get straight with our life. We took them up on the deal, and they brought us to the shelter.

When I was heading over there, my wife got in touch with me. She was at a friend's house and she text messaged me on the cell phone. I found out about my mother-in-law a couple days later. She got transferred to Arkansas. She was okay, but she had a lot of dehydration. She actually had a nervous breakdown.

Ten days later the band played in Memphis, Tennessee. Phil [Frazier, the sousaphone player] had been calling me the whole time. Phil is like brothers. I called him up right after the storm, and he came over and we hugged and all that, and Stafford Agee, too. They came over with their jokes and stuff and really helped me out, 'cause I was really down. Even that first day, I'd seen a lot of destruction. I had a little bit of shirt on, and I hate my shirts to be small. I wear very big shirts. They was ribbing me about the shirt, saying they can see my heart beating in it.

We're closer to each other than we are to our wives. The only thing we don't do is have sex with each other. We've been around each other our whole life, watched everybody grow up, watched each other's talent bloom. So ten days, that was a long time for us.

We played like shit that night. We sounded bad 'cause everybody was on new instruments. The feeling was there, but the playing wasn't there like we wanted. We try to put on the best show every time we hit.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at September 16, 2005 5:43 PM | Comments (1)

 

Survivor stories: "We gave away everything we had"

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

A couple of words pop up regularly in Fred Wichers's speech: "So we...." And then Wichers says what he did next in the wake of the hurricane. So we started working our way down the roads with the chain saw; so we gave out all our MREs; so we cut her driveway.

Wichers sat out Katrina in his house in Folsom, on the north shore of Lake Pontchatrain, with six dogs, his "big" son, his son's wife, and her mother. Once the storm had passed, this 48-year-old school bus driver, diesel mechanic, and handyman headed out into the wreckage and went to work.

"I don't like taking credit for nothing," Wichers told his former work colleague Frank Carter over the phone, having just risen from a well-earned nap. "I just did what my military training told me to do. I needed to help and keep things going at a fast and furious pace."

With his generator, his truck, and his chainsaw, Wichers felt prepared to cope with Katrina's aftermath. But he empathized with people who couldn't. "I was a kid when Betsy come through," he says. "I was in Gretna then. I remember standing in an ice line with my mama."

Fred Wichers: We go to bed that night and all hell breaks loose. All through the night all we did is get up and walk out and stand on the porch and watch this hurricane go by. You seen things going by you. Stuff moving. You look up at the porch and you can watch the porch go left to right, left to right. You know what I'm saying? The whole porch is shifting. The whole house is shifting.

But nothing come off. It didn't fall apart. I had probably a hundred dollars worth of aluminum fascia come off. Two pieces of aluminum fascia came off and that was it. Everything fared real good.

When the storm was over with and everything calmed down and we knew we had survived, we went out with the chainsaws and we started cutting out the neighbors. There was trees everywhere. I mean, they broke them off 10, 15 feet up. They just twisted and broke off. And we made it to the front of my street and we looked down the road left to right and it was trees everywhere. You couldn't get 10 feet without hitting a tree across the road.

So we started working our way down the roads with the chain saw. At the time, I only had my one chain saw, my big Stihl. So we started with that chainsaw and we worked down the road to the little store where we used to buy ice. I had brought the truck. Every driveway had trees broke off, laying on the road. So we cut and cut and cut and cut--it was like three, four hours.

We met all the neighbors. A lot of them didn't have nothing. They didn't have no chainsaws. So it was just me, my brother, and my big son. We rode up and down the road, and we cut as much trees as we could cut. We had made our way out to Highway 40, and that's as far as we went that night. [After that,] the road crews came out and helped a good bit, too.

The next day, which is probably Tuesday, I finally made it down to Miss C.'s because we had cut that far. When we went in there, buddy it was just tore all to pieces. The big oak in the back, the five-foot oak, it broke the limb out the oak tree. The limb is 24 inches in diameter. The gazebo did fine. It took down both of the pecan trees. The walking path bridge--it's in shambles. Trees is falling everywhere.

Water level really didn't come up. We really didn't get a lot of rain. We had more wind. A hundred and seventy-five, sustained, and then the gusts was 190-something. It was unreal. There was a few times if we had stuck our head out, we knew it was tough. What made this storm bad was how wide it was.

Looking into a forest, a pine forest, where you couldn't see 10 or 15 feet in it, now you can see 75 to 100 feet. No trees nowhere. Total devastation. Trees totally snapped off, 15, 20 feet up in the air. The beautiful oaks that were there are not there no more, the big live oaks.

We went to [Miss] C.'s and made sure that everybody was OK. I pulled boards off the windows and took care of them. By the third day, FEMA was showing up with MREs, ice, and water. We were fortunate; we had a generator. But my kids on my bus route--I got me a new bus route at Folsom--and I have a lot of kids that really have nothing. Their color don't really mean nothing--it doesn't mean that just because they are black, that they're [poor]. A lot of [black] kids do have things. But a lot of kids don't.

So what we did is, me and my brother would go there every morning, we'd pick up the water and MREs that they would give us for our family that were here at the house, and we would go give it to [other people]. I would go on my bus route. I knew the streets that I needed to go on. So we gave out all our MREs and we gave out all our water to everybody we could find that was shut in, or couldn't get out, or their cars was tore up, that kind of stuff. We gave away everything that we had, and we did that for three days.

