On August 29th, the day the hurricane hit, we were at a couples’ house for dinner. We were dining and I couldn’t answer my cell phone. When I got in the car I saw the Governor had called. I was like: I missed a call from the Governor! What a knucklehead!

The Governor’s call was: Mary you’re so creative, we’ve got to do something for the people in New Orleans. Please start thinking. Start thinking of ideas. What can Michigan do? How can we help? I sent her an email with some thoughts. She replied and said: next morning at Senior Staff, I want you to lead a discussion where we’ll brainstorm and vet these ideas and see what we can do.

Some ideas were taken off the table. We grappled with balancing doing things for other people in other states when people in Michigan have so many needs. There was the whole debate about that. But the discussion pulled forth more ideas. Because I had been the one standing in front of the room, facilitating, I became the one who took those brainstorm ideas to the next level. And the next level. And the next level. It just snowballed. I became the point-person on Michigan’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Little pockets of activity within state government were happening all over the place. Calls were coming in to our National Guard; our State Police sent people down, etc.
We made a recommendation that the Governor accepted. We opened up the State Emergency Management Center.

The State Emergency Management Center is a huge space in a secure location. Once you declare an emergency, all the department heads and all the emergency management personnel come together. The Governor, the Attorney General, and all of the department heads and the key personnel sit in concentric half-circles, emanating from the Governor’s post.

In this meeting the Governor said: We’ve got to coordinate our efforts…who’s doing what, now…we’re going forward…and Mary’s in charge.

I am? [Laughter]

Governor Granholm talked with other Governors. She said: We would be happy to take evacuees in Michigan. We really are. And they were talking about, OK, how many thousands can you take tonight?

We pulled together our cabinet members to talk about what’s the best way to do this. How can we do this? How can we do this? Major General Thomas Cutler (Head of the Department of Military and Veterans’ Affairs for the State of Michigan) recommended that the best place to do this was at two training facilities: Fort Custer, the military base, and Camp Grayling, a military base up north. Now that’s way up north. Hard to get to. We should fill up Fort Custer first, and then go to Camp Grayling.

Gen. Cutler said that he we can take 10,000 people and house them well. But it would be great if they didn’t all come at once. If we got 1000 a day, we could make sure all their medical needs were effectively treated, and move people into the proper housing—whether they were a family or an individual, whether they had pets or not. That was our plan. We proceeded to say: we are ready. The Governor wanted us to be ready by Friday night to take evacuees. We were.

The Governor went out to Fort Custer. She inspected the place. The media was dying to get footage of anything at all. What are you doing? Show us anything. We decided early on that this needed to be private and respectful for the evacueees. It’s not a movie or show. It’s not about the Governor. But they were dying for something. What are you doing? You’re using Fort Custer. They were trying to sneak into the space. So the Governor gave a media tour to show off the readiness of our strategy and how we were moving.

Fort Custer has a program for kids who had a light run-in with the law. It’s kind of like a little boot-camp program. These kids had sorted all the towels, folded all the clothes, plus, we got backpacks for kids at school. [The boot-camp kids were there for the Governor’s inspection.] They were just so humble and glad to be helping in this way.

Ready and Waiting

I put a big emphasis on communications. We had so many people who wanted to know what’s happening. Early on, I did updates two or three times a day. I sent them to all of the Governor’s executive staff, and then the cabinet members. I think this may be one of the first:

September 4th, Hurricane Update. Sunday, 5:30pm. This is an update. I hope to make them more frequent. For sanity’s sake, please don’t reply to all. I will issue corrections/additional information/clarifications early tomorrow. If you have any questions, please reply to me and I’ll get the answer. Mary Z.

Stage Three is “Transfer to Permanent Living,” which we assume will mean a trip back to Louisiana in six to nine months. (Ha! Yeah, wishful thinking) If some choose to stay in Michigan, we will welcome them.

The Governor also issued Executive Directive 2005-7 that waived the weight and size restriction on transporting manufactured housing so housing manufactured in Michigan can be sent south. This is a reminder to the team that we need to get more Michigan manufacturers involved and folks should start to think about that. Though I know it’s crass to think about economic advantage while people are suffering, but we have skills and talents in this state that should be put to work for the good of the Gulf states, for the good of the country, and the good of Michigan.”

Then we waited. We were literally sitting in this Emergency Management site and we kept hearing, OK, there’s a plane in the air! We think it’s coming to Michigan. And we’d wait. There’s a plane in the air, and it could be here in as little as two hours. Get ready. Then the plane went somewhere else! And it went somewhere else! And it went somewhere else!

The Emergency Management Center has televisions all around the perimeter of the room. We’re seeing people in the stadium in Texas in these horrible conditions. It was getting pretty bad by Friday and Saturday. We’re ready! We have all this stuff. OK, it’s cold here. But it’s not that cold in August, you know? And they never came.

Governor Granholm got on the phone with Governor Perry of Texas: Rick! We’ve got ten thousand beds ready here. We’re ready! You know? Governor Perry was in a world of hurt. He told Governor Granholm, I can’t handle everyone coming to Texas. I’m going to make sure some of these people come to Michigan. So that gave us new hope that our state of readiness would be utilized.

There is a national emergency system. A communications network. Let’s say, [a state] were to put out that they need five flat-bottomed boats. Whose got a flat-bottom boat? If you had a flat-bottom boat, you then go through the system, and you say, we have three in Michigan, we’re willing to send. Then they say, OK, Michigan, we’ll take two of your three. This is the system that we used because the Emergency Management people who had been through drill after drill after drill said this is how it’s done.

Now mind you, on August 14th, 2003, there was a huge blackout in Southeast Michigan. The power was dead. The Governor jumps into action like you wouldn’t believe; whenever there’s a problem, she’s there. She dove in and had opened up the Emergency Management Center. Got water to Detroit. Made sure gas stations weren’t gauging gas. Brought food to people. Did things to make sure seniors weren’t overheated. So we had had this great test with emergency management process. In August, two years before and it worked. We were relying on this system. But [the system] wasn’t working

We started to think, is this political? Are they not coming to Michigan because this is a Democratic governor? Why send all these people to Haley Barbour in Mississippi and Arkansas and Texas. What’s the common denominator? Well those are all Republican governors. So this started to creep into our thinking a bit—at least my thinking. I’ll own my own suspicions.

We thought we’d thought of everything. Veterinarians. All kinds of medicine. Kotex. School buses to transport them from the tarmac where the plane landed to where they would come. How could we give them the privacy they deserved? The families… Then there was a little scare that people would be coming with weapons. How were we going to find out if somebody has a weapon? How are we going to make sure that our workers are safe? We’d thought through all this stuff. It was very disheartening to be able to think of our readiness, to be proud of what we had readied, then to wait and wait and wait. Not be able to make that available.

I witnessed some direct conversations between Governor Granholm and Governor Blanco. Also, First Gentleman Dan Mulhern called Coach, just to make a connection with him, so the First Gentleman could talk to the First Gentleman and say, I’m with you, how can we help. We’re ready.

I think Governor Granholm sensed profound despair. A totally untenable situation. More so than we could ever imagine having to face ourselves in Michigan. I don’t speak for the Governor, but I’m sure she felt tremendous heartache that we couldn’t be more helpful. That Governor to Governor, she couldn’t mobilize her resources to help her colleague. It’s just so weird to be ready, to watch on TV all the problems escalating, the tension. People were getting sick. People weren’t getting the proper health care. People were off their meds. We were so ready to help all those things, and it wasn’t utilized.

At Fort Custer

When all was said and done, two or three planes did come to Michigan. They carried what we were told were the last folks out of New Orleans. In some cases those were people with serious mental health issues. In some cases they were people with serious physical issues who went straight to hospitals.

We had some college students from Tulane. I think medical students. They had stayed as long as they thought they could be helpful. They came because they were forced out, and promptly got on some other planes to fly to family they had. So we really only had about five hundred people officially come from FEMA planes to Michigan.

I was preaching to everybody, stay out of there. If you don’t need to be at Fort Custer, get out of there. You can’t gawk. No gawkers. So then when the evacuees came, I wasn’t there. I stayed for the media tour, but I said, we gotta practice what we’re preaching here, and not all like hang around what do the evacuees look like.

My colleague JoAnne Huls was the point person on-site. She was there, and she was radioing back on her cell phone, they’re off the plane, you know, they look terrible, you see people and they’re like ghosts, and they’re silent, oh, somebody has a dog (she and I are dog people). So I can’t imagine being in that situation.

More on What the State of Michigan Did to Prepare

JoAnne Huls mobilized all kinds of resources. She called our friends in the unions. She called our friends at Meijer’s Supermarket. We need towels. We need ten thousand towels. We need toys. She called Toys R Us. We need toys for kids. We need veterinarians. We need crates for animals. And somehow all this stuff started coming in. We had such an outpouring of help.

We knew we wanted the people of Michigan to have an organized way that they could be helpful with money. People were calling, I have a house. I have a cottage up north that I won’t be using. Someone can have it. All this stuff was coming in. We quickly needed to organize it. And communicate what we were doing and how we were going to do it.

We set up a hotline. We staffed it twenty-four hours a day. Anyone who wanted to donate anything could call. There was an incredible sifting process from people who were saying, I’ve got clothes, to, I’m the head of Pioneer Sugar. I can send as many tanker trucks of sugar as you need me to send. Tell me where to send it. I have a vehicle called a “water buffalo” which carries fresh water, should we send it down? So we had volunteers and state staff members sitting on these phone lines, figuring out all this stuff.

We made a database. What is it you have? Tell us more about that. How do we contact you? And so on. We learned that our strategy was not going to be to put people into individual houses, but to use these camps. People would say, thank you for your house, but we’re not going to use individual homes like that, but we do need clothing, blah blah blah.

We quickly realized we didn’t want to collect the clothing. We established partnerships with the Red Cross in Michigan, with the Salvation Army, with all of the non-profit organizations in each community that delivered social services. We said, take your things to them. They know how to intake that kind of stuff. Clean it, size it, all that kind of stuff. Take your stuff to them, and then we’ll work through them in a wholesale fashion. So there was this incredible mobilization, proactively and also reactively on our part of services and things for the evacuees. We were so ready.

We would prepare remarks for the Governor to give if she wanted to give an update. We would write the script. We did live teleconferences, where reporters could phone in to the Governor. (This is when we thought they would send us people.)

Here’s what she said:

“Thank you for joining us at this late hour and at the last minute. We wanted to let you know what people on the ground are finding out. FEMA has notified us that they need additional help from Michigan. They have told us that they intend to take advantage of the support organizational housing staff we have in Michigan. FEMA has told us that we should expect to receive the first group of evacuees sometime tomorrow. We believe that group will number approximately 500 men, women, and children. (And they told us we were getting people! And then we didn’t get them.)

“Michigan is ready with open-arms to provide these families who have lost everything a safe, comfortable place to call home while their homes and their communities and their lives are being re-built. These evacuees will be housed temporarily at the Fort Custer Training Center in Augusta Michigan, near Battle Creek. While there, we will help to assess their physical condition, and provide basic human needs. Our intention is for them to stay a very short time, and we are working closely with mayors in communities within the state to bring about swift transfer to transitional living in many of Michigan’s communities.

“We’re working with mayors and non-profit organizations with the direction of the state health and human services organizations to insure that these families’ transition and time in Michigan is comfortable. Since we told FEMA Friday afternoon that Michigan could make its resources available, there has been a remarkable outpouring of public and private support to make this happen. Fort Custer is now outfitted with all the necessities a family might need to live a basic, healthy existence: a toothbrush, pajamas (yeah, we got everybody pajamas), formula for a baby, a change of clothes, a meal, a pair of shoes.

“Making this happen has been a remarkable effort.

• The hotel community of Battle Creek has made bedding available, including cribs, bedspreads, and sheets.
• K-Mart of Battle Creek has donated playpens, mouthwash and soap.
• Best Buy of Battle Creek donated electronic equipment so that folks can tap into the internet to find family members.
• SBC has generously donated twenty-five phone lines, free local and long distance calls and equipment.
• Wal-Mart Superstores of Battle Creek donated over 300 pairs of socks.
• Sam’s Club has delivered pallets of water. Scholastic Books program has donated children’s books.
• Target of Battle Creek donated brushes, combs, and undergarments.
• The Kellogg Foundation donated backpacks and duffel bags so that people have a bag to carry their own, new things in.
• Toys R Us of Battle Creek donated toys.
• The Battle Creek area, including the area food banks, the Kellogg Foundation, the Calhour County Red Cross, local churches, Second Harvest Food Bank, and the entire Foundation Community are mobilized. And ready to help.

“Clearly the State of Michigan as an organization has been working hard to make sure that we’re doing everything else that the affected areas are asking of us. Just yesterday, the new Hurricane Help-Line has fielded more than a thousand calls from citizens pledging their support. Everything from pet supplies, to coloring books, to manpower, to kitty litter. The number is 888-535-6136. I want to encourage citizens to utilize that line. It’s more important than ever now that it appears that FEMA is asking for our help within our own borders that we can streamline the process of gathering and redistributing.

“Let me share a great example. Yesterday, a woman in Kalamazoo, who worked for a time in Los Angeles, recruited all the hotels in town to donate clean linen, toiletries, children’s toys. She was prepared to ship a truckload of things that she had gathered to the affected areas, but she called our help-line, and we were able to tell her, God bless, to keep collecting, but to keep those supplies right here at home.”

This is the Governor’s statement to the media via conference call. Then she took questions.

What happened to the stuff? When we read that it wasn’t going to be utilized, we gave it to non-profit organizations. We called back the people who gave it to us and asked them, are you OK with this? Sure, sure, whatever will help. People were so generous.

Kevin Goes to Louisiana to Help

My husband didn’t see me for days. He was back in Detroit watching news after news after news. Having spent four years working for Governor Granholm, it’s kind of a sensitive issue that he’s got vacation time but I can’t go. I have vacation time, too, but I don’t have any time to take vacation!

So Kevin decided that he was going to go down there and help. He went on-line. The Humane Society had some sort of credentialing process. He filled out all the paperwork and got his approval to go. They sent him a big long list of stuff to bring: leather gloves, pup tent, so you can sleep outside. Took a shopping list and got all this stuff, loaded up our Saturn Vue and headed down there. That was towards the end of September [2005].

He called me on the way. He wasn’t sure how much cell phone battery he’d have and whether he would be able to recharge. He was judicious about it, but he would call me, and say how the landscape was changing and how he knew he was approaching the storm area. At one point he called me and he said, you know, this is really a beautiful area, there aren’t even billboards on the freeways. And then he called back to say, oh, that’s because they all blew down.

