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

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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.

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

 

New Orleans House Party: The death of Dylan

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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.

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

 

New Orleans House Party: How to find a filthy angel

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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.

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

 

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

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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.

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

 

New Orleans House Party: Welcome to the ghost town

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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.

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

 

Mission from Minnesota

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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.

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

 

New Orleans: Survivor Stories--now live

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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."

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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.

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

 

Survivor stories: "We gave away everything we had"

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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.

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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

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"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."

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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"

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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.

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

 

Survivor stories: From the roof, she could see everything

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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.

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

 

Survivor stories: "We sailed over houses"

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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.

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

 

Survivor stories: "Fortunately, I had a gun"

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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.

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