I kept my refrigerator going through the generator. I got a diesel generator now. By the fourth day, I need fuel. I was getting it out of my big bus tank. So then we made our way to Ponchatoula and we bought fuel in Ponchatoula. While we was out, we had chains made for our chainsaws. A lot of my neighbors [had] trees across the driveways. So after we worked all day at Miss C.'s, or giving away our food and everything else, we was going back after two a clock, and we was giving an hour or two hours to our neighbors just to cut them into their driveways. Just so they could get in or out. There was a lot of them that couldn't get out. Miss G.: She's 83 years old or 86 years old. She doesn't have nobody. So we cut her driveway.

And Mr. Core. He's the deaf mute just down the street from me. He was in bad shape. We never even thought about nothing. He didn't even know the storm was coming. He didn't watch television that much. So, we went down there, and he came to us for about three days. And we cooked, and he ate down here with us, and sat with the fan, and him and his wife sat down here. Him and his wife are both deaf and mute. She's got real bad cataracts so she can't see that good. Imagine her world, how this beat it up. We finally convinced them to go to Baton Rouge to their cousin's house; they've been there ever since.

That's what the storm was. We decided to stay, and so you just have to say, I can do this. And do it.

Posted by Michael Tortorello at September 16, 2005 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

 

Survivor stories: NOPD officer who worked Convention Center describes the days after Katrina

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

"The people at the Convention Center were left high and fucking dry": a Blotter/CP web exclusive

Dumas Carter, 30, is an eight-year veteran New Orleans police officer who wound up being one of just six NOPD cops on duty at the Convention Center complex after Katrina struck. A couple of days ago his brother, Frank Carter, placed a call to him for City Pages and taped his recollections of the scene in New Orleans and at the Convention Center in the days before help finally started arriving. Here is an excerpt; click below for the full story.

"Lots of people on the street were asking me where to go. I'm telling them the truth, which is I don't know, they haven't told us anything. They're telling us that somebody told them that they were told by another person who was somebody in charge of something that the Convention Center was being set up as a secondary evacuation point with food and water. Those people went to the Convention Center, and there was no food or water there for them. So now there's no water, there's no police. And now there's 20,000 people with no extra security down there.

"We just told people that the National Guard was handling the evacuation effort, and they're not talking to us. So we've got all these people at the Convention Center, and now the captain is saying, okay, you all got to get out of the hotel. They're going to riot and they're going to burn the fucking hotel down. They're going to start this big massive thing, they're going to start killing people on Convention Center Boulevard, it's going to be a big massacre."

Dumas Carter, 30, eight-year veteran NOPD officer, one of six local cops who stayed on duty at the Convention Center complex in the days after Katrina:

The day before, we all go in for roll call and we're basically told that we're reporting for work and we pretty much won't be able to leave until this is over. Some of [the officers] were whining, but all week long we had been told, you're a police officer, and once you go active we're going to be on active duty for the remainder. Make sure that your families are out and your houses are taken care of, because we can't have you worrying about your family, your house, your dog, and be a police officer. That made sense to me. But a lot of people were like, fuck this, I've got to go with my family. So they left. My district wasn't like any other district. Ninety-eight percent of the people stayed. The Sixth District. The real district. Fort Apache. You've seen that on the news.

We do our shift, and we find out that our captain has arranged for us to stay at the Pontchartrain Hotel through this, on St. Charles. They've given us two floors to house all of our people. The hurricane starts trickling in, we find out that the Pontchartrain Hotel has locked the doors and evacuated the city. They've locked us out and we have no place to stay. My lieutenant works a detail at the Hampton Inn on Convention Center Boulevard and has access to that. He said if push came to shove, we could house people at the hotel.

So we all go to the hotel and hunker down to ride out the storm. Once the winds get over 35-40 miles an hour in the city, they pull us off the streets. Park the car somewhere secure, get the fuck off the streets. Because at anything over 20 miles an hour, tree branches become bullets that can shatter windows and decapitate people. Not to mention flying street signs and bending poles. When you see people impaled on two-by-fours that were airborne in the storm, it gives you an appreciation of the power of wind.

So now we're at the Hampton riding the storm out. It's battering the building. The winds are hitting the building so hard that water is forcing itself in through the window seals and the brick. It's chiseling the mortar out between the wood and the brick on windows. On the north side of the building, it is now raining in all of those rooms, horizontally, a good seven inches from the window. Most of the beds are soaked, the sofas are soaked, the carpet's soaked, the power's flickering. Then we lose power. I'm on the fifth floor, at the top of this building, and in the corner that's getting hardest hit. The building is rocking.

When the hurricane's gone, or so we think--after the eye passed--we sneak out to do a couple of patrols, and check on some houses and areas. Then we go back to the hotel for the next wave. Once the storm passes, the power is out and we relocate to the Sixth District station and try to figure out what we're doing next. A number of our police cars are destroyed. There's some flooding in the city, but we're looking around thinking, this isn't going to be as bad as we thought.

Oh, and by the way, the 17th Street canal just broke. We found out from people on the street who were listening to the news. At this point we weren't listening to our radios very much because they weren't working. Our radios would only broadcast a mile or two miles. The communication tower went down--the one communication tower that the city has. So now we go back to the hotel, and we're waiting around. This is where the franticness begins. We're getting information from people who don't know any better, people who don't have any background with sewage or water, no basis for claiming any kind of knowledge about this, coming in screaming, we've got to get out of our hotel! We've got to get out of the city! There's a 10-foot wall of water coming at us! We've got to go! We've got to go!