He worked for a couple of days at an animal shelter in Gonzales. By the time he got there, they were closing that animal care facility. Someone had a flyer saying that a veterinarian in Plaquemines Parish had been asked to convert a senior citizens’ center into an animal shelter. They could herd the animals and keep them healthy so people could come back and claim them. I believe that the notion in Plaquemines Parish was that if people vacated, they wanted to make sure their animals were there when they came back. Kevin was all loaded up and ready. He went from Gonzales to Plaquemines Parish.

Kevin was put up in a house with folks who lived down there and were very involved with animals. They had a house that was in great shape and he and a handful of other volunteers lived out of that house. He was there for three weeks.

When he first got there, they had all these makeshift ways to keep the animals apart. Found wood and chains and things. I think it was the Sante Fe National Guard or somebody came in with fencing units and created all sorts of individual pens for the animals. Kevin’s job was to assemble them. They got into this daily routine of arriving, getting all the cages clean, giving them food and water, checking them out one by one. There was a great deal of pit bulls. He had some horrible stories of keeping the dogs away from one another if they wanted to harm each other. I understand that dog fighting is legal in Louisiana. God help us.

He was heartbroken to see houses gone. Entire spaces where he knew there was a house but all he saw was a toilet–the only thing that remained cemented down. Seeing the Xs on a house, and the symbol of whether someone was found there alive or dead. Or animals.

Stories. Everyone had a story. The fellow who thought he was being prepared and ready and had his boat under his carport. The water began to raise the boat. He filled the boat with his essential belongings. The water was rising, rising, rising at an incredibly rapid rate. The man got into the boat. But the boat had risen up into the rafters of the carport. He couldn’t get out. He thought he was going to be killed or beheaded because now he’s smooshed up against the top of the carport. The only thing that saved this person was the weight of the water. The pressure of the water lifted the carport off its foundation. Off sailing away this whole contraption went. These stories have forever changed Kevin.

For a whole month we’d been separated. We both had this amazing thumbprint of this hurricane on our lives. I was thinking, what can I do, how does he re-enter? I did something that I’m very proud of now. He said he took care of 200 dogs in Plaquemines Parish. 200. So I went and I bought 200 of those mini Milk Bones, the ones that are about two inches, and they’re all different colors, red and green. I got a permanent marker and wrote out the numerals, one to 200 on 200 of these bones. I went all over the house. His car. The garage. We have a cottage in Canada, I went there. The tool box.I hid all 200 of these bones. Some of them were in really obvious places, like the egg carton. But some of them he has not found til this day.

I told him, every time you find one of these milk bones, I want you to think back to a dog you saved. He said, I found four today! He still finds them. I found a Milk Bone today! OK, who’d you think of? Uh…there was a Dalmatian, and the Dalmatian was about eight years old, and I think it was a female. That Dalmatian was always barking at my heels. I created this little way to stop and think back to what happened.

We just took our Christmas ornaments out for the second time. I opened that box last year, and opened it again this year, and he still hasn’t found the bones I hid in the Christmas ornaments.

Bringing Back Belle

Kevin came home with one little pup. A pit bull/boxer mix. I think they’re being generous allowing us to say there’s some boxer in there.

Her name is Belle. Belle Chaise, from where she came from, and Southern Belle for those who don’t know the town Belle Chaise. She was two months when she came to our house. She has been a handful.

Belle’s definitely a pit bull. She is solid like a bowling ball. Hard as a rock. A real strong, strong dog. I have a 12-year old black lab who’s old and feeble and hobbled. She really likes to pick on him, including biting him. You have to physically separate them. I have a 2 ½ year old black lab who’s very playful. Those two tend to be best friends. They play, and they play rough. Every now and then Belle, when she doesn’t get her way, she gets aggressive towards Gertie, the other dog.

For the longest time, we’ve had no success housebreaking Belle. I’m not sure we’re a hundred percent successful now. We’ve talked with our vet and he said, well, you know, this dog is probably raised to be a fighter, probably raised in squalid conditions, with a whole bunch of other pit bulls, so there was no spot where we sleep and eat, and spot where we pee, it was all done in the same area. So she never learned.

She pees in our bed! We’ve had dogs all our married life, you know, and the old dogs train the new dogs, oh, we don’t do this. This dog wasn’t getting it. She’s still seeing a behaviorist. We’re seeing the behaviorist to try to figure out how we moderate our behavior to get better behavior out of her. She grew up in different conditions, bad conditions, and there’s DNA that we cannot change. The dog gets very excited, the door bell ringing. You notice that I didn’t invite you to my house.

Strangers come over, the doorbell ringing, she gets all excited, and then chomps on the back of the neck—the vet said the side of the neck, that’s a little more vicious then the back of the neck. I’m thinking, but we’ve got to pry these dogs apart! Is it going to escalate?

It’s so weird. We’ve always kept our dogs no matter what. We feel we’re committed to them for all the days of their lives. That’s the deal. They give us all this love. We’ll take care of you all the days of our lives. We never thought that this dog would kill our other dogs. This has been very stressful having a dog who pees all over the place and attacks the other dogs.

But many many times I’ve gone back to how I felt seeing those pictures. How I felt helpless, with all these resources, all this fabulous stuff. How many times did I say I would do absolutely anything I could to make this situation better for somebody in Louisiana?

I don’t know who owned that dog before. She was surrendered. Somebody said they didn’t want her because they didn’t have a house. I think she was surrendered with other pit bulls, so we’re thinking, fighting dogs. I don’t know if I’ve helped their life any by giving this dog a life. But this has been one thing we personally could do.

A Profound Desire to Help

I love Michigan. I love the state, I love the people. It was really extraordinary how generous people were. A profound desire to help. I felt it. I think everyone in the nation felt it. After September 11th, 2001, people were willing to do whatever, donate blood, whatever. But here I really felt it. I heard the call. To know that there’s that much caring is pretty powerful.

“Katrina Day” was our 25th wedding anniversary. We were supposed to be in Scotland or Ireland. But a year ago Christmas, my husband was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. He had Hodgkin’s disease 30 years ago. I don’t know if this is a recurrence or something that happened because of the radiation, but anyway, he’s got this. It kind of put a crimp in our travel plans.

My husband works at Stennis Space Center. We could have gone there. But I had this frying pan or the fire mentality. The eye of the storm looked like it was going right over Stennis. I kept asking Jim: “What is the shelter out there?” He said: “I think we’re just gonna be in my office building.” I’ve never seen his office. I asked: “Are we any better off?” It’s closer to the Pearl River. When the United States government builds a government facility, they build it pretty strong. We probably would have been fine. But they don’t take pets. We would have had to leave our six cats behind.

By Sunday night there were phone calls from panicked family saying: “You’ve got to get out of there! You’ve got to get out of there!” We kept going: “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll go to Stennis.” I told my brother: “If it looks really bad, we will go to Stennis and leave the cats at home.” That’s how I got my brother off my back.

But I really didn’t intend to do that. We packed everything. We had the cat carriers all lined up. We had the water in the car. We had everything ready to go, but instead of putting it all in the car, at the last second we started throwing things up to the second story of the house. And I don’t know. We stayed in the house.

The Hurricane Experience

Sunday night we went to bed. Kind of. I mean, the lights and the TV were on. A couple of times the police came up the street. They flashed searchlights into windows, checking to see who was home. I can tell you this: nobody did a bullhorn to say “Get out, or you’re under any mandatory evacuation.” Nobody ever said that. But I do think they were checking to see who was still there.

The lights went out between 3:00am and 3:30am. We were in the bedroom. We were getting some gusts. We’d get up, walk around and check on things. On TV, we saw that the hurricane was hitting the southern part of Louisiana. It was coming ashore and losing some intensity.

They always talk about wind speed. They don’t talk about the storm surge.

The wind picked up. My husband got up and took a shower about 5:30am. He figured, there was still hot water in the hot water heater, I’m gonna get me a shower. Clean guy that he is. Lazy person that I am, I said I’m going to stay in bed a while longer.

The wind really blew. It was howling pretty good. It was becoming more of a continuous sound, not just the gusting-type winds. We’ve been through enough storms. We’ve been through some and you could tell there were little tornadoes—where the pine trees would snap off. Fifteen feet off the ground, you could hear them popping. Well, this one wasn’t that. This was more of a continuous blow. It grew stronger.

Full daylight came and we watched big, big pine trees blow completely down in our backyard. We’d never seen that before. They were starting to go slowly. Not just lie down–they were going more and more down. I would say: “Jim, the one in the back, it’s about to go.” We’d go to the back. We watched some major trees—trees that have been there since before Camille—big big pine trees slowly going all the way down. Never had we ever seen anything like this before. Those had to have been 100+ mph continuous winds. Not gusts. Continuous winds for at least three hours.

The sky was dark. It wasn’t that yellowish kind of look. It was dark and it was raining and the wind was making the rain go sideways. We knew we were in the midst of a hurricane, there was no doubt about that. There was debris blowing around. But I wasn’t seeing any big chunks of flying rooftops or any of that. I didn’t hear tornadoes. I’ve heard tornadoes before. Being a geologist, we had some chasing us in Oklahoma one time on a field trip. I’ve had that, “Oh, there’s a train coming behind us!” feeling. A tornado sounds like a train coming. I didn’t hear that.

But this was a very loud wind. Constant. There were sounds every now and then, like pine cones, or branches hitting the house. Something broke a window upstairs. From then on, Jim held a mattress to the window to keep the wind from tearing off the roof.

About 9:00am, we noticed water coming up the street. I said, “Jim, do you think that’s rainwater?” He starts looking at it. He says, “No, I don’t. I don’t think that’s rain water at all.” It was coming up the street pretty fast. It wasn’t just overflowing ditches and all: this was the storm surge coming up the street.

We started running things upstairs. Our suitcases. My laptop. As the water started coming up, I started grabbing my cats and throwing them up the stairs. A couple of them didn’t want to go. I got scratched up pretty good. We had put some bags with some nonperishable food—stuff you could just eat, you know. A big five gallon jug of water. I said, “Jim, take the water upstairs, take it all there. Everything you can grab, take upstairs.” Because we could see this water. “Do you think it’s gonna keep coming?” “I don’t know.”

It got all the way up to the porch. Now it’s two feet. Cars were floating outside.

The water was in the house. I looked down, and there’s one of my cats. It’s swimming. Jim starts coming through the hallway from the bedroom and the water’s up to his knees. He looks down, and there’s a cat swimming next to him. He grabs little Phoebe up, and he grabs her up under one arm, and he’s got something else under the other arm. I said: “Jim, I think we’ve gotta go up. We can’t stay down here anymore.” It was really coming up fast then. We both ran up the steps and we stayed up there. And it just kept coming up. We had ten foot ceilings downstairs and it got all the way up.

There was an upstairs balcony, overlooking the great room. Jim held the mattress against the broken window and I kept checking around the corner. We had an ax upstairs. There’s a walk-in closet in one of the bedrooms with a pull-down for the attic. I said: “Jim, get the attic stairs down.” I held the mattress for a while. “Get the attic stairs down because if it keeps coming up then we’re going to have to go all the way up.” Of course the cats had gone under the beds. I didn’t know if we would get them all up into the attic.

I kept thinking, what if I end up out in the water? I can’t have a purse. I gotta have some ID. I’ve gotta have some money. I had this zip lock bag. What am I going to do with a zip lock bag? I’m gonna need my hands and all. I stuck it down my jeans. I had my little CD with my pictures. I had my tax returns on CD for the last year. I said: “Well, I gained this weight this year, and my pants are so tight, even if I was in the water, nothing’s coming out of these pants.” So I stuffed them down my jeans.

We were in the upstairs bedroom. I’m standing there and my husband’s holding the mattress, and we both look down at the floor. The carpeting goes whhoompf—some big wave beneath us pushes the floor up. I said: “If it goes any higher, you know, the whole wall beneath us may collapse and this floor’s going to drop.”

From the window, I watched other peoples’ roofs. One had been floating up the street in front of the house. It kept going. I watched it go further up the street. It kind of stopped. I said: “Jim, that roof stopped moving.” Sure enough, it started, slowly, going back towards the beach.

God bless our contractor, and my brother who helped design the house and everybody that helped us, for we built this house with 2×6s instead of 2×4s, and all the hurricane straps and the extra wood. Instead of building the studs this close together we put them this close together. It saved us. Our house did not collapse.

Water was still leaving the house at 6:00pm. We probably could have gotten out of there that evening, right at dusk. It was still daylight enough to see. But we were pretty well fixed upstairs. It was amazing what all I had upstairs: screw drivers, and tools, and stuff. We had this other room which had a little bed in there, so we were fine: we could spend the night up there. The other closet upstairs had some old boots so we could at least put sturdier shoes on.

This is where the stupidity factor plays in. I didn’t think ahead that my husband’s medical condition really was tenuous. Even a scratch could have meant his life. And here he is holding a mattress against a broken window, glass all over the place. He’s on blood thinners. If he’d gotten cut, he could have bled to death. There was no one to help. As far as what kind of germs and stuff’s floating around in that water, you know, I was so afraid that even a scratch—I didn’t want to take any chances with him in the dark. I said: “Jim, let’s just stay up here until we can see what we’re dealing with.”

That night, it was just black down there. There was a little bit of moonlight. There were no walls left. It was kind of creepy because you could hear stuff settling down in the muck. I didn’t know if there was something down there. I wasn’t worried about snakes or alligators. I wondered if there were dogs. Or people. I was more worried about the two-legged kind of critters.

It was the hottest night. We just sat there sweating. I told Jim: “If we live through tonight, I can’t spend another night in here. I will die. Because we can’t breathe up here.” Not to mention the mosquitoes, the mud, and the stink.

Afterwards

Just to get out of the house we had to climb out over everything we’d ever owned. From eight feet down there was no sheet rock. Even the artwork on the walls—paintings, prints, everything was just in a pile. We had to carefully make a little path to the door. The front door was gone. The walls were gone. The cars had floated all over the place. We lost both cars. People came in the house later and said: “Oh, you gutted your house.” I said: “No, Katrina did that for us.”

The front porch was still there. But there were mountains of other peoples’ houses in the front yard and trees you had to climb. You had to pick your way over that. To get to the end of the street took us an hour and a half. We were so tired. It was hot. The air was so still. It’s like all the air got sucked out. Then there’s this hot, humid stuff that comes in from the Gulf.

We saw our neighbor Marilyn and her son Richard. Marilyn’s house was real bad. Richard had been exploring a little bit and unfortunately found a lady, one of our neighbors, from up on the beach. She was deceased. They were still looking for her husband. They found the husband a few days later, a good half mile from their house. They floated that far back. When I think about how close we came to being in that same position. I mean, they were older, but still, it didn’t matter how old you were. They thought they were in a hurricane proof home. A big mansion on the beach.

Nothing could stand up to what hit that beach. A 30, 35-foot wall of water that must have hit the beach right at our street. Our house at the slab was 18½ feet. And I saw at least another 10 feet myself in the house and there were waves on top of that.

When we got to the street corner, a Georgia power company was there trying to clear the road. Their cell phones worked. It was Southern Link—a walkie-talkie thing, and we got a message to my stepson. It was the only message we got out: “We’re alive! Come get us!”

We ran into some UPI photographers. The press is always there first. They had a vehicle. We got a ride with them to the command center—up by the public library. From there we walked to my cousin’s funeral home.

They had taken water, but they’d already swept it out. The generator was back up and running, too. Because his funeral home acts as the morgue for the county, he was considered a critical responder. He was given special treatment. I told him that we needed a place to stay until somebody could come get us. He said: “Stay here, no problem, I don’t know where. You might have to sleep on a sofa or an air mattress, or on a soggy floor.” I said: “I don’t care.”

He had lights on. He had a fan. A little TV that was working. A refrigerator. A coffee pot. I felt like I was in hog heaven. I mean, we had civilization at the funeral home. There was a gang of people there, which was good. Because…it was spooky. To be in the middle of a devastated area at night in the dark. It was like Fort Apache. At least at the funeral home there were people.

We got reports–now I didn’t see any of this–that there were incidents of people being robbed in broad daylight. Everybody was saying: “Don’t go anywhere alone.” Because I mean if you had a car, and you had some gasoline, there were people out there with guns who would just assume take it from you. They knew the Waveland police department had been flooded out. All of their cars but two were underwater. The bad guys know these things.

My cousin saved us by taking us in. We stayed two nights at the funeral home. I don’t think we could have stayed in that house and dealt with the heat.

We worked on a couple of ways to get out. We had a cousin up in Jackson, and Jim’s family in north Louisiana. If we could just get to someplace where we could buy a car or something. I knew you had to get out of this disaster area. You had to get way away from New Orleans, from all of south Mississippi, from all of south Alabama. You had to go all the way to Florida. You had to get way away from the whole thing and do it pretty quickly, because gasoline—you couldn’t find gas, and the situation was getting pretty tense. So the sooner we got out, the sooner we could establish something, the better.

Plus, I had those cats to worry about. I had to leave them upstairs. It was wide open. I had plenty of food for them up there, but they’re housecats—they’re not used to dealing with anything. They were so shocked, scared, they were hiding underneath stuff. I didn’t think they’d leave. But I was afraid other critters might get in there after them.

Jim’s son Rick came on the morning of Friday, about 6:00am. It was just about dawn. I was never so glad to see anybody in my life. Rick and his friend packed us up, and we went back to the house. We climbed through all that again. I got one cat because I had one cat carrier. I could only take one that day. I took the youngest. We went down to Crestview Florida where our daughter Janet and her family lives. Now Janet had said, come and bring the cats, and Janet really meant it. So we stayed with her.

The next weekend Janet brought us back to get the cats. They were all sitting up there. They were hiding. But they were all upstairs. They’d just about eaten all the food, but they were all waiting for us. I got everyone of them out of there.

We went back to Crestview. After the first week we moved to the Holiday Inn. I left the cats with Janet, at her house—it was just across the road. We were there about a week when we found out the Red Cross would pay for that room. It eventually became part of that FEMA program. The Red Cross paid for about 36 days. It was very nice. It helped us a lot. In the meantime, friends of ours got word that we needed a house. They had a rental property here in Picayune that they let us rent. That’s where we are now.

I was born and raised in this area. Every summer of my life we would go to the Gulf Coast, even if it was in a rented house in Pass Christian or something. When I was really little, my family still had a place in East Beach, in Biloxi. It was a little house. And I can remember being a little bitty baby and watching those white caps come in. My mother put me on the porch for a nap and I’d watch those white caps. I don’t want to ever say I’m not going back to the Gulf Coast, but I don’t think I’ll ever put everything I own in a house that’s right there that I can’t pick it up and take it out of harm’s way. That was too much to lose. I’m not going to lose that again. I can walk away from it this time, but I’m not going to be that foolish again.

I had my great grandmother’s piano in that front hall. My grandmother and mother entrusted it to me. Upright carved beautiful. It floated out the front door! That thing had to have weighed 800 pounds. I found it in the yard of my neighbor, four houses up the street. Smashed to bits.

I had my bedroom set that I’d had ever since I was in high school. Antique furniture. My parents got that for me down in Magazine Street, in an antique store when we moved back Uptown, in New Orleans. I had this big room in this big house and I needed a big bedroom set so I had a big armoire, walnut with the glass doors, beveled mirrors, and a big dresser and a little washstand with the marble tops and all. Big double bed and all. Of course my husband is six foot three. He’s been squeezing into this little double bed all these years—he probably doesn’t miss this bed that much. He’s been a good sport all these years because that was my antique bed. So anyway, all of that’s gone.

Let me tell you about the last things I found. Before the storm, I packed up all of my jewelry. My wedding rings, my good pearls, everything. I had them in a red, vinyl totebag with a cat on the front. It did not make it up the stairs. I had everybody on the street looking for my totebag. Couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it.

Three months after the storm, we finally got some help in the house. A couple of volunteers. They started moving some of the kitchen cabinets. Now the totebag had been in the study—in the other part of the house. My husband finds the totebag underneath all that gunk in the kitchen. We find most of my jewelry. But one little bag floated out. The one with my wedding rings.

Three weeks later, the Corps of Engineers is outside. Jim happened to be there that day. They’ve got this big Caterpillar, with the big claw in the front, and they’re pulling big trees and stuff away from the front of the house. Jim happens to see this little red thing drop down out of the claw—and I told him to be looking for this—he says: “Hold off, guys, wait a second.” He reaches down, and there is my little bag with my wedding rings and all in it. My great-aunt’s diamond earrings. I said: “Jim, some things I was meant to have.”

The last thing I found was on the last day we were there. We’d sold the house to these other people. They’d pulled the baseboards away from the walls. In all the crumpled up sheetrock down in-between the walls, something was shining. I had a little trowel. I dug through all this stuff. The little bit of sun coming through the walls shone on this thing. I picked it up, and this is what it was. [Showing] This is my rosary that my grandmother gave me on my confirmation day. You see my initials on it? And the date? Candace Ann Verlander. It’s Sterling Silver. It had been in a box, the original box. The Archbishop blessed it on the day that I made my confirmation. It was in a drawer, in a desk, in that study, and it ended up in the wall. It’s like my grandmother was reaching down and saying: “You better get your butt back to church, girl! I saved you.”

This is the last thing I found in the house. She wanted to make sure that it came back with me.

What’s the next phase? I don’t know. Right now, I’m going to get my husband through this, and you know, then we’ll do it together. We’re both kind of adventurous I’d guess you’d say. You just have to move on with it. There was nothing that was going to change that storm. I mean there was nothing we were going to do to stop it. When you live on the Gulf Coast, you’re going to have hurricanes. Everybody knows it. If you can’t deal with them, you shouldn’t live there.

I can remember Jim saying to me: “If you think you’re strong enough to do this, I’m with you.” When I think back on that, I wonder what he meant by “strong enough?” Did he mean physically strong enough or emotionally strong enough? Because emotionally strong enough, I knew that. But physically strong enough, I mean, to swim for it? Now that we look back on it, we had no business staying there. Not with his medical condition. What we ended up facing and what I know some people went through, physically, we were very, very weak. Some of our neighbors did not make it.

He’s 57, the same age as I am. He’s got to undergo a stem cell transplant. The stem cells will be harvested from Jim’s own body. What they do is harvest your cells, then hit you with a bunch of chemotherapy. When they’ve totally knocked out everything in your system, they put your cells back in you and reestablish your immune system. So he’s going to be a bubble-boy for a couple of weeks. That’s why we can’t face rehabbing the old house. He can’t be around the mold or the construction or any of that.

The fact that they’re finding him strong enough to undergo this is a good thing. He’s in good spirits. I’m not going to fight him on anything. As much as I’d like to be part of the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, you just have to keep your priorities straight. They’ll come a time. I mean, I’ve already been on-line looking at houseplans and this and that…

I planned that house. I designed every inch of it. I had every square inch of that house down—I measured every bit of my furniture, exactly where it was going to go before it was ever a nail driven. I loved that house. And right now, it’s very hard for me to even drive over there to see. We sold the house as is. Someone else is taking on rebuilding it. As far as we were concerned, if someone hadn’t bought it, we were gonna bulldoze it. We couldn’t leave it sitting empty, as a hazard. I was very thrilled that somebody wanted to take it on. But I realized that they’re not going to do it the way I would do it. It’s their project now. I have to turn loose that and move on to something else. You see my whole life has been—I went from being an artist, to being a geologist. Then I had a screenprinting business, so I was back being an artist again, then what did I do? I had my little shop for a while. Then I worked for a doctor for a while. I mean, you just roll with it.

My husband—I don’t think he’s ever really going to be strong enough to work in the yard and all like he used to do. I just want him around for a while more. I want to get over to England and Ireland like we planned, you know? I’ll tell you this: we did not survive that damn storm to lose him now. He’s gonna do fine with all this other stuff. But I worry sometimes, that he stayed in that storm for me. I think he really would have wanted to go to the shelter. He won’t say that. You know. He will never put that on me. But I worry that he did.

My name is Jay Segarra. I reside in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast. Ninety miles east of New Orleans. Fifty miles west of Mobile. I live in what used to be a house on the Gulf of Mexico. It’s set about two hundred yards back from the Mississippi Sound.

Ocean Springs is an artistic community, so to speak, of maybe 15,000 people. The nearest big city is Biloxi. Then Gulfport, just to the west of Biloxi. On the other side of Ocean Springs there’s the Pascagoula shipyard, which was heavily damaged in the hurricane. Then the Alabama border, Mobile, and then after about 60 or 70 miles you come to Pensacola, and the Florida Panhandle.

We live in a house that is set back from the ocean and elevated. It was built in sort of the German Bauhaus style. It has a flat roof, 4000 square feet, but it’s all one floor, shaped like a U. I have it on good authority that during Hurricane Camille, the [old] benchmark of how bad it could possibly get, the ocean only came halfway up our driveway. Our house had never flooded.

I always wanted to live on the beach. Lisa’s always lived on the ocean her whole life. Even in Boston she did. We have a second house in Maine and that’s also on the ocean. We love kayaking and beach things. We had a pier that was partially destroyed by the storm. She could leave her kayaks on the pier, and take them out when she wanted to. She liked that. She’s an ocean person. She likes the ambiance of the sea.

Personal History

I was born in Boston. My father was from Barcelona. He had come to the United States on a medical scholarship to study neurology at Mass General Hospital in Cambridge. There he met my mother, who was working as an EEG technician. I was born two years later. My parents had six children more or less right in a row. I was born in 1956.

My mother was local. She was actually born in Paraguay to European parents, then adopted by a Boston-Edison electrical engineer and his wife who are my adoptive grandparents. With my father being a neurology resident, and researcher, with six kids, we never had very much money growing up. In fact, my father made all of our furniture. I still have some of his homemade furniture that he made from back then. I leave it in our house in Maine.

I went to college in Cambridge and medical school in Boston. Before medical school my father called me one day. He said, I have to talk to you about something. I said, OK. He said, I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer. I’m going to have to stop working and I can’t pay for your medical school. You’ve got to get a scholarship or take out loans. Which was of course entirely reasonable on his part. Which I did.

I applied for a scholarship to the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and the Public Health Service. The first one that came in I was going to take. The Air Force showed up first, so I took their scholarship. They paid my way through medical school. I owed them time afterwards. My wife and I were married right after my first year of medical school.

After medical school I went to Mississippi for a year to do my internship. Then we were stationed overseas. For three years, I was a general practitioner on a NATO base near Aachen. My father became terminally ill. We came back early. He died while I was stationed in upstate New York near the Canadian border. But I would come home to see him on weekends. After that year, I did an internal medicine residency in a pulmonary and critical care fellowship in San Antonio Texas. I moved to Biloxi with the Air Force as the Chief of Pulmonary Medicine at the hospital. I was a pulmonologist. I’ve been there ever since. I left active duty in 95 or 96. Beginning of 96. I’m still in the Reserves. I’ve been in the Reserves until this day.

I also do a lot of medical legal consulting. I do consulting in occupational medicine in different parts of the country. I testify in trials. I have a small pro bono practice as well where I see some shut-ins who can’t go to the doctor because they’re on home ventilators. I began seeing them when I was in the Air Force. I just continue to see them, even now.

Lisa and I have two children. My daughter, Kate, is 25 now. At the time of the storm, she was in graduate school. She had been an environmental chemistry major, and was in graduate school for that at Tulane. When the hurricane hit, Tulane shut down for the rest of the year. Lost all its students. The researcher she was working with was a graduate student who left and went back to New York. Eventually, Kate transferred to the University of Georgia, at Athens. She’s there now. Ben’s in law school at University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

The Hurricane Experience

I had been in Houston till the day before the hurricane. When I flew back into Gulfport, the first thing I had to do was drive into New Orleans. My daughter was doing research on the Monterrey Peninsula in California. She had two cats in an apartment. She called me up frantic about the oncoming hurricane and begged me to go to New Orleans and get her cats. I dutifully drove into New Orleans. I packed her cats up in a cage and took them with me to Ocean Springs.

I came home and looked on the official hurricane center [site]. It seemed like the path of the hurricane was [headed] directly into New Orleans, or over Grand Isle.

My house has never been flooded. Not even during Hurricane Camille, which was 160mph winds and ocean liners carried across Highway 90. I figured I was perfectly safe.

We had three cars at the time. I thought that I needed to position at least one of them away from the house in case the narrow road between the house and the beach and the ocean would be perhaps impassible after the storm. I took one of the cars and left it at my office, which is a mile further inland. The other two I left at the house.

My wife and I did our usual preparations. I had a generator, and all the things that I need to survive without power for a longtime.

That night we went to our friends’ house. We watched some movies. They suggested that we stay with them. I said no, and I explained all the things I just explained to you now, that it would be much better if I’m there. I can protect the house better. I have no reason to fear for my bodily safety. I’ve got four cats there now. So we’re going to go back. We’ll be fine.

We went to bed around midnight. The wind was brisk, but nothing special. The water was not even up over the road. The road was entirely passable about 12:00am or 1:00am when we went back. Just to be on the safe side, I took a very tall step-ladder and I positioned it in back of the house, on a low part of the roof. I put two jugs of water up there. I got the cat cages, etc., in the garage. I got the generator out, and cranked it up to make sure it started. Then I went to bed.