Instead of getting a representative from the Army Corps of Engineers on the radio and saying what the facts are, they tell somebody who tells somebody else who's doing a press conference, who whispers it to the mayor, and now it's changed 10 times and gone from "we've got a flow over the levee where it's breached" to "there's a tidal wave coming and the tsunami has hit." So these people are freaking out, and we're in a five-story building with access to an eight-story building next door. And they're screaming at us, "We're all gonna be under water. We've got to go!" And we're at the highest point in the city. We're less than a hundred feet from the river. I'm trying to tell these people, from my knowledge of how the city's laid out, and nobody wants to hear it. So whatever. My lieutenant believes me. My lieutenant asks the captain, "Are you commanding us out of the hotel?" The captain refuses to command us.

Four of us stayed at the hotel, two of us stayed at the station, and everybody else ran like I don't know what. They went to the parking lot of Breaux-Mart. They were like Battlestar Galactica. They were fleeing the Cylons, and they didn't even know what the Cylons were. And we were like, we've got a hotel, we've got high ground, why the fuck should we go? We're 50 feet from the bridge. The water's not going to rise so quick that we can't get out of here if we have to. We can just sit on the fucking bridge for the remainder if we need to. But it's not going to come to that. I'm watching the water rise through the city, and it's rising at a rate of six inches to a foot every hour and a half.

Lots of people on the street were asking me where to go. I'm telling them the truth, which is I don't know, they haven't told us anything. They're telling us that somebody told them that they were told by another person who was somebody in charge of something that the Convention Center was being set up as a secondary evacuation point with food and water. Those people went to the Convention Center, and there was no food or water there for them. So now there's no water, there's no police--everybody's left the city except for the six of us. And now there's 20,000 people with no extra security down there.

We just told people that the National Guard was handling the evacuation effort, and they're not talking to us. So we've got all these people at the Convention Center, and now the captain is saying, okay, you all got to get out of the hotel. They're going to riot and they're going to burn the fucking hotel down. They're going to start this big massive thing, they're going to start killing people on Convention Center Boulevard, it's going to be a big massacre.

At this point it's like four days into it, and we're trying to explain to the captain, these people are so tired and thirsty and hungry they couldn't flip over a lawn chair if they wanted to riot. I won't say anything bad about my captain. My captain was making good decisions based on bad information. And my captain had to realize that he had to run a district of a hundred [officers], not all of whom had the testicular fortitude to stick this all out. So to keep morale up, he moves them out of the line of fire so they can sleep in a car somewhere. Whatever. That's what he had to do. When he got the proper information, he said we didn't have to leave the hotel. He said, just do the right thing. I trust you all. Do what you need to do.

So we hunkered down again. Our hotel was at the corner of Gaiennie and Convention Center. If you walk into a door 40 feet over, there's 20,000 people. And they were not staying inside the Convention Center because of the murders and robberies going on inside there. They were all on the neutral ground staring at us. We don't have many supplies, so we're not passing shit out. We barely have enough for us to get by the next two days. Occasionally another police car would drive by and stop and ask if we were all right, then drive on. No patrol presence whatsoever.

The majority of the people were staying outside. We were hearing all kinds of horror stories from inside, murder to rape to robberies to shootings to beatings. There was no way to verify any of that stuff. Ninety-seven percent of these people were behind us. They wanted us to be the police and they loved that we were still there. We were the only police they saw for four or five days. The majority of the conversations were, "Baby, I know you're being left here just like we're being left here and you don't know anything, but if you find out something, could you tell us?" My response was, you've got the radio--you tell us what's going on. And these people would come over and give us bulletins as they heard it from the news.

I talked to lots and lots of those people there. Ninety-nine percent of the conversations were people coming up to us asking, Where's the food? Where's the water? When are the buses coming? Where are they taking us? People were coming up with dying children, with elderly people who were dying and needed medical attention. We need diabetes medication, we need heart medication. Where can I get medical assistance? We don't know, we don't know, we don't know.

Then came the military helicopters. They'd fly over the crowd, then fly seven or eight blocks away and drop food and water from about 40 or 50 feet--high enough to bust the boxes and send bottles of water all over the concrete. There was a group of people, Good Samaritans, who pilfered the Convention Center for handcarts and walked out to where the food and water was and brought it back to the people. And the people got together as a group and disseminated it amongst themselves, without any riots, any fights, anything. And then these people put together a box of food and water and brought it to us. We didn't take it. We told them, don't worry about us, give it to the kids and the old people. But these people were looking out for us at this point!

There were guys running through the crowd shooting at us and shooting at the crowd. And they would disappear back in the Convention Center. There wasn't much we could do. How about shooting into a crowd of 20,000 people to kill one person? At one point, there's a guy in a stolen Jeep Liberty who's shooting at us with an M16. It jammed on him--he didn't know what he was doing--and we were able to persuade him out of the vehicle the way I normally persuade people out of vehicles, and we were able to subdue him. We weren't technically the most polite in subduing him. We did this in front of 20,000 detainees. I call them detainees because the city sent them to a place where they could be detained, and that's all that happened, they were inconvenienced and detained. Anyway, we do this in front of the crowd and you hear this fucking roar from the crowd, this fucking standing ovation. We handed him over to the feds--who, by the way, are very good at making ID cards, and have really pretty uniforms.