I got up at 4:00am. I looked at the latest update on the hurricane center. I could see the hurricane taking a retrograde turn towards the east. I knew this was not good. Looked like it was going to come in just east of New Orleans. I was thinking it was going to be worse, but we’d still be OK.

I went out. The wind was kicking up. The water was now across the road, but not even coming to the driveway. You could see in the distance, but you couldn’t really focus too well because it was very dark, and the wind was blowing spray off the ocean. It was sort of this amorphous, black gray mass. You couldn’t see exactly. We have a Hobie Cat. It’s a very small catamaran sailboat. I untied it and dragged it further up to a tree that was closer to the house. I did the same with our kayaks. Then I actually went back to bed.

I got up again at 6:30am. I made some coffee. We still had power. I went back on the internet and looked at the hurricane path. This time it did come further east— still further east. I thought, this is going to be maybe as bad as Camille.

At 7:00am, the water was maybe a quarter of the way up the driveway. I got dressed. I thought the worse thing that could possibly happen was that we might get a bit of water in the house. Enough to wet the floor. So I picked things up off the floor. I put some photos and documents into a plastic bag. I put my wallet in that [bag]. I put that next to the pillow.

My wife got dressed. She was dressed in a waterproof sailor’s suit. I was in this capilene t-shirt, a bathing suit, and some water shoes. She had kept life jackets at the end of our bed as we slept that night. We got those up on the roof as well.

At 7:30am, the water was maybe halfway up the driveway. I thought, oh, well, this is as bad as it’s going to get. The hurricane was supposed to make landfall at 7:00am. I figured it would pass behind us. Then, as it passes behind us, the wind would push the water back out to sea. That this was about as bad as it was going to get.

That was a tremendous miscalculation on my part. Over the next 45 minutes, the water began to rise rapidly. Just fast. I mean, you’re not in a tidal wave; it wasn’t chasing you. But you could incrementally see with each series of waves, you could see it getting slowly higher and higher and higher. I looked at my wife Lisa. I said, you know what? It’s time to get on the roof.

Once Lisa got on the roof, I passed the cats up to her. My own two cats I could get up easily. I found them and I put two of them in the cat carriers and I handed those up to Lisa. I went back to get the other two cats. By the time I came down the ladder, the water had reached the front of the house. It was amazingly fast. It must have risen ten feet within ten minutes. There was this one sort of crash that came through the front door—still just ankle deep in the house—but it came through the front door. We didn’t have much time.

Unfortunately, Kate’s cats don’t know me. They wouldn’t come to me. One I found pretty easily, so that went into the cage. But the fourth one had bitten me the night before when I went looking for it. I was fumbling around in her closet, looking for it. Well, I couldn’t find it. The water was getting deeper, knee deep. I finally just tore apart her closet. The cat was at the bottom of her closet, already soaking wet. It looked at me. It didn’t like what was happening. I agreed with it, but I just grabbed it, and threw it in the cage.

I waded through this black water. Lisa would have to hold the ladder for me. I climbed up the ladder, got up on the roof. We pulled the ladder up with us so we could get back down again. The water began to come through the house. At that point, things became surreal. We were not afraid, as much as we were—there was a sense of depersonalization. I did not feel connected to the scene.

We watched as the two houses to the right of us, and the two to the left of us were completely destroyed within a span of about two hours. The wind picked up. The rain was going sideways. It was carrying particulate matter with it, so it really stung. We had wedged ourselves down behind a skylight that was sloped towards the back of the house. The skylight acted as a windbreak. There was another skylight nearby, and the four cats were wedged there.

The house to the right of us was a house that had been designed by Louis Sullivan, who’s a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s kind of a famous house. It looked like it heaved outward, and then it heaved inward. Then the whole thing just collapsed. Into splinters. The house to the left of us was a palatial house, with a pool house and a garage. The entire second story of that house fell down through the first story, because the underpinnings of the second story were lost. The first story was washed away.

All the houses on the beach were destroyed, many of them down to the foundation. The rest of them were sort of floated from the outside, from the wave action, and from the inside, from the push, because of the wind.

My own house was built of steel-reinforced concrete. It’s like a lighthouse. I knew this going in. In fact, if I didn’t have any doors and windows, I never would have had any damage, because the water couldn’t knock the house down. But it sure could crash through the windows and doors. It carried all of our possessions out the windows and doors. We sat on the roof and watched them go by. You couldn’t really look out the direction the wind was coming because it was painful to your eyes. But when you did look out, you saw this big black gray mass. It was three-dimensional.

The sea was this black, pitch-black dark, gray color. The water was not clear water. It was black. Mississippi water on the sound is a little muddy anyway. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is an estuary; it’s a nursery for shrimp and fish. The bottom is muddy. It’s not sand; it’s not clear sand like in the Panhandle of Florida. But that muddy color was multiplied a hundredfold by the fact that when the sea came up over the land it just sucked up all the dirt and the sand that went with it. It was pitch black by the time it got to the house.

We watched as all our kitchen appliances flew out the door. The hot tub was going past. It seemed like the Wizard of Oz, or Alice in Wonderland. I remember our wine refrigerator floating past. We watched where that was going, because we could see the bottles inside and they weren’t broken. We wanted to make sure we didn’t lose them.

Then I did something really silly. My father died twenty years ago. He had played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He had this cello that was made in Paris a long time ago. Three years ago, I’d found this cello in the basement of my house, when my mother lived in Boston. I’d picked it out of the basement. It was a mess. I’d had it refurbished, at quite a bit of cost, in Cambridge. To bring it back down to Mississippi, I actually had to buy a plane ticket for it and it sat next to me on the plane seat. My wife Lisa and I were taking cello lessons, on this cello and another one. This cello floated past in its case and that was just too much for me: without thinking I actually jumped into the water. Fortunately, I had a life jacket on. I swam to where it was and I grabbed it. Lisa put the ladder back down for me, and was trying to hold it against the wave action. I swam to the ladder. I dragged the cello back up with me.

I realized that I had left that plastic bag that had all of my family photos, documents, my passport and my wallet. I panicked. I had to have these things. I jumped into the water again. As I did that, the metronome where I learned music when I was a kid floated by, and Lisa’s cosmetics case. I grabbed those. I came back up the ladder. I handed those to Lisa. I explained to her I was going to go back to the house but pull the ladder up because you can’t hold it, I might be in there a while. She said, don’t go into the house, don’t go into the house. I said, no, no, I’ve got to find my wallet. I can’t. I won’t be a person. I can’t travel, I can’t do anything. I travel a lot on business.

I swam back into the house. I went through one of the windows that’d been smashed. This was the most surreal part. The house felt like a washing machine on the wash cycle. All this black water was churning around. All the furniture was floating in this water, about two/thirds of the way up towards the ceiling. I swam towards our bedroom. When I got to the bedroom, the water was higher there. Almost up to the ceiling. Maybe a foot from the ceiling. The waves were actually breaking in that bedroom.

You could actually see them: six foot waves breaking in the bedroom. I swam to where I left the bag, which is at the door of my study. I couldn’t find it. It was utter chaos. There was just furniture and debris everywhere. Also, the water was so pitch black, you couldn’t really see under it. You couldn’t look under it at all. It was opaque. Also, the hallway that I was trying to swim through was clogged with furniture. The piano and my grandfather’s walnut desk were floating in the hallway.

I had a moment of fear. When one of the waves broke, it forced this large desk against me. On the other side was this mahogany wardrobe. I was sort of trapped between the desk and the wardrobe. I was having a hard time getting my head above the water, even though I had a life jacket on, even though I could swim. I had to actually fight my way to the top of it. By this time the water level was rising. There was only a foot left between me and the ceiling. At first I was afraid, then I got angry at myself. I thought, this is a really stupid way to die. I gave up at that point. I swam out.

To get out was kind of a problem. The water, being a foot from the ceiling, was already over all of the doors and windows. I had to see where the door was and blindly swim under the water and through the door. It wasn’t difficult. But it did require just a little bit of mental effort, to actually think about what I was going to do, then actually do it. You know, it wasn’t a difficult thing to do. But you might think it was difficult if you were actually in that situation. You had to stop all the panic. You actually had to just do it.

Then I was outside. I went back up the ladder, defeated, because I didn’t find what I had gone there for. The metronome that I had saved had already fallen apart. The cello was horribly damaged and is still damaged to this day; I haven’t rebuilt it yet. At that point, I was still feeling sort of surreal at watching the washers and the dryers float by. All of Lisa’s clothes. So I just sat. I accepted a bit of water from Lisa, and we sat with our backs against the skylight.

The sea was getting higher. The wind was getting worse. We really couldn’t stand up anymore. We were sitting against the skylight. It was between 9:00am and 9:30am. We could see in back of the house. There was water in the garage. It had gotten under the door. Lisa had a little red Mercedes. It was banging up against the garage door. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! So finally, it just took the garage door off the hinge. Her little red 560 SL 1986 Mercedes floated out of the garage, down the drive. Almost under its own power. It just floated out through the backyard, all the way to the end of the backyard. Like 100 yards away. It was lodged there.

We watched this for a while. Then, I did something that I would not have thought possible. I fell asleep. There’s only so much of one sort of stimulus that you can take. Plus, I’d been up for most of the night looking at the hurricane center. I fell asleep. I must have slept for about 45 minutes. I woke up because a tree had fallen on the roof. Fortunately, about 10 feet away from us. The crash woke me up.

I was covered in spiders. I was literally covered in spiders. I didn’t realize this, but apparently most insects, in a flood, just die. Spiders will actually seek higher ground in order to save themselves. That’s what they did. I mean, it must have been every spider in my yard, or in my house, was covering me. I was literally covered in spiders. And not a single one bit me. Not one bit me. They were in the same position as I was. They were trying to hang on, too.

My wife had crawled off to look at the devastation from the roof. She came back to me. I had brushed all the spiders off, carefully. I know it sounds odd, but I felt sort of a kinship to them. I know it’s a strange feeling. I brushed them off gently, if you can imagine such at thing. The cats were screaming in their cages. Even they shut up after a while, realizing that it’s not going to do them any good. At least they’re alive, you know. They could sort of sense that big events were sort of unfolding.

The storm was getting worse at this point. Trees were being uprooted everywhere. I mean the whole yard to the side of us, every tree was down. The houses were gone. The black sea was in the backyard as far as we could see. There was only about 5 feet between us and the water level.

Lisa turned to me and said: Jay, are we going to die? I felt this depersonalization. I could answer that question in a very matter-of-fact, objective way. I thought about it. I looked at our position. I looked around at the trees that were near us, that looked like they were doing OK. I looked at the direction of the wind. I was looking at the axis of the wind and I was looking where the ocean was now and I said, you know, it’s always possible, but I really don’t think so. [Laughing]

That turned out to be what happened. After about 4 more hours of this—about 2:30pm or so—the water had receded enough so that we could get down on the roof. In fact, we needed to because the wind hadn’t stopped at all. Having shifted axis, the skylight was no longer protecting us from the wind. It was now coming almost due, from the west. It was painful. We got down off the roof in order to escape the wind.

The wind was sharp and painful and yet powerful at the same time. It felt like you were being pushed at needlepoint by a million man army of tiny pygmy warriors all wielding a spear. It smelled like sewerage. It smelled like something dead. It was almost like the whole sea was something dead. It smelled like parts of the bayou in deep summer that dry out. When the bayou dries out, there’s several feet of muddy silt that contains organic matter from decomposing fish and vegetable matter, and so on. It has a very distinctive smell. It seemed like our entire landscape had that smell.

We eventually came down off the roof. We were only knee-deep in water by this time. It was no longer over our heads. We left the cats on the roof for the timebeing because we had no place to put them.

We began to root around in the water for our lost possessions. It was pathetic. We would pick up a waterlogged book and put it on the ruined windowsill. The windows had metal frames that were twisted into these odd shapes, but some of the frames were twisted in such a way that you could lay things on top of them. It felt like we were at the scene of a plane crash. Just picking up the debris.

Soon we could actually see the ground. The wind began to subside. It looked like the entire landscape had been covered in black death. All the trees—the ones that still remained—all their foliage had been stripped. They were completely brown. All the grass was gone. It was just sand, silt, and debris.

The colors were all brown, black, and gray. Before, the entire area had been green and blooming. There had been a garden that Lisa had tended for years that had hundreds of different species of flowers and flowering plants. All gone. All turned into this brown smoke. Almost like incineration by water. But by muddy saltwater. All of this occurred in just a few hours. Our belongings, and the belongings of our neighbors, were strewn hundreds and hundreds of feet in back of the house. I mean, as far as the eye could see. It was just debris everywhere.

Right after we got off the roof, we walked into the ruined kitchen. There was this horrible hiss coming from the kitchen because the commercial gas stove had been pulled out of the wall into the backyard somewhere. There was this huge gas line just pouring forth gas. Yeah, it was really dangerous. Later, [Our friend] Kevin showed up. Unexpectedly. I don’t know how he got there. His house was completely destroyed. It was pushed into the bayou. The entire house pushed into the bayou. But, I am forever indebted to him, if for nothing else, than for this one thing. He went back to his house—crawled into his house—found a big pipe wrench, and came back and turned off our gas valve. It was just such a great thing for him to have done. I mean, it’s an important thing.

Our other two cars had been in front of the house in a parking spot. One of them was a white Suburban. The white Suburban had been carried by the waves through the living room windows. It had been acting as a battering ram, slamming into the doorframes, and the foundation of the house. We had an F-150 pick-up truck. The same thing. The truck had been picked up by the waves and had been used as a battering ram.

Here’s how well this house was constructed: as I told you, this is poured steel-reinforced concrete. The doorframe of the front door was this vertical structure with a steel rod, with concrete around it. The F-150 pick-up truck was bent in two around the doorframe by the actions of the waves. That’s how powerful the ocean is, and that’s how well the house was built. When we came down off the roof and walked to the front of the house, it was the Suburban sort of head-in to the china closet, through the living room sliding glass doors. The F-150 was wrapped around the doorframe like a pretzel.

We looked at each other. Lisa said to me, well, I would have rather have been with you up there than anybody else I can think of. I thought was kind of a nice thing to say at the time. [Laugh] Then we agreed that it was just stuff, and that we were OK. We hadn’t even lost the cats.

This may sound artificial to you, but it’s really is the truth: although I felt that disaster had just occurred, at the same time I felt a sense of liberation. All of our possessions had been destroyed. It was going to be a long time before I could even clean up the debris here. I could see that this was going to be years of work. All having been created within the span of some hours. There was a sense of loss, but there was a sense of liberation. I no longer felt that I was a slave to my possessions. I just had on this wet capilene t-shirt, a bathing suit, no shoes even, except these water shoes, and yet I felt this certain paradoxical sense of exhilaration. Which doesn’t make any sense, I know.

That is when I hear this shout. As far as I knew, we were the only people who stayed on the beach. The shout’s from next door. We walk next door, where the house had been destroyed. Not directly next door, but on the other side. The wind is still pretty intense, but we were able to do it. It was hard to do; but it was like two steps forward and one step backwards. We walked next door, where the house had been destroyed.

To our shock, there were four teenage boys up in a tree. Apparently, the boys had stayed in their house. Their parents had been out of town. They stayed in their house against most peoples’ advice. Unbeknownst to anyone. Their house had completely collapsed. It was gone down to the last brick on the foundation. As it was collapsing, they climbed into an oak tree which had survived the storm and they spent the worst part of the storm clinging to the branches of this tree. That’s a better story than mine, even. Only one of them lived there. Three of them were from overseas. They were exchange students. One from Australia, one from New Zealand. One from Singapore, I think.

We were a strange procession. There were these four boys, who were sort of laughing, as boys will in situations like that. We were carrying our cats. Lisa in her crazy sailor suit and her helmet. She was this one piece, foul-weather sort of Goretex, bright red jumpsuit thing. She had red Wellington boots on, and a bicycle helmet. She looked the part. She looked like almost like a Japanese anime character from some cartoon, you know? [laugh] I was the one who was poorly equipped.

We took our cats and we began to walk. We didn’t know which direction to walk. The roads were impossible. We could walk from one yard to the other because the houses were gone. I mean, they were literally gone. There was just rubble. Sometimes, not even very much rubble. We could sort of go cross country so to speak. Not on the roads.

Looking at this devastation, it was just surreal to see it. We finally came to a street that was more or less passable. You had to go over a mound of debris, but coming down on the other side, there was a street that you could sort of pick your way on, around, and that’s what we did. We walked about three blocks.

The cats were getting heavy, and our water supply—we had that with us—that was getting heavy, too. The boys stopped at a friend’s house that was damaged but still standing. So they were safe. It goes without saying there was no electricity, no phones, no nothing. No way of contacting the outside world.

The Ocean Springs Police were already out. Not on the beach, but maybe a ½ mile away. Not only were they there, but they were changing a flat tire because all the debris from all these houses had left nails all over the road. All the police cars had flat tires already. Just from five minutes of driving. They were changing a flat tire, and another car came by. I heard one of the officers say to another one, oh, go and get him and get him out of here. He’s a looter. Because apparently, such a small town, the police know the sort of repeat offenders so to speak who are known to be looters. He recognized the car and the person as someone who loots after storms. They went after him to get rid of him. Can you imagine?

We walked another ¾ of a mile. We got to our office, which is on one of the main streets of downtown Ocean Springs. All the trees were down around the office, but the office itself was almost completely undamaged. We were able to get in. We were able to put the cats there. We could dry off. There were towels there. No fresh clothes.

We were sort of sitting in the office trying to decide what to do. The woman who does transcription and word processing for me, showed up at the office. She’d come in to check to see if the computers were ruined. We’re friendly with her anyway, and we’re friends with her neighbor. They lived within walking distance. So basically, our friends—my co-worker’s neighbor, Gretchen—took us in, and put us up for a month, during the immediate recovery phase from the storm, which is another story unto itself.

We Were Archeologists

We were staying in Gretchen’s house. She’s a single woman about our age. Also staying with her were other refugees who had the same experience. Gretchen’s house had maybe six rooms. There were about eight people staying there. Lisa and I were in the lap of luxury. We had a room to ourselves. We even had a fan hooked up to the generator. It was very hot still. This is Mississippi in August. Still really, really hot.

Every day was spent gathering things needed for survival. Enough gasoline to run the generator. Enough fresh water. Food for lunch and dinner. The only clothes I had was this bathing suit, and this capoline thing that I would wash every night when I would go to bed and then put it back on the next day. I had gone back inside the house and found a plastic bag that had cash in it. Still hadn’t found my wallet. I ended up finding that four days later. But I had some cash with me, and that was a great thing. I had the car at the office. It had a flat tire which I had to change, but it ran.

Taking the car out on the road was a surreal experience. None of the traffic lights worked. Debris was everywhere. Gas stations knocked down and so on.

A man was airing out the boot store. It had been slightly flooded. All the doors were open so I walked in. I asked the man who if I could buy a pair of boots. I didn’t have anything to wear on my feet [but water shoes]. My feet were being like torn up by the debris. I was stepping on and nails and things like that. He sold me a pair and a pair of socks.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy as I was in my entire life as I was putting on these boots. I mean, to put these boots and socks on was the most joyous feeling. Better than anything. Better than any accolade. Better than anything was the feeling of these brand new boots. I could walk around with no fear of nails going through my feet. I had stepped on several of them already up to that point.

We would walk back to our house. We’d drive part of the way, but you couldn’t drive all the way, only part of the way, so we’d walk the rest. We’d spend the day sifting through our debris. The house was literally in ruins. It was all of our furniture, which had been smashed to pieces. It was all inside, piled up in these huge pieces. Most of the books had come out of the bookcase and were strewn everywhere.

We were archeologists. That’s what we called ourselves. We would dig through debris. Sift through it, looking for jewelry. I was looking for my wallet, which I found four days later. We would do this literally all day until the sun went down.

My wife is much more in tune with her emotions than I am. She would excavate furiously then she would cry. She would excavate some more, and cry. She would alternate between one and the other. At the end of the day, she was exhausted.

We would go back filthy. We would take a shower that was just a wonderful thing. A cold shower, but it still was great.

You know something? Furniture and books, they die, just like human beings die. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a corpse outside, unexpectedly. I have, only because I used to work in emergency rooms and I’ve ridden ambulances before and seen things like that. But furniture and books have a lifecycle, just like animals and humans do. When a big piece of wooden furniture, like a desk, dies, dies by being immersed in salt water, it can even look okay. But then over the next several days, it swells, and around the mouths of the drawers it swells so that you can’t get the drawers open. You have to use a hatchet to smash them open, to get what’s inside them. I mean, you can see it decompose in front of your eyes. Just like a body would.

We have built-in bookcases. They’ll be a row of books land superficially they’ll look OK. But if you take the shelf out, the books will stay up. They don’t require the shelf anymore because they’re swollen up against the sides of the bookshelf. They’re all holding each other up. It takes a huge amount of strength to yank them out of the bookshelf. They just turn to mush in your hands. It was tragic. I lost a first edition of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I lost T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I lost a lot of things that were dear to me. But as I told you before, it’s just stuff. It was OK. I mean, I say that now. I still feel that way. Once in a while, I’ll go to get something and then I’ll think, no, no I don’t have it anymore.

By that time, my daughter had arrived. How did I first get word to our family that we were OK? That’s just it. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Until about four days later. Then I did. She was able to fly into Houston and drive from Houston. My daughter brought the greatest gift with her. She brought fresh underwear and clothes. I mean, just simple things, like shorts and t-shirts, but oh, to have clean clothes was just a godsent. It was just fabulous. She stayed with us, and helped us excavate, basically.

We wanted to salvage what we could. We learned very quickly what is salvageable and what is not. Books and wooden furniture do not like salt water, at all. Most clothes don’t, either. But you know what does very well with salt water? CDs and DVDs. They were all in the backyard. And 75% of them, after you wash them off and dried them, they work. That strange? We lost 80% of our books. Or 85% of them, or whatever. We had a lot of books. Books were our main thing. Lisa had lost all of her jewelry. But I would find little pieces of it in the house. Then one day, we got a metal detector. I was digging under one of the rosebushes, and I found the motherlode. I found a jewelry case that had half of her jewelry was in it. Intact. Undamaged. She was really happy about that.

We found our wine refrigerator. We put all the wine bottles into a little red wagon that we found in back of the house. We wheeled the wagon all the way back to Gretchen’s house, sometimes portaging it over stumps and things. We would open up one of those bottles every night. That was our reward for having labored under the hot sun all day long at the house.

It was hard work, too. The sun was relentless. It was so hot. The landscape looked like death, everywhere. It seemed so futile. We just did it little by little. I was trying to stay focused. I was trying to say, OK, you need a lot of self-discipline right now. Just keep doing this, and you need a timeline, too, because eventually I had to go back to work. I said alright, I’m going to give myself a month of this. And I did. I went back to work on the first of October at my practice. Keesler Air Force Base, where the hospital was, where I worked, took twenty-five feet of water. In fact [today], only the clinics are open. The hospital itself is not going to open until November [2006].

The people on base where I worked they thought I was dead for some reason. I don’t know. There was some rumor that I was dead. Lisa and I had stayed on the beach and we had died. Oh, we had stayed on the beach, but the death part was a little exaggerated.

As soon as phones began to work, I got on the phone to a trailer company in Alabama. I actually bought a trailer. It was delivered a month after the storm. I feel a tiny bit ridiculous for telling this to you because lots of people who went through the storm, who lost all their houses, they don’t have the resources that Lisa and I had. I mean, they can’t buy trailers. Cars. I mean, we bought ourselves—not a new pick-up truck, but we bought ourselves the only used pick-up truck available in Ocean Springs after the storm that was in-tact. We had lost our cars. But there are tons of people who don’t have that luxury at all, who were basically in Red Cross shelters for months afterwards.

Oddly enough, when I went up to Ocean Springs Hospital to volunteer I was expecting there to be a lot of sickness. There was not that much, really. There were a lot of lacerations. And skin infections. There was not an epidemic of diarrheal illness and so on as was expected. The hospital was handling it quite well.

The grocery chains weren’t open yet. A few days after the storm, a local grocer opened his small grocery store. He would sell us what he had. We didn’t know what we were going to eat until we would actually get there. Some days it would be canned Italian green beans and stewed tomatoes. Whatever he had.

Everything tasted so good because we were so shellshocked. We had never had any appetite in the morning. We didn’t eat during the day either. I’m a relatively big eater myself, but we didn’t realize we were hungry until we came home after our archeology session, took a shower and got into clean clothes. All of a sudden we were ravenous. Hadn’t eaten anything literally all day. Everything tasted really good.

There were these community meals that were kind of fun actually. Everyone sat around and talked. Shared rumors about what was happening in New Orleans, and so on. We had a little radio and we’d get radio news. We had that sort of that connection to the outside world. This was before the phones were up. Even when the phones came back, they would only work for like a couple of hours a day and then they’d stop working. Usually the circuits were busy.

Did the plumbing work fine? Yes, in the house we were staying the plumbing worked fine. In our ruined house, they had shut off the water, actually the night before the storm hit. They knew it was going to be bad. They turned it back on about ten days after the storm. There was water pouring from all those leaky pipes in the house. We had to run around and cap them all off. We loved having the water. Water’s essential when you’re trying to clean up. We tried to scramble around and cap them off.

The neighbors that lived in the Lewis Sullivan house, they left during the storm. Ellen had played viola in the Gulf Coast orchestra. She was retired, and her husband Edsel was retired as well. On summer nights we would visit them, and they would make us this horrible drink that they liked called rum & soda. We didn’t like it, but since they enjoyed the visits so much, we just drank it anyway. They were very nice—an old-world kind of couple. She suffered a massive stroke right after the storm and died. And he, who was chronically ill, was in much worse shape than she was, up front, he’s moved away with his relatives elsewhere.

My neighbor on my other side, Charlie, he and his wife had left for the storm. But he came back, and we bought trailers together. He bought the same trailer I did. He also bought one for his father-in-law. So, there were these three trailers sort of separated by several hundred yards, but more or less lined up. We wanted a presence on this ruined beach.

Interview Two, July 27, 2007, in Ocean Springs, MS

A few days after the storm, my neighbor thought, well, we need to put a trailer here. We can’t wait for FEMA. We’re gonna have to buy one. I said yeah, I agree. We should buy one. Plus the ones we buy will be bigger than the ones that FEMA would donate. We thought FEMA trailers would come with strings attached. We called up this place in Alabama and they had them in stock. No one had bought them yet. We bought them right on the spot. We held them with our credit cards. Then we thought, oh, this is great, perfect. They delivered them a little over a month after the storm we had a trailer. We made a lot of jokes about living in the trailer.

If you look out there, the ocean is maybe 100 yards from here. The trailer was much closer. It’s half the distance between here and the ocean. So literally, you were right on top of the ocean. When the wind would howl and you’d see the waves frothing up, it wasn’t frightening, but it was interesting—it got your attention for sure. Especially in a trailer.

It was a temporary situation. We knew that. But still, it was an interesting situation. It was sort of cozy. I’d never lived in that close quarters. As you can see, this house in shaped in a U, with the open part of the U facing towards the ocean. The one wing of the U is the kitchen. The flat part—the middle part of the U the living rooms, and all the bedrooms are in the other part of the U. If you’re in one part of the U and another person is in the other part of the U, the beauty of that is that you can’t hear them. You can’t hear her or he and she or he can’t hear you. Which allows you just tremendous peace, so to speak. Being the trailer, you’re sort of accessible at all times. But it was nice. It was different. It was nice at the same time.

Now, you see a lot of human activity here on the beach. Cars passing. You see people working on things that look to be houses, or partially-rebuilt houses. While we lived in the trailer, there wasn’t any of that. There was very little traffic on the beach, except for Red Cross relief trucks. And FEMA inspectors. Or insurance adjusters, and so on. And at night, it was completely deserted. That was a little bit eerie.

On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the storm created a great deal of social disruption. [The storm] separated family members—some who did not return to their ruined houses. It left adolescents or adult children living in tenuous living situations; they did not follow their parents or other family members to permanent residence in other states. As a result, the number of people who don’t have any permanent residence has increased greatly. This was especially prevalent the year after the storm. So, living in a trailer out here on the beach all by yourself at night, occasionally at 2:00am or 3:00am there would be a knock on the door: someone with slurred speech wanting a ride to some remote place, and so on. It’s not a big deal, but those sorts of things which you would never have to deal with normally, that was part of what living in a trailer was. But it was still fun.

We moved out of the trailer shortly after I talked to you. We bought a two-bedroom house in the center of town, which we owned for about six to nine months. Then we resold it.

Was it easy to buy a house? No. A fortuitous circumstance made it easy. My administrative assistant wanted to move out of her undamaged house and move out to the country. She had bought land to build a house. She decided to put her house in town up for sale. It just was a coincidence that that house went up for sale right at the right time. It was a form of insider trading if you will. We ended up buying that house. We ended up selling it as well.