Eventually we're going on seven days without word on what else is going on. Meanwhile, from midnight to noon, we're pooling out of the hotel and we're doing neighborhood patrols with guns, driving around with our machine weaponry. At this point I don't even have a uniform. I've got my gun, but somebody's walked off with my gear bag and they've got my duty rig and my NOPD uniform. So I'm wearing my shoulder holster, my raid dress with a camo bag on it, water in it, and anything from shorts to blue jeans with an NOPD t-shirt, my badge around my neck, and a bandana tied around my head. More times than not, I had to wade in water, and that's where the pneumonia came from. At one point I had seven days of 100-degree fever and full pneumonia that I had been patrolling with. I went to the hospital ship, and the Navy doctors were amazing. They took really good care of me. I went back to work, but I was still showering with the water that was making me sick and I was still dealing with all this pollution.

We're patrolling from midnight to noon, and noon to midnight we're standing guard at the hotel because we don't have any relief help. We get a couple of wannabe SWAT teams from outside agencies coming in and saying they need a place to stay. We said we'd put them up at the hotel, but they had to give us a hand securing the hotel and patrolling this area. They looked at the area, and we never heard back from them. Then came the guys from Detroit. Five agencies from around the Detroit area came down. They looked at the area and they went, all right, looks like home. We're in. They moved in to the hotel and helped us secure it. They helped us patrol at night. They fucking were the real police. They had our backs. Then the Burnett County guys came down, from Austin [Texas]. I know other agencies showed up to help, but I didn't see them. They weren't in my area.

I took pictures. I knew that there'd be enough photos of flood water and enough photos of refugees, so that's not what I focused on. I focused on police officers and how we were living. How anarchist our set-up was. Sleeping on sofas in a hotel lobby, machine guns laying around. It was just outrageous, you know? It kept on going like that, and blurring and blurring, and sometime around day 12 the hotel people got to town with a crew to rip up the carpet and clean out the hotel, set the place up for us.

Food and water started trickling in five or six days in. We started seeing buses lining up on the outskirts of town. They were getting the Superdome cleared first. The Convention Center had no security presence from the get-go except for us, so they couldn't just bring in three buses and leave and then come back in with three more buses. They needed to have enough buses to move everybody out in one sweep. And they did it. The military sure knows how to line things up. They can line it up in twos, threes, backwards, forward, alphabetically. You name it, they can line shit up. They lined up those goddamn buses and filled them up, and the next thing you knew there was no one. In less than 30 hours.

The city had no idea--the mayor couldn't do a mandatory evacuation from the get-go, because to do a mandatory evacuation you have to provide transportation for people who don't have it. For whatever reason, the city wasn't going to use RTA buses to get people out of town. So most of the RTA buses wound up stolen and wrecked around the city.

How many died there? I couldn't begin to put a number on it. I know there were a number of people who died in front of the Convention Center on the neutral ground. But as to inside, and as to how many died on Convention Center Boulevard, I don't have a tally. I don't know that there will be a tally. I think there might just be one big number for the entire incident. I don't know how accurate that number is going to be, either. They're going to be finding bodies for weeks. All I know is that when you drive into certain neighborhoods, you'll hit a corner and you can smell something. And it smells worse than an animal that's dead. You can only assume that it's a body, but I'm not trained to deal with it, so I'm not looking for it.

Day to day, anything I could get my hands on that might be useful, I'd go get it. By any means necessary. The number of vehicles I've procured, commandeered, is just phenomenal. The gas issue was another whole story. We figured we'd go get some of the old fleet trucks that have air conditioning, and we'll keep the trucks running so we can store cold goods in them. So we got five of those. Through all this, you can imagine all the flat tires we were getting from nails and debris and everything. If you've got six inches of water on the road, you can't see what's under the water. The department made no provision for spare tires. Thankfully, through some connections I've got, we got access to spare tires and we're getting that done. Through this, I've been to southern Plaquemines parish, to the water line, wherever I've got to go to get what we need. We don't care.

The department had no provisions for any of this. It'd be easy for us to say, well, we're out of gas. Oops, we got a flat tire, we're done. Some of the task force guys got a blowout, and instead of driving the car to a safe spot on the rim, they left it there and the car got vandalized. These are not the smartest people we're dealing with.

Just know this. Before the hurricane hit, there was a bulletin sent out to all districts from headquarters, saying please come to headquarters to pick up your hurricane provisions: 72 cases of water per district. Big whoop.

The people randomly shooting at us, and the things that we had to do to people that we caught--that's something I have to deal with, and I will deal with. That's not the story here. The importance needs to be shined on the fact the city was unprepared for a tropical storm, let alone a category 5 hurricane. And the people at the Convention Center were left high and fucking dry. They survived, they pulled together, they sang songs all night. I mean, they would come and ask us: You're looking tired, are you feeling okay? Those were the people I swore to protect. Five times we were told to leave: Leave 'em. Leave 'em. Leave 'em. When the oil storage facility in the Ninth Ward blew up, [people outside the Convention Center] thought they were blowing the levee and they were going to flood everybody, and they thought that's why there were no police around there. I said, well, look, if they're doing that, they're doing it to us too. We're here with y'all, regardless.

They were afraid given what the city did to the community in the '60s when the hurricane hit and they blew the levee and flooded them and killed them. And [given] no information and no security presence and no food and water. They'd been lied to by everybody except us. I want somebody to find out who said "Go to the Convention Center, there'll be food and water there," and I want that person held accountable for the fact there was no food and water or security presence there. I want them to be held liable for every death and injury there. I want someone to find out why the city didn't get their hands on 10 tankers full of gasoline and park them somewhere outside the city and drive them in. I want to know why a city that floods if it rains for more than five minutes doesn't have high-water vehicles. I want to know why they didn't use the RTA buses to get some of these evacuees out. Those are the people I swore to protect.