We are sitting now in the house that has been refurbished. I don’t say rebuilt, because the house didn’t need rebuilding per se, at least in terms of foundation walls and roofs. The house itself is made of poured concrete. The house can withstand high winds. It can also withstand the ocean. Unfortunately they don’t make doors and windows and furniture and belongings that can withstand the ocean. Or photographs. Or books. Or china. Things like that. But the basic structure of the house was so strong, there was an F150 wrapped around the doorjam like a pretzel. It had to be pulled apart with a crane. That’s how strong the house was built.

We put in new doors and windows. In some cases, new floors. Other cases, just the old ceramic floors were polished up and cleaned. All the furniture is new. A lot of the books are new. Some of the plumbing and electricity in the kitchen is new. Some of the light fixtures and all of the fans are new as well.

We lived in the trailer for almost six months. We lived in a house in town for over six months. We were not in a great rush to buy things quickly, so we were able to pick and choose a little bit. My wife Lisa put most of the time and energy into picking things. I was working more. I was traveling quite a bit.

I have to confess, I had a certain detachment from the particulars of refurbishing, at least in terms of objects. I completely deny feeling any sort of anger or fear or something you might construe of as post-traumatic stress disorder in regards to the storm experience. The one thing that is prevalent though was a sort of uncoupling from being attached to things, objects, furniture. Bric brac and so on. I’ve lost my desire to acquire things.

It began with the death of my mother, six months before the storm. My father had died twenty years ago. I watched all of their belongings, or at least most of them, end up in a big dumpster, or sold at a garage sale. This is despite of all the things that my four sisters, my brother and I decided to keep. This is outside of all that. Watching all of that go into a big dumpster, I thought to myself, you know, everything you have is going to someday end up in somebody’s garage sale. That was the first lesson.

I’m not an extremely religious person. But for wont of a better word, I would say that God had decided that I hadn’t learned that lesson quite well enough. He decided: a good hurricane ought to set you straight, in terms of your attachment to the material world, so here. Try this one, too. I think I’ve learned that lesson now. I’ve lost my zeal for shopping and acquiring. In fact, I tend to give things away rather than trying to acquire them. Not through any great sense of altruism, necessarily, or through any sense of obligation to the human world. I’d like to be able to claim that, but that would be false. I have to say it’s more due to a sort of like zen-like detachment from wanting to own things. I attribute that in part to the storm. Maybe it’s just a part of turning 50, too. I don’t know.

Weathering the Costs

The houses along the Mississippi Gulf Coast were pulverized by waves and the ocean in a very violent manner. Since the brunt was taken by the houses right on the ocean, or right close to it, by and large those are expensive properties. Not always, but generally speaking they are expensive properties; fairly wealthy people that were directly affected by this. That is one of the big sociologic differences between what happened in New Orleans and what happened on the coast. That’s part of the reason why recovery has been slower in New Orleans than it has been on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Many of the people who own houses on the coast have resources or alternatives available.

Lisa and I had little over a $100,000 in savings that we were able to throw into the battle. We were able to purchase a trailer, out right, and to rebuild the house. Now, we sold the trailer and built the house, but still, all of that takes money. For initial outlay of expense and loan fees and so on. We had the resources to do that. Many people do not. We were very lucky in that regard. We had our own savings.

What we did not have was insurance. Where we sit now [in the living room], you look at the ocean and think, you would have to be crazy not to have flood insurance. Well, I agree with you now. However, prior to August of 2005, nobody here felt that way. The highest the water level ever got, in Hurricane Camille in 1969—you can see that oak tree right down there, just about as far as that oak tree. Nothing further. According to flood records which only go back 150 years, this part of the house, where the house stands, has never been flooded. Ever. At least not in 150 years. I didn’t think flood insurance was necessary. When we first got our mortgage on this house, no flood insurance was required. We don’t have it. We paid off the mortgage a few years ago. But still, never found the need for flood insurance.

So the insurance adjuster came, looked at the house and said, oh, no flood insurance. Well, this was all flood damage and we’ll give you some money for the roof and this and that. Ended up they gave us about $40,000. Our actual losses were more like half a million. But as I said, I had a $100,000 of our own money to spend.

The State of Mississippi stepped up to the plate. People who suffered bad property losses—and this was one of the worst you could have—they would pay up to $150,000. A little more than a year after the storm, we got a $150,000 from the State of Mississippi. I thought it was done pretty well.

It took a long time. But at least you knew generally where you stood in the middle of the process. That was a $150,000 right there. We were out of savings by the time that money came through. So that was a great thing. We were able to continue building our house. We were able to not get too far into debt.

There is something called a Disaster and Casualty Loss Amendment that you can file with your previous tax returns. If you’re in a natural disaster, and you’ve lost property of considerable value, the entire dollar value in loss can be taken as a tax deduction. So whatever gross adjusted income you had in a particular year, you weigh that against your disaster loss. If that exceeds your income for that year, then you go on to the next year, and then you go on to the next year, and then to the next year, until the loss has been spread out over enough number of years. Fortunately, our case was about two and a half years. Although this disaster and casualty loss required lots of documentation, and an auditor came and poured over our records and figures and wanted to see photographs and so, if you were to invest the time to do that, the federal government and the state of Mississippi gave us back every penny we paid in taxes in 2004 and 2005, and part of 2006.

That was just a huge amount of money for us. We’re high wage earners. We pay a lot of taxes. We got so much money back in taxes that it was as if we were fully insured for everything we lost. That essentially has made us whole.

This is another example where the tax code favors the wealthy. Lower and middle-income people do not have that advantage. That is not right. It’s not fair. But nevertheless, that’s the way it is. If you hadn’t paid that much money in taxes, then you wouldn’t have this available to you.

[The inequity] is even worse when you think of it from a situational perspective. If you don’t have a high income, and you have a mortgage, the mortgage still needs to be paid, regardless of whether your house is ruined or not. If you don’t have the resources to rebuild your house because you didn’t have flood insurance because it wasn’t required, and now you can’t pay your mortgage and you can’t sell the house, there’s very little alternative to financial ruin or bankruptcy. We were able to avoid that in large part because of the generosity of the tax code. I’m grateful for it, but I don’t think it’s really right.

So, this is why unlike just about everybody else we know, we did not sue our insurance company. Even though I think our insurance company failed us in many ways. We didn’t have flood insurance, that’s true, but they ascribed all of our damage essentially to flood damage, and none to wind. There’s the other aspect that which the insurance companies routinely include in the concept of flood: when a category five hurricane picks up the ocean and deposits it on top of your house. They call that flood damage, rather than hurricane damage. That is a semantic interpretation which benefits only the insurance company. It certainly doesn’t benefit anyone who’s insured by them.

Most people think of flood as when the creek rises too high. They don’t think of flood as basically the wind picking up the ocean and sending it through the house. Normally, they think of that as wind slash hurricane damage. The insurance companies feel otherwise. They’re the ones that frequently prevail. This has created an unusual kind of charade in the legal sense. There’s all these desperate people who live on the coast who are suing their insurance company for the reasons I just told you, they’re really stuck. What the homeowners are asserting is that the damage to the house was mostly wind-driven and not flood-driven. The insurance companies conspire to conceal that fact and deny them economic redress. They wouldn’t pay their claims, claiming that it was all flood. Of course, the homeowners for the most part are wrong. By the definition of wind and flood, the insurance companies are of course correct. Now the insurance companies are losing these cases in the local courts. One after the other. Wrongly. Technically, they should be winning these cases, because the argument for the homeowners’ doesn’t really hold any water. [Laugh] Excuse the term.

Do I feel bad for the insurance companies? No! They have breached the confidence of their policy holders in a fundamental way by not taking care of them after this storm. There’s a sort of rough, imperfect justice that’s being done through these verdicts which are technically unfairly weighted against the insurance companies. The arguments for the homeowners are just false. Just plain false. But in a larger sense, justice is prevailing, and I personally, privately, am glad to see it.

But the reason that it would be of no advantage to sue my own insurance company is because whatever I would recover in the suit, I would have to give back to the federal government and the state government. Through the disaster and casualty laws, they insured me, so to speak. It would be tilting at windmills to sue my insurance company, to spend all that time and money; whatever I would recover, if anything, I would have to turn around and repay the federal government. That’s the reason I haven’t done it.

I don’t like insurance companies. I say this without any glee, but I’m kind of glad they’re getting screwed on these homeowner cases. Of course, the homeowners are getting away with murder because you’ve got local juries that are going to sympathize with the homeowner and not with the insurance company.

On the Future

Right now, we are afraid that the meteorologic conditions that generated this storm have not gone away. We’re in the midst of a warming cycle. The engine that drives hurricanes here, that makes them so big and dangerous, is that the Gulf of Mexico is very warm. Late in the summer, when it’s at its warmest point, a hurricane accelerates. It turns in strength and size when it gets over the warm waters of the Gulf. There’s nothing that’s changed about that. We fear that we’re in the beginning of a cycle where big storms like the one that we had are going to recur.

There are basically two views: the optimistic and Pollyanna view, in my opinion, is no, this was the storm of the century, that it’ll be another 100 years before there’s another storm like that again. I don’t see why that should be the case. It seems to me that the conditions exist where it could happen again. We live in a world of probabilities. I don’t see any reason why in the next ten years this couldn’t easily happen again.

We are in a debate. Do we want to stay here and tough it out, or do we wait until property values recover and then move? Property values were actually paradoxically high after the storm, because there were so many damaged properties. There was great competition for the properties that were undamaged. That’s changed now. We’re in the midst of a housing slump. Driven in part by the loss of population, there are more houses for sale than there are buyers. Part of it is that industry has disappeared and people can’t find high paying jobs here. The third thing is that even when you can find houses within your price range, unless you already have an insurance policy on it, it’s very difficult to get new hurricane insurance. The insurance companies, which have been badly burned by disaster to start with, still have hundreds if not thousands of lawsuits pending against them; they are understandably reluctant to write new insurance in this area. Most buyers need to have insurance because they have to get a mortgage to buy your house. It’s rare to find a buyer who is going to pay cash for your house and doesn’t care whether they’re going to get insurance or not. That’s especially true for higher-end houses. This is not a good time to sell a house like this.

If another big storm comes, will we evacuate? That’s a good question. If projected storm surge exceeds 20 feet, then yes, absolutely. I’ll evacuate. But only as far as my office, which is a mile and a half inland. I have no intention of evacuating out of town. That’s a fool’s errand. Unless you do it two weeks before the hurricane comes, you have your own set of problems if you try to evacuate a city right as the hurricane is approaching. The traffic, and the pitfalls that can go along with it are worse than just staying put. So yes, I am not afraid of wind damage here at all. This house is a bunker as I told you before. But yeah, if the storm surge is 20 feet or more, we would not stay in this house. We would go inland.

Do our children have an opinion about us staying here? The children are quite sober about that. This is not the house they grew up in. We moved into this house seven or eight years ago. The house they grew up in we don’t own anymore. We sold it. It’s about a mile inward. That’s the house that they would have been attached to more I think. They were in high school already when we moved in here. They would prefer that we keep it, but they would certainly understand if we left.

We’re thinking in a couple of years, when things recover, we may choose to leave this area. Either move further inland, or maybe even move into a different part of the country. We like New England. We’re from New England. Or the east coast of Florida. The DC area. We love the Denver, Boulder area of Colorado as well. We think that would be a healthy environment. At least an interesting place to spend a couple of years. We haven’t made any decisions, but those are the kinds of thing we’re thinking. Not in the next week, or few months, but long-term. We don’t trust that ocean. We’re not afraid of it, we just don’t trust it. [Laugh]

I was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts. A very small town of about 20,000 people. I essentially spent the first eighteen years of my life in that town. That’s where I learned to talk like this. That’s where I learned to pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd.

I went to Mount Holyoke College. I met the man who would be my husband, Steve Rosenthal. Since he’s a New Orleans born and raised local, I came back with him. I had been living in New Orleans for 25 years when Hurricane Katrina came.

The Evacuation

We were in New York City when we got word the storm was coming. Friday afternoon. Friday afternoon is the worst time to find out there’s a storm coming because you can’t prepare your office. It’s too late to do a lot of things. But [my husband’s] office had a storm plan that kicked into gear. In fact, our hotel rooms in Jackson had been reserved since the prior Monday. Most people in New Orleans didn’t have that good a hurricane plan, but our office did. At home we did, too.

We had to book an emergency flight home. The flight was full of tourists coming to New Orleans. We were tempted to go to them and say, don’t go. But we were afraid that the Marshall would bar us from getting on the plane. It was post 9-11. We were afraid that that could happen to us. We needed to get back to board up our home and get our children and the dog. So we kept our mouths shut. We feel really bad about that. We know some of those tourists got trapped. We don’t know, but we feel sure that they did.

We just had twelve hours. We had to board up the house, move all the furniture, roll up the rugs, and pull up the curtains. It was very difficult. We took every pot we had and filled it with water. We put them in the freezer to buy some time for when the electricity went out. We knew it would go out. Next time, we’re just going to pull everything out. We didn’t plan for three weeks. Or a month. We were hoping for a few days.

We’d been through this before. We evacuated for Ivan one year earlier. The exact same situation. Each evacuation prepares you for the next one. We had hurricane lists. We had a list on the computer that I printed out and followed. The children thought we were going to be back the next day. They knew better than to argue. We got our two sons [20 and 15], got the dog and got in the car. We left at 8:00am Sunday morning.

When I got into the car to evacuate, I was so happy because all my plans for September had all fallen into place. I loved my work. I was working part-time in advertising and marketing. I volunteered heavily in the public schools; I taught nutrition and fitness. I was an avid tennis player. I had just won a tennis tournament. I was very excited about my trophy. I even brought with me on the evacuation. Through the public tennis court system that we have here, I’d organized leagues for public people to play in. Anyone could join, and I had two leagues going. I also taught fitness. I was all excited because I’d just lined up a schedule of fitness classes that worked with the rest of my life that was obviously very busy at the time. My life was perfect. Everything was all set. And then Katrina came.

I realized a few days later that all those beautiful plans, none of them were going to happen. I said to myself, well, that may be true. However, I’m the same person. The same person that got all that ready is still here. Who knows what that same person is going to do now. Time will tell.

First, we evacuated to Jackson, Mississippi. We now know this was a mistake. The storm went right to Jackson. We lost all our power. We relocated to the Drury Inn in Lafayette. We chose this hotel because they had some rooms available and because they had internet access. Very critical. We had just arrived when we got word that the levees had broken. That New Orleans was flooded. It was at that moment we realized we weren’t going back. There were lots of hugs and tears but we had each other.