Posted by Steve Perry at September 15, 2005 11:29 AM | Comments (36)

 

Survivor stories: "There was 31 of us in a one-bedroom apartment"

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

Thirty-seven-year-old Quvandra Ballard lived in New Orleans her entire life. About seven years ago she settled into a house on Paris Avenue, located in New Orleans' Gentilly neighborhood, with her kids and husband, 37-year-old Nolton Seaton. Her mom was only five blocks away. For five years the husband-and-wife team worked for the state of Louisiana archiving historical-home and real-estate info, most of which Ballard says is now destroyed. On the Sunday before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Ballard, along with her husband, stepfather, kids, and 61-year-old mother, JoAnn Ballard Taylor, fled the only home she had ever known for her cousin's one-bedroom apartment in Houston. For nearly two weeks they slept on blow-up mattresses alongside 30 other family members who evacuated from New Orleans. There, Ballard met up with cousins and uncles who were holed up in the Superdome for days without food and water. Last weekend, Ballard's brother, Quinton, a St. Thomas graduate who lives in Eagan and works at a Lexus dealership, sent for his mother and sister and her family. They gathered the few belongings they had from the Houston apartment, rode the train for almost two days, and arrived in Minneapolis on Monday.

Quvandra Ballard: We're from the Gentilly area. On the news, they were showing my area on TV. It's all under water. They showed my daughter's school, which is mile from my house. All we could see was the top of her building. It was all under water. It was just devastating that this can happen. I've lived there all my life, 37 years. It was just very devastating for me and my daughter, who's 13-years-old, to look at it on the news. She was looking at it and crying.

We were able to get out before the flood. We didn't have to experience the horror and trauma that was going on in the Superdome. I had family members that witnessed killing and a lot of raping going on. My cousin, her name is Daisy, she was in it. I have three uncles that were there and two girl cousins that were there. They were telling us their stories and crying. The was, like, the last ones to get out. They experienced a lot.

The last ones that got out, they were really destroyed. My uncle, when he did make it to Houston and he told us his story, I was just so glad I didn't have to witness the things he did. He said there was no help. It was very hot in that dome. They had water leakage because of the opening, so they had to hurry and move everyone to one side. Thousands of people in there. You couldn't sleep, because people were stealing your stuff, going through your pockets. You had to keep one eye open, one closed.

As they were bussing some of the people out, it was so hot in there, and they had to get them all out, so they were all hanging out on the ramp that goes into the Superdome. They were giving them hot water, which they couldn't keep cold anyway. The little supplies that were coming in, people were taking it and not sharing. He said he saw people dying, just giving up. Elderly people dying. Raping was going on. He did witness two killings. One guy jumped over the banister in the Superdome; he killed himself. The help just did not come. Everyone was just so frustrated they were sitting there for all those days with no help. People couldn't get to their medicine. He said the smell was just awful.

When he was in the canoe, trying to get to the Superdome, he said he was rowing past bodies that had blown up that was in the water. He didn't get to the dome right away. This was while they were just trying to get to the dome.

I had a friend that died in the water. The rescue people tried to pick her up from her roof. Whatever they use to pick them up, they said she slipped through trying to carry her up. She drowned. I don't know what happened with that. I don't know if she was afraid and let go or what. She was in her house for three or four days.

After the storm, we wound up in Houston. We got out on Sunday evening before the storm. There was 31 of us in a one-bedroom apartment. We had to make-do. Getting out [of New Orleans] was not really getting out. We were moving at an inch at a time. It was very slow-paced.

I have a little cousin that lives in Houston. He's in school. He let us stay with him. There were 31 of us in his apartment from New Orleans--all family. He took all the appliances, all the furniture out. There were just mattresses all over the floor, the living room and dining room.

JoAnn Ballard Taylor: The sleeping arrangements, we went to Wal-Mart and bought those mattresses that blow up. We had king-size, and medium, and whatever else. [My nephew] was really wonderful. He let us keep his bed for my husband and I. My husband had a stroke last year. He's in Virginia right now with his daughter so I can get medical care.

Quvandra Ballard: My mom's a diabetic. Her left small toe was amputated. She hit her small toe on her right foot, and they need to look at it. We didn't have any way to get around in Houston, so it was really hard for us to get medical attention for her and [my mom's husband.] That really put a toll on us. He needs help around the clock. He's paralyzed on one side.

Someone gave us a free plane ticket, I don't know him personally, but he knew that we needed help. We knew that getting my mom's husband to Virginia was the most important. My mom is going to try to get herself together and send for him, so she can take care of him. They're going to stay here in Minnesota.

Before the storm came, we were trying to see if we should leave or not. There wasn't a mandatory evacuation at first. When we saw it looking really bad, we decided to leave. We just grabbed what we could. All we were able to grab was what was hanging around, some jeans and a shirt, stuff like that. We grabbed some covers and pillows, to ride in the car and just in case we need it in shelters. We actually thought that we would be able to come back home like we do for every other storm. But this was category five; this was a different story. They kept predicting it every year, but it never happened.

My mom was in Hurricane Betsy. She was on top of her house. I was like, really? I just couldn't see that. But now I really see it.

So now we're in Minnesota. I come here to visit once in every blue moon. Last December I was here for four days. And now I'm here to make it my home.

Posted by at September 15, 2005 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

 

Survivor stories: From the roof, she could see everything

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

Adele Bertucci, 53, has lived in New Orleans for the past 35 years. A longtime hospitality worker, she moved to the U.S. from Cuba when she was 11. On the night before Katrina hit, Bertucci, who is disabled by chronic health problems, took refuge in the Uptown home of a friend, Sidney Smith. She stayed for the next five days. Much of that time she was perched on the roof, flagging down passing boats to get emergency deliveries of bottled water and other provisions. In her time on the roof, Bertucci had a panoramic of her city as the fires burned and chaos erupted in the streets. Now staying in Florida, she hopes to return to New Orleans for a visit soon but is uncertain about her long term plans.

I was on the roof for four days. I went up on Tuesday, just for a few hours. But From Wednesday to Friday, I stayed on the roof from early morning--5:3030, 6--until the roaches and mosquitoes became overbearing. Maybe 11:30. Every aircraft I would see, I would wave a towel to get their attention.

I was able to flag down quite a few boats. They were in canoes and jet skis, anything that floated. Every boat that passed by was filled with people—people and dogs, people in wheelchairs. I could see fires across the river where my friends Frank and Laura live.

I could see fires around the Superdome. At one point, there was a ring of helicopters hovering over the prison, like a big donut. I could see everything. It was hard to respond that this was the U.S. At night, every time I turned on a flashlight, the helicopters were all over me with the floodlights. I guess they thought I was a looter.

On Friday, I started thinking the fires were getting too close for comfort. A guy came down from a chopper on a rope. I had to straddle him in this apparatus, and then both of us got lifted into the helicopter. It was very, very weird. I didn't get scared until we were half way up to the helicopter and I felt the line jerk, like we were going to fall. It was pretty nerve wracking. But I knew that was the only way to get out for me.

When they picked me up, they told me I was going straight to the hospital. Instead they dropped me off at the interstate for a few hours. From there, they took my to the airport. My blood pressure was way up, so they put me in the MASH unit which had maybe nine beds. Some people were sick four days before they even got seen or transferred. While I was there, they gave me medication and stabilized me.

The worst experience for me was being alone for maybe four days in the airport. That's something I'll never forget. There were bodies. There were people bleeding. There were people laying in their own waste. One after each other. It was just horrible. If you take Gone with the Wind, and the Nazi War and the Vietnam war, and visualize that in one place, that's how I would describe the airport. When you watch it on TV, it's like watching a Walt Disney versus an R rated movie. You only see what they want you to see. You can't smell it.

After they released me, it took me about nine hours of standing in line to get to the plane. I flew continental to Austin and went to a shelter. As soon as I got the shelter, they took me to the hospital, then back to the shelter. That night, I went to a hotel. A lady and gentleman I don't know--they didn't want me to know who they were--paid for my hotel room. A lady that works in the hospital got me a flight to Florida. So I had pieces of fortune here and there. Great love. Everybody's been wonderful.

My daughter and her husband and her grandchild ended up in Carolina. My mom is in Fort Lauderdale. My boyfriend is a fire fighter. He just headed back today, and he's going to give us a heads up after he finds out just how safe it is. I got word from a friend in Baton Rouge that they're going to start letting people back in Orleans Parish on Monday. As far as a long term plan, we're just taking it day by day.

Oh, and Sidney says to say, "Forget Iraq, rebuild New Orleans."

Posted by Mike Mosedale at September 14, 2005 5:37 PM | Comments (0)

 

Survivor stories: "We sailed over houses"

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

For five days after the hurricane hit, Sidney Smith holed up in his two-story home in the Uptown neighborhood. Smith--a 51-year-old New Orleans native who runs a tour company called Haunted History Tours--says he decided to stay because, well, that's what he's always done during hurricanes warnings. Like a lot of other people, Smith came to rue that decision. Stranded in the rising waters, he watched in disbelief as the city of his birth underwent a surreal transformation.

On Sunday the hurricane was coming and I'd taken several people into my home--my friend Adele, her 80 year-old mother, one of my tour guides, his wife, their two little children, and a couple of dogs and cats. My home is in Uptown on Fontainebleau Drive. It's relatively close to the Tulane University area.

Most of the city had evacuated. I was born in New Orleans, I'm 51 years old and have been through numerous hurricanes. I just didn't think this one was going to be any different. The hurricane came on Sunday night and raged through the city. By Monday afternoon, it was pretty much over. Trees were down. Power lines were down. Houses were damaged. But we felt for the most part we'd dodged the bullet.

When I woke up on Tuesday morning, my street was a river, my front yard was a lake and it was rising. So we started frantically moving things--important papers, my computer hard drive, things like that things--to the second story of my house. I didn't know that the levee had broken.

By Tuesday night, the water was four to five deep in my house and we had all evacuated to the upstairs. Tucker Carlson's show called me up and said, "Well, what do you think now, Mr. Smith?" And I said, "I think I might have made a colossal mistake." I kinda made a joke and said this might be a good time to send out an SOS to the world to save the haunted history crew because we’ve got to get saved.

Shortly after that call we lost phone service and all communication with the world. All we had was a battery powered radio. By Wednesday, Adele had taken her spot up on the roof. She was doing roof duty, looking for boats passing down the street. Helicopters were flying overhead all the time, but nobody was rescuing us.

The area had become truly toxic. We had heard about corpses floating down the street. There were dead animals in the water. There was pesticide. There was gasoline. There was urine. There was feces. And the town was starting to burn. The fire department couldn't fight do anything because there was no water pressure. It felt like something out of a Mad Max movie or Escape from New York.