In Lafayette

My husband has been in insurance for thirty years. He believed that this was potentially the big storm, and he told us to pack for three weeks. I am the only person that I’ve talked to that packed for three weeks. Ironically, our house didn’t flood. We’re on high ground. However, we were prepared for the evacuation. We had our clothes. We had our computers. We had our checkbooks. We had everything. We hit the ground running.

One of our sons went off to college a few days later. Our other son is a freshman at Newman. Newman wasn’t going to open. Those were the crazy days right after the storm and we had to find a school for our son. We were lucky that his two best friends were going to a little school south of Lafayette. He wanted to go where his best friends were. We thought that was important [right then]. Being with your friends, being with your family was more important than anything else. We settled in Lafayette so that our son could go to a good school and be happy. It was all about my son during those days.

We didn’t know Lafayette. We had no family there. No friends. My son and I had been at a few tennis tournaments there, but that’s it. While we lived there, I played a lot of tennis because there wasn’t much else to do. Compared to 99% of the folks who evacuated, my experience immediately post-Katrina was actually not bad, but all I could think about was going home.

My husband set up an emergency office in Baton Rouge. He commuted from Lafayette to Baton Rouge. It was tough. I also worked for that company. But I was able to do a lot of work from home via computer.

In just days, all the available housing was snatched up by desperate displaced people. We were very luck to find a place to live, but we couldn’t move in until the current tenants vacated.

We spent an entire month in the Drury Inn, right off the interstate. The Drury Inn was full of dogs and people. Rooms had as much as 11 people in them because the hotel was set to the max. People from everywhere. The people next to you could have been from Plaquemines Parish or St. Tammany. It was everybody. All in this hotel. All of us there for the exact same reason. It was a crush of humanity, but a very supportive humanity. And all of us were glued to the television sets.

It was a very odd way to live as a family. My son had to do his homework at a hotel, wake up in the morning in a hotel and go to school. I worked hard to make my son feel at-home and comfortable. Hotels are not made to be lived in. It was tough. The dog was miserable. When your dog’s miserable, you are, too. But you can get through anything if you know it’s just for one month. We got through.

Finally on October 1, a full month after Katrina, we moved into our home. We felt a whole lot better when we were actually in a house. With a kitchen. A stove. These amenities that you take for granted.

The Beginnings of Levees.Org

I started getting reports that the levees had all failed. It wasn’t just a matter of overtopping. It wasn’t the matter of a big storm. It was a matter of faulty engineering. I started to get mad. I started thinking about how nobody knows this. New Orleans knows this, but not many other people seem to know it. Or seem to care. That’s when the whole idea of forming Levees.Org began.

I am not a lawyer, but it was clear to me that the people who should be responsible for the levees breaking should be the people who built them, not the people who maintained them after they’re built. If a skyscraper fell to the ground, that would be like blaming the janitor and not the architect, or the engineer, or the contractor who built it.

No one else seemed to be looking at it that way. I felt like a player in a B-rate movie, where the whole world is wrong, but this one person is right. Turned out it was true for a while. In the beginning it felt like I was the only one, and a few select others, to see through what was going on.

On Halloween Day, I participated in a tennis tournament as a fill-in. My partner was from Alexandria [LA]. I was talking to my partner about the flooding of New Orleans. How it was a man-made disaster, and it should never have happened. He told me, oh no, New Orleans is below sea level, and the storm was just too strong and nothing could have been done about it. I said, no, that’s actually not true, there were fifty levee breaches. It was because they weren’t built right. He told me, no, that I was wrong, and that it was meant to happen, that we shouldn’t rebuild New Orleans because it’s hopeless.

This was a conversation I had with a Louisiana resident. I could tell from the whole tone of the conversation that this is what he wanted. He didn’t want New Orleans to be rebuilt. I began to think to myself, well if that’s the attitude of citizens within our own state, imagine what people are saying in California, Wisconsin, Maine—who aren’t even close to us. No way are they following this as well as you would think people are following this in our own state. That was October 31st.

I went home and said to my husband: we’ve got to figure out a way to educate the nation that New Orleans was not destroyed by a hurricane, but by faulty federal flood protection. We’re going to tell the nation. That’s a pretty big mission for one person. But I said it, my husband remembers it, and that’s when my son and I put our heads together.

My son is very skilled in website design. We realized with a good website, we could help get the word out. We spent a month working on it. We reserved our URL. We created the mission. We created the goal. We created a technique to get people to join. We launched on December 3rd.

My worries were confined to, how am I going to gain credibility? What do I have to do to gain peoples’ confidence? I did not worry about criticizing the US Army Corps of Engineers. I might as well be criticizing aliens on Mars; I never ever expected them to respond to me or to recognize what I was doing. It would have been like talking about President Bush—I never would expect President Bush to respond to anything I did.

I’m a citizen. I’m exercising my right to speak publicly about something I believe. I wasn’t born yesterday—I know I wasn’t doing anything wrong by that. So my worries were confined to how am I going to do this? To gain credibility, I needed members.

The first thing we did is create a petition to President Bush. We said: President Bush, please recognize the mistakes of the Corps and please help New Orleans as you promised in Jackson Square, a week after Katrina. People were happy to get on and sign that. We got 200 members immediately. That’s how we gained our core membership.

“Everyone Looked At Me Like I’d Sprung a Second Head…”

On December 7th [2005], I drove into [New Orleans] for my very first meeting to talk about Levees.Org. It was a meeting at Touro Synagogue that was organized to discuss what steps citizens could take to get assistance from Congress. I had called ahead and made certain there would be wireless internet so that I could show off our newly launched website.

I waited my turn. I was wiggling in my chair like a little girl on her first day of school. Finally they came to me. I said, I”ve formed an organization called Levees.Org, and we’re going to educate the whole nation about what really happened, that this is federal, and not local, and we”re going to hold a rally at the Corps building. And I’m not just all talk, I have a website, and I have 200 members.

There was silence in the room. Everyone looked at me like I’d just sprung a second head. The moderator said, OK, next.

I got in the car and I drove back to Lafayette, and I told my husband, they don’t get it even in New Orleans. I was in a room full of educated people at Touro Synagogue and they don’t get it. This is December 7th. That gave me the strength to go on. Things like that gave me the strength to go on.

We moved back to New Orleans December 17th. Our child had finished the school semester, and we could come back to the city. I was so busy working on Levees.Org, that’s all I could think about at that time. But it was good to be home.

I’ll never forget the point at which the interstate comes up high, and it takes a turn, just as comes into the Bonne Carre Spillway and you can see New Orleans in the distance. I saw the city and was feeling so good because for the first time, I was not only driving back to New Orleans, I was driving back to New Orleans to stay. That was a very exciting day. December 17th. Saturday.

Growing Levees.Org in New Orleans

In the beginning, it was true grassroots. We were people talking to people. I did a lot of talking. I did a lot of canvassing. We had some yard signs made. I used to drive around with them in my car and pull up to peoples’ houses and say, do you want to put this sign in your yard? I loved that human part of grassroots work and I miss it. We still are grassroots, although we’ve developed a lot of momentum.

We are web-based. I’ve had someone ask me, have you considered going more into communities and using the telephones more, and yes, I considered it. We just don’t have the people. It’s time-consuming work that is important. I’d love to be doing it. But we don’t have the people. People here are gutting their homes. Working two jobs. Traveling back and forth to their houses, cleaning their houses. Nobody has time. We had to get the most benefit for the littlest amount of effort. We had no choice. For that reason, we’ve had to be web-based.

[Being web-based] has its drawbacks. People lost their computers in the floods. Some don’t have computers. You really lose the elderly. The elderly are generally not doing the computer thing. Not all of them; my ninety year-old grandmother has an email address. I don’t mean to speak of all of them. But you do lose that group who hasn”t gotten fully into the internet scene. Again, we’ve done it out of necessity.

In New Orleans, I do grassroots group work that isn’t web-based, primarily the yard signs that we have all over town that say Hold the Corps Accountable! We have twenty banners all over town that say Hold the Corps Accountable! and have a phone number, so anybody can get more information about who we are and what we’re doing. I have two ladies whose job it is to check that phone number everyday for phone calls coming in.

In the beginning, a lot of people told me I was barking up the wrong tree. Go join other grassroots groups that are doing these missions. I would say no, that’s a separate mission. That’s a good mission, but that’s not all that I’m doing. This was when there was a lot of confusion, when a lot of people really thought it was the local levee boards that were primarily responsible for the levee failures. I got a lot of that.

I have had a little bit of vandalism. My Expedition was parked out front, full of signs. The car was keyed. There’s no doubt in my mind that that was intentional because of the work that I’m doing for Levees.Org. I tried not to say a word about it because it defocused on the mission.

The only [real] backlash has been Congress’ resistance to recognize the mistakes of the Corps. I can count on one hand the number of our Members of Congress, that’s including our own delegation, who have recognized the mistakes of the Corps, and said we’ve got to do something to help those people. Two of them our own delegation and they almost don’t count.

The First Rally @ the Army Corps’ of Engineers

At that time, the Corps of Engineers was blaming the New Orleans Levee Board for the breaks. This was engineering. People didn’t know what to believe. Now it’s common knowledge that the mistakes were the Corps.’ It was far from common knowledge in January [2006]. In January, much of our energies of Levees.Org was convincing our own citizens that this isn’t our fault.

We put out a press release that [our] rally was going to be the Corps building on January 21st [2006]. A friend of my sister-in-law helped get word to the media. I asked my husband to help me. He gave me some money so that we could run an ad in the Times-Picayune. Between the ad in the Times-Picayune, the membership that we had gotten through grassroots, and then these signs that I had put up, we gathered members to come to our very first rally.

[We had] about 300 people. A very healthy number of people especially since there were so few people in the city at that time.

We chose not to invite elected officials to speak. We chose to keep it citizens. I stated that the mission of Levees.Org is to make the facts of the New Orleans flood mainstream knowledge. That we wouldn’t stop until this was done. At that time, it was just getting out the word, getting out the facts. It was essentially a kickoff rally.

We all turned our bodies to face Washington, DC. I yelled to the Capitol, President Bush, Members of Congress, and the US Army Corps of Engineers, you flooded us, now please help us. It was a chant that we kept going for quite a while. It was great. Little kids. Everybody was there. I wish there had been a better representation of African-Americans. You had to realize how few people were back at that time. I did try to keep it diverse. There were some there, but not as many as I had hoped for.

The Corps administrators were very worried about our rally. I found out afterward that they had issued memos to the entire staff that there’s going to be a rally, so be prepared—
I guess they thought we were going to throw tomatoes at them or something. We’re a peaceful group. Everyone knows we’re a peaceful group now. But I think they were preparing for the worst. There were even a pair of Humvees and US Corps of Engineers in full military garb. I didn’t see any guns, but I did see the Humvees and the men. They had a police car pull up into the driveway—I guess to prevent people from trying to pull into the driveway.

I never looked in the direction of the Corps building. I just focused on doing a peaceful demonstration just to get out the word that this is the primarily the responsibility of the US Army Corps of Engineers. This is not us. We felt that if American citizens had the facts, that would create a whole lot better environment for getting the funding and the assistance that we needed.

The First Face-to-Face Meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers

In late February [2006], Dan Hitchings, the equivalent of a one-star general at the Corps, invited me and a group of my members to go sit down and have a talk with him. He was, and still is, the Director of Taskforce Guardian which is responsible for ramping up the condition of the levees.

I was shocked. I had said publicly many times—on radio and in print—that I didn’t expect the US Army Corps of Engineers to talk to me. They’re military. I was surprised when he called. And he did.

I had no expectations for that meeting. I thought we were going there for a Power Point presentation. Well, we sat down at a table, and he answered any question we had. No prepared speech. No Power Point presentation. I asked him, point blank, to his face, people here think it’s us, that the levee boards caused this flooding. Would you set them right on this? He said that no, the levee boards did not cause the flooding, to his knowledge. Now, there are investigations going on right now, but as far as [I] know, the levee board did nothing of significance, concerning flood protection. I said, well, what about the Corps’ role in all this? He said, the Corps is accountable to the people and to Congress for the final product.

Now this is February, before [the US Army Corps of Engineers] admitted responsibility for the flooding. They were changing their stance. They were realizing they can’t have this stand-off attitude. They were becoming more transparent—I wouldn’t say transparent, but they stopped the standoffish, defensive attitude that they’d had for years up until Katrina. That was a groundbreaking event. A change. A definite milestone in the relationship of the Corps of Engineers in New Orleans and the relationship of Levees.Org with the Corps of Engineers. It was an important day.

Too Big to Be Just Mother & Son

In March, it became obvious that it could no longer be a mother & son team. We needed people in charge of things like signs and letter writing. We needed a research department. I began doing outreach programs to find people who would like to work in research, people who would like to write. I needed to have a team of people who could help out, who liked to come to events. There are people who that’s all they want to do; they won’t write a letter, but they’ll come to a rally. I started setting up these groups in about March. I now have ten different committees each composed of 10-40 people.

The first true jump in our membership was when Bobby Jindal signed on with us. He signed our petition, and then he agreed to be listed on our website as a public supporter of Levees.Org. He was the first. Very ìBobby Jindal… of him to do that. Totally willing to do something that no else has ever done. Shortly after that, we got the public support of Sen. David Vitter. Another jump in our membership. Sen. Vitter is a Senator. Bobby Jindal went from 1400 to 2000 in 24 hours. Then Vitter was another jump. Probably from 2200 to 2600. Another big jump. Those things help. Members is credibility. It really is.

We have no corporate sponsors, and expenses are funded entirely by member donations. We’ve probably received I would say on the order of $5,000 or so in donations. Unlike other grassroots organizations, we have no political advisors, no alignments to anything, or anyone. It gives us independence. In fact, the Corps of Engineers has even said to someone who said to me, that they’re worried about Levees.Org because they don’t know what we’re going to do next. We”re unpredictable. That’s what makes it very scary for anybody who’s watching what we’re doing. It gives us power.

Moving Forward

Our mission is education that New Orleans was destroyed primarily by bad engineering and not bad weather. Our 2006 goals were addition of Corps Reform measures the Water Resources Development Act bill and also passage of federal legislation awarding a fairer share in the revenues from royalties on off shore drilling in the Gulf. Both goals were achieved and widely recognized. Our 2007 goal, launched on January 3 is the 8/29 Commission, an independent analysis of the failure of the federal flood protection in metro New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Over 400 petition signatures were collected in the first few hours, and we quickly lined up broad support from businesses, city government, environmentalists, neighborhood and special interest groups, and major publications. On August 9, 2007, Senator Mary Landrieu D-LA issued a press release documenting her support of the legislation.