On Wednesday, we evacuated the young couple--my tour guide, his wife, and their two young kids. They got into a boat passing down the street and were taken to points unknown. By Thursday, we had pretty much gone through our own water supply. I canoed to one of my neighbor's houses to break in and get food and water--I might say, with their permission. Then the military finally arrived and dropped us two boxes of MREs and a case of bottled water. It bounced off the roof and into the toxic soup, so I had to wade out into that mess to get that stuff.

On Friday, Adele was airlifted off the roof by helicopter. After she left, it was just me and her 80-year-old mother, Lola. The mother couldn't make it to the roof but it was important someone be on the roof. There was no other way anyone would know you were there. Remember, by this time, I was one of the only people left in my neighborhood. Most of the city been evacuated.

On Saturday, maybe noon-ish, we were listening to the radio and I'm weighing my options on what to do next. I was in the process of making a sign, "Food and water needed" when I hear a whistling in my house. At first, I thought it was coming from the radio; I couldn’t imagine anyone was in my house. But I started wandering around the house and all of the sudden I come face to face with this guy. About 40 years old. Bare-chested.

Once it was established that he wasn't going to shoot me and I wasn't going to shoot him, he told me that he had heard about our plight on the internet. I said, "So you're here to rescue us?"

He says, "Yeah. You got a telephone?"

I looked at him and kind of laughed and said, "Sure. But I haven't had phone service in a week." And he says to me, "Gimme your telephone. I’ll hook it up."

And I said, "What, are you from the phone company?"

And he says, "No, but I can do these things."

So we walk downstairs to the front of my house. He climbs up on a fence, hooks the telephone to the house and, bingo I've got a signal.

I said, "How the hell did you do that?" He says, "I can do these things."

I said, “What's your name?" He says, "The name is Gambino." Now in New Orleans, there's a bakery called Gambino Bakery. So I said to the guy, "Are you in the bakery family?" And he says, "No, I'm from the other family. I'm here to clear the family name."

It was a real Seinfeld moment.

So I called a few people. I'm still weighing my options at this point. Whether I should leave or stay with my house and just send Adele's mother with Gambino. Because that was the main reason we couldn't all be airlifted, we had the old lady with us.

After a little thinking, I decided this would be the best time for me to evacuate. I wasn't so worried about starving to death. But when I started seeing the fires in my neighborhood, I started worrying. I saw an entire shopping center burn down and there was gasoline all throughout the water.

So we all sailed off in Gambino's boat--me, Gambino and Adele's mother, Lola. We sailed up Nashville Avenue to Claiborne Avenue to Napoleon Avenue to St. Charles Avenue. It was totally surreal. We sailed over houses, stop signs, totally submerged vehicles, dead animals, what looked like corpses, army vehicles. It was like nothing I'd seen in my entire life.

Once we got to St. Charles, Gambino carried Lola to the dry land. The street corner was flooded with military and police with shotguns. So we get into a police van. There must have been 20 of us. I was crammed in with my knees up to my chest. It was very uncomfortable. The van made its way through the city to New Orleans airport. There were thousands of people massing around the airport. I saw dead bodies piled on top of each other, I saw sick people, dying people, children without parents. Nobody knew what they what they were doing or where they were going.

I asked one of the military guys, "Where is everybody going?" The guy says all the flights are going to San Antonio. So I grabbed Lola, and we stood in line waiting for a flight. I thought we were going on a commercial airline to San Antonio but when we got outside, I saw the largest cargo airplane I've ever seen in my life. It looked like a warehouse with wings. There must have been five or six hundred of us in there. There were no seats, no windows. We were all sitting on the floor. I felt like one of the Jews going to Auschwitz.

On the plane, it was hot and noisy. Midway through the ride, a voice comes on the speaker, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're not heading to San Antonio. We're heading to Fort Smith, Arkansas." A near riot develops on the plane. We get to Fort Smith and there were two rows of military guys waiting for us, shaking hands, clapping. I felt like one of the Iranian hostages that had just come back to America.

We were taken straight to Fort Chaffe, where we were processed. When I walked into the processing building, I saw this young girl--twenty something with tears in her eyes, just looking lost. I asked if she was okay. She said she got separated from her fiance at the New Orleans airport. So I took her in. Me, her and Lola, we became a family and went to the barracks together

The next morning, I went looking for breakfast and found that the place had become a city. It was an unbelievable sight. The place was jam packed. Kids without parents. Parents without kids. The elderly. The infirm.

I thought, "This is a riot waiting to happen. This is a powder keg." So I started asking military guys, "Now that we're here, how do we get out?" Nobody could answer the question. Nobody knew how to get out of there. They only knew that people were coming in, bus after bus. Long story short, it wasn't the military that got us out, it was civilians. I said, "Take me to the nearest airport."

A couple hours went by, and the three of us--Lola, Lindsey and myself--get into a van with some volunteers who drove us to the airport at Fort Smith, where we bought airplane tickets. Lindsey flew to her family in West Virginia and Lola and I flew to Fort Lauderdale.

Posted by Mike Mosedale at September 14, 2005 4:44 PM | Comments (1)

 

Survivor stories: "Fortunately, I had a gun"

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

A New Orleans resident since 1952, Sandra Carter never let a hurricane force her from her home. When Katrina hit, Carter, a widow and retired substitute teacher, figured she would be okay because her home in the city's Algiers neighborhood sits on a high spot. But three days after the storm rolled through, Carter--isolated, suffering from asthma attacks and increasingly alarmed by the sound of gunfire in the nearby streets--finally loaded up her cats and dogs and fled town. Reached by phone at her sister's home in Lafayette, Carter said she was fine, but anxious to return to her home which, she reports, appears to be relatively undamaged.

Saturday and Sunday I wasn't the least bit concerned. My area of town hasn't flooded for years. I didn't leave when most of my kids did. But by Sunday night it looked like the storm was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So one of my daughters, her husband and kids and I went to the Algiers Methodist Church, which has several floors where we could stay dry if the water did come up.

I spent Sunday night, all day Monday and Monday night at the church. We all brought food in, so it was more like a campout than anything. We lost electricity since the middle of the night after a tree fell on the wires leading to the transformer and started a fire in the connection box. That was a bit of excitement--4 o'clock in the morning, having people running around the church, trying to put a fire out.

By Tuesday morning it looked like Algiers had made it through the storm. There were a lot of trees down, but there was no major flooding. The majority of the homes have minor to no damage.

I spent Tuesday night and Wednesday night at my house. By Wednesday morning, my asthma was acting up like crazy because there was no electricity and I'd been without air conditioning for three days. So I decided I better go ahead and leave until they got the power back on. I cooked up what I had in the refrigerator and took it to the local police station for the guys to eat. Then I packed up. I planned on leaving Thursday morning.

The phones went dead about 9 o'clock Wednesday night. I was in the house by myself, nobody else on the block. The dogs woke me up at about 3 o'clock in the morning and I saw that somebody was staring in my window at me. Fortunately, I had a gun. I put the gun in front of the flashlight and he ran away. After that, there was no question of me staying.

Thursday morning I loaded up the dogs and the cats and started driving to my sister's house in Lafayette. There were crowds of people on the 310 overpass, all trying to get cars to stop to give them rides. I was leery because there were so many people, so I just kept driving. Since I had my own automobile and a little bit of cash and a credit card, I was luckier than most of the people you saw on television. They didn't have the resources to get out.

I've lived in New Orleans since I was six. We've had hurricanes my entire life. And I never left before. Will I leave next time? Yes. Not because of the hurricane, but because of the aftermath. I only live three blocks from a grocery store that the looters went in and demolished. I heard a lot of gunfire, too.

I left because I didn't want to have a shoot out and I was tired of having an asthma attacks. Most of the older people that I know left before the storm. I've been reading Polimom.com--Polimom is a blogger and she has a forum for Algiers--and I've had contact with quite a few people who did stay and don't regret it. We never lost water in Algiers, so we had water and sewer the whole time. But there are a lot of people who won't leave no matter what. This is there home, this is their property and they don't trust the government to protect it. And after some of the things that went on, you can't blame them.

Posted by Mike Mosedale at September 13, 2005 3:38 PM | Comments (1)

 

Survivor stories: New Orleans journo and former CP staffer Katy Reckdahl on the view from Touro Infirmary

Filed under: Katrina Survivor Stories

"Why didn't they leave?" That question was asked over and over in the days after Katrina. Barely concealed in the questions--sometimes not concealed at all--is the suggestion that the hurricane's victims are to blame for their plight. But of course, there are thousands of explanations for why people stayed. For Katy Reckdahl--a reporter at the Gambit, a New Orleans alternative weekly, and a former staff writer at City Pages--it really wasn't a matter of choice. On Saturday night, with the hurricane bearing down, Katy found herself at Touro Infirmary, where she would give birth to her first child, a baby boy named Mervin Hector.

For the next four days, Katy, the baby and Katy's boyfriend, jazz musician "Kid" Merv Campbell, were marooned at the hospital. For much of that time, conditions were primitive, food was scarce and rumors rampant. After the generators failed, there was no electricity or running water and little communication with the outside world. To maneuver the hospital's dark corridors, Katy and Merv relied chiefly on the dim light from an otherwise useless cell phone.

Just before noon on Wednesday, with the situation becoming increasingly desperate, the family got a ride out of town from a sympathetic nurse, who took them to the airport in Baton Rouge. From there, they made their way to Katy's sister's home in Tempe, Arizona, where, in the week since her escape, Katy has come to accept that she won't be returning to her adopted hometown any time soon. Reached by the telephone yesterday, she discussed the ordeal with customary candor and wit.

Katy's story, in her own words:

All day Saturday, people were getting ready to evacuate. Everyone you saw in the street would say, "Are you leaving?" Among our friends, it was 50-50 between people staying, people going. We were debating because I was so enormously pregnant--38 weeks along, big as a house and four centimeters dilated, which meant I could go on to labor at any moment.

Last year, I had evacuated for Hurricane Ivan. We spent 14 hours on the road, and then we got two drops of rain in New Orleans. I knew I couldn't do that this time. For one thing, you really don't own your bladder at that point in pregnancy. And if I had gone into labor, I probably would been forced to give birth in a car.

At about 10 p.m., when Merv got home from his gig, my contractions were getting pretty close. So he borrowed a car and drove like a speed demon to Touro--me in the back seat, on all fours and in a lot of pain. When we arrived to the hospital, they discovered Hector was lying sideways, so they had to turn him about 90 degrees before he could come out. I could have never given birth to him in a car. It turned out we probably did the right thing by staying.

I started to push at midnight. Hector wasn't born until 4:14 in the morning. He was a cute, mellow little dude and we called some people to say that we were staying and then I fell asleep. About eight hours after I gave birth, the hospital was put on lock down, which meant no one could leave and no one could enter. So after that, I really didn't think again about evacuating.

About 6 a.m. on Monday morning, we were awakened by the head nurse. The hurricane came through--it sounded like a train--and she was telling everyone to move in the hallways. Ori