In November 2006, we opened up a chapter in Florida, and a chapter in California. The Levees.Org sign—Hold the Corps Accountable!, green logo—it’s just as appropriate over by Lake Okeechobee in Florida, as it is in Sacramento Valley, California, as it is Uptown.

The Louisiana delegation could have been better, but they’re not bad. Our Members of Congress on the Hill are shocking. Absolutely shocking. They continue to blame the victims. They continue to blame us for living here. They continue to blame us for not leaving. The poor dead people, they blame them for not leaving. It’s shocking, and that’s one of the things I’m focused on. Not so much a backlash, so much as a wall. A wall of indifference.

What I’ve Learned

I’ve learned a lot about politics. Before, I could not have told you how many members in the Louisiana delegation there was, much less tell you who they are and who they represent. I can now. I can even tell you who the important members of the delegations are in Florida and California, Wisconsin. I’ve learned a lot about politics, about what works and what doesn’t.

My husband calls our house the Levee Channel, all day, every day. I have become an expert on levees. I know more about I-walls and T-walls than I would have ever imagined. But I’ve learned to balance more of a full-time job with life as a mother and a wife. I like to see girlfriends now and then, too. It can be done.

I’ve always known about the power of one person. I wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t think one person could make a difference. But it’s been amazing to me how frequently I’ve looked at my past and seen, things or events that prepared me for this day. If I could make a list, there are as many as twenty things that were significant in preparing me for this day.

I have learned that people will discourage you. Even the people close to you. I think they almost want to shelter you and save you from disappointment. Luckily I said thank you for your suggestions, but I’m not going to give up. That’s the advice I’d give to anybody. Be careful, because the people who care about you most are the people that might give you the most number of reasons to give up. They don’t mean to harm you. They are actually well meaning. It’s interesting. Life is interesting. That’s another thing I’ve learned. Life is interesting. I’ve probably known that, but when people say to me, why do you stay in New Orleans, when everything is so hard, my answer is, it’s way too interesting to miss.

Beyond Imagination

I have the words from the dictionary: beyond imagination. If you think, what does “beyond imagination” mean? Go and look at New Orleans. Go look at Chalmette. When you go look over there, then you understand.

My husband first went over and he said: “You will not be able to see. Make your heart stronger. Because it’s not a home anymore.”
Still, I wanted to see it.

I went to my home. It was ruined. Everything was gone. As I said, it’s beyond imagination. You cannot even think, if water comes in someone’s home, that anything could happen like this.

When you entered my house, there was a den, with a sofa, a china table, a sitting place, my TV, and entertainment center. In between the sofa was a beautiful rug. I did carpeting in my house because I have small kids. To me they’re small. A 13- year-old and an 8-year-old. My first daughter’s name is Ruqaya. The second one is Rabia.

It was really beautiful. To my left-hand side was my kitchen, a beautiful dining table with six chairs. Cherry wood. Curtains all around. My kitchen was well-set with Corningwares and everything.

If you go all the way straight—to my left hand side—was my children’s bedroom. Two single beds. Their certificates hung all around. I started from Pre-K. Pre-K certificates. Then I said no, I don’t want to hang the certificates. I will hang the honors. They were honor students, so I hung honor roll certificates. After they got their “Terrific Kids” certificates, I hung “Terrific Kids” certificates. They made beautiful paintings of lovely houses. They said: “Mom, we want to hang these.” I hung their pictures on the notice boards. They used to write notes all around.

In my kids’ room, closet space was not enough for me. I bought two cupboards to put their clothes in. I had a small library in their room and they had collections of Disney books and Highlights. It was a cozy room for my two daughters.

In front of them is my bedroom. One can understand how many things are in a bedroom, but still…my cherry wood bed, two nightstands, and a lamp. My two cupboards and a dresser. Many more things to say, but it’s all gone. Big flower vases. I have a pretty collection of jewelry and bangles. My photo albums. All my photo albums are gone. Those photo albums were of my children. All my children’s certificates were in my room—from the beginning of kindergarten to seventh grade, I had all their certificates and all our school stuff. When they used to get the grades A and B we used to save them. It was all in my cupboard. It’s no more.

The third bedroom I made into a sitting room because I’m Muslim, and in my culture we sit down. I made a pretty Persian rug, and pillows all around like Muslims do. Big curtains. I buy cloth from Hancock. I make curtains very well with pretty frills. I made that sitting room very pretty and beautiful. Flowers all around.

When you came out of my house was my beautiful garden. I was very fond of my flowers. Roses. On my street, everybody said: “Nobody has a collection of roses like you.” White, red, yellow, orange, and all colors. Maybe 6 to 9 colors. Roses I was having. Jasmine I was having. The season of October-November, the people used to say—all my neighbors, they were also very good—they used to say, “We come outside and stand outside to smell it.” Nobody has jasmine.

You know, maybe its destiny. It’s all gone. We don’t know from where to start. Let’s everybody pray for New Orleans people, that they can build their lives. I settled here for 8 years. I have seen people, they lost everything of 25 years, 30 years, and now they have to start over. Still, I thank God that I saved myself, my children, and my husband is with me. In our religion we say that you should thank God for everything. Whatever you have. Life is very important. So we’re thanking God of all this. Maybe we can have everything in the next world. We pray for it.

I was not expecting that Houston people will cooperate like this. They have helped a lot at the time where we needed. Like food, kitchen items, comforters, pillows, all kinds of things. They even donated their children’s—children bring their stuff in Ziploc bags, like toys, crayons, pencils. Even the small children. Their parents told them: “The New Orleans people have been going through such a disaster.” So even small children donated such things.

I went to a disaster center. Over there I saw volunteers are helping and I saw one of the ladies. She came from New Jersey. I talked to her. She said she’s volunteering. She was talking to the people. She was only helping emotionally. It helped me a lot because until that time, I didn’t talk to anybody. When I was sitting and thinking, my children got scared. “What happened mom? Why are you so quiet?” Then I talked to that lady. Maybe I cried. She gave me emotional support and helped me a lot. Thanks for the people that are helping in Houston. Maybe all of the United States. The people have helped a lot.

Everybody has a dream. I hope I get my home back. I don’t say that I want my things back. My dream is I should have a good education for my children because we were in St. Bernard Parish and their schools are very good. I want them to have a good education and obviously a good home. My children are missing school and me too, I’m missing my place.

The Prime Coat

They flood us out. Every time water get high, only the downtown area goes through tragedies. It don’t happen Uptown. They sabotage us.

Down here, if you know these pumps don’t work, you know its hurricane season, why we ain’t got somebody down here? You got money to get somebody down here and fix the pipes.

When that hurricane was over and that rain stopped, that water was no higher than right here on my leg. Now all of sudden now there’s water over our house? At one time? I could see it if it’s raining and the water rising—but the water just—you’re just murdering people. That’s straight up murder. You bring me to jail for shooting somebody in the head, and I’m going to bring you to jail for flooding these houses out.

These children. We people. You know, its lives, man. Why you get in charge if you ain’t going to do what you’re really supposed to do? It was like, they couldn’t control the crime rate, drugs. It was at an all-time high. You know what I’m saying?

The hurricane was nothing but a prime coat. For this real paint. Feel me? I think all this here was a cover-up, to spread these people out. You know we can’t really do nothing. We can’t go against the grain.

I think people need to just open their eyes, really analyze life. I’m young, but I know more than the average person my age.

When the Hurricane Hit

When the hurricane hit, I was in the Florida Projects. In the Ninth Ward. Some people have first floors, but in our houses—they’re new—they ain’t like the old projects where they don’t have no attics or nothing. They had attics. People would be able to get through their house to the top of their roof. That’s what most of the people did when the water came so high. Across the Canal, if you weren’t no good swimmer, or a young child, or whatever, you died. And that’s just—you know, that was that. A lot of people died, man.

The police was killing people. They was shooting people. I saw the police, you know, go really over the line. In our part of the city, in the Ninth Ward, I could understand—somebody started shooting at them, in the helicopters, when they were rescuing people. I don’t know who was shooting. I do know that the person that was shooting was shooting because all his family members had died. In the house already. He couldn’t get them out there. Too much water. The water was over—the water was to the gutters of the roof. From right here—the water—the water went from right here, to the gutter of the roof, in what, in a couple—in about 30 seconds? 40 seconds?

I was with my parents. Everybody got split up. Right now, I’m with a partner of mine. My godchild. And my partner’s wife. I don’t know where my sister at. My mama…My mama didn’t leave. My mama stayed in the Palace Hotel. I don’t even know—I didn’t talk to her. I don’t know when’s the next time I’m going to talk to my mom. She don’t have a cell phone, or nothing.

Aftermath

I went all the way to the Fourth Ward to help my partner out with his family. My godchild. My children were in Pennsylvania at the time.

We had been through so many storms like this. Everybody was just worried about the storm. They didn’t know that the water would ever be this high. You see what I’m saying? That the pipes were gonna bust, and then—I actually walked down Claiborne, and witnessed water coming up out the ground. Going into the water that was already there. Like it was pumping it from somewhere else. Y’all need to pump that into the river somewhere. This people too, just like you.

The water was high on Canal Street, six feet, seven feet. People dying. You walking past dead bodies. People stuck on poles. Poles going through—they had a man on Canal, right in the middle in the streetcar thing, with a pole stuck through his body. He was dead. Like he was drunk when the storm hit and fell dead on that pole. It went straight through him. Police just passing him. Peoples bodies, just…

One minute you see a baby crying, with their mama, the wind blowing hard, the next minute you see a baby floating in water, dead. The wind was blowing at a 160mph! How can a 7, 10 pound baby, a 2-week old baby, withstand all that wind? The mama’s scared, she can’t swim, because she ain’t nothing but 14, 15, some of the girls young in our projects, in the Florida Projects, with babies. Some of the girls—I don’t know what’s going on, but they start off at 13 and 14 years old with babies.

Older people dying. A lot of them, dead.

The helicopters. The ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha [the blades], lights everywhere, boats, people panicking, screaming, some people even diving and swimming in the water. It just was—it’s like a lot of people just didn’t have God in their life because something really drastic was about to happen em. They, you know, the spirit wasn’t in them, so they couldn’t, the spirit wasn’t able to bear witness with the spirit, you see what I’m saying? And they was just asleep. They was awoke. But they was asleep? You feel me?

The water smelled like oil, gas, chemicals, stuff from the stores that people was breaking in. Dead bodies in the water. Dead dogs and cats, rats. Man it took you to be strong just to walk through that water. The water was black. They had so much chemicals in that water, seem like if you would have lit a cigarette it would have blew up.

Helping People

I stayed in that water for like three days. Helping people and bringing people food and water.

First we built a raft. We went to an old tire shop, got some tires with air in them. Got some two by fours, and three sheets of plywood, and built it.

We tried to save as many people as we could. They was in their houses, trying to stay in their houses. They didn’t believe that the water was going to get higher. Everybody just had hope that the water was going to go down. The people didn’t want to leave their homes.

What they would say? Um, man I ain’t leaving my home, what am I going to do? Where I’m going to—I’m going to have to start all over from scratch. I’m going to go somewhere and be a… Nobody wants to start all over. It’s hard.

[To another young man] I told her all that man. She know we built an ark. But she don’t know about the five month old baby we carried through the storm. Through the water. He a little soldier too. He a survivor. He five months old. It’s raining. We walking through five and six feet a water with him. And he’s holding us down. He’s not crying or nothing. My partner was with his baby, Malik. My godchild.

We helped a lot of people. Me and Bobby, Printiss and Bobby. We did our thing, man. It got so bad, down in the Four, in the Fourth Ward, we had to take us a house that was up higher. And the people who was on the bridge by the Supderdome and had no water? We went to Kentwood [water company], opened up their thing, and took all the Kentwood trucks. We brought them on the bridge, and gave everybody some water. We helped everybody. It was a storm. They couldn’t do nothing with water, and we needed it. We brought everybody who was out there gallons, big–they had big things that go in the machines. All them babies need that water. How they gonna drink a bottle without the water?

Looting the City

After the storm was over, and that water came, people were breaking into everything. The furniture stores, the banks, the store on the corner—anything you could break in, they were breaking in.

Now people who was thinking right, like people who had values, morals, they was going in the store, getting what they needed, like food, chips, cold drinks, water, stuff that was going to be needed for the storm. The water already was rising. It didn’t make no sense for you to go steal no TV.

We had old people with us. I’m telling you me and my partner, we took a house, a double house. It’s a big tall like–it’s a doublestory, the house is like 35 feet tall, you dig? We got to go up there from the outside. But man, we were living like—we were living the high life. The water was up to our chin and chest.

The landlord owned the house. It was right next door. The people had evacuated, so we had to get higher. We had little Malik with us. We had Parain with us. Godchild. I call him Parain. His name’s Malik. I call him Parain. I’m his Parain. So I call him Parain. That’s a New Orleans thing.

Getting Out

This is how I done it: I thought like the white folks.

We took one of the Kentwood trucks and we rode it down, straight down Claiborne street. We got the baby, his old lady, you know, me, and another old man we had with us, trying to get him to shelter. He left with us because he saw that we was trying to get somewhere.

We in a big ole truck–it’s like a twelve-wheeler. The water was so high to the truck, the truck stopped on us. It was just floating. Then it started raining again.

When it stopped, Bobby cut it off. They got a Salvation Army on Napoleon and Claiborne. Bobby went down to get somebody with a boat. Everybody passing us up. Nobody want to come get us. They like, y’all hardheaded, y’all shouldn’t even much be stuck right there right now. So they didn’t come and get us.

But when we saw two guys coming from the side street with a little boat, you know, a little paddle canoe coming, I told him, this is my last twenty dollars—can you bring this baby and that lady? We was going to swim in the water if we had to, as long as the baby and the lady got to Napoleon.

When we got to Napoleon, it was easy for us to walk, from Napoleon to St. Charles. You dig? They was picking up people there—that was dry land. Everything in the Garden District—I ain’t gonna say it like that, but in the Garden District, you dig, everything was dry, you know?

They done persuaded everybody to go to the Superdome, when these people right up down the street getting saved. And y’all trying to turn us all the way back around, when they’ve got people right around the corner getting saved? On Napoleon and St. Charles. St. Charles area, where all the rich folks. Where it’s dry. They didn’t have no water. But we got 20 feet at the same time while y’all are dry? This is the same city? Something ain’t right.

Houston, and the Future

The Convention Center is nothing but open arms. .In New Orleans, people don’t—very seldom would a group of young ladies, or young men, my age, come volunteer and not get paid. You’d have to pay somebody in New Orleans to come help these people, to help us. Now, I don’t know what go on in Houston, or how you all really rock, but far as of now? Man, I respect y’alls mind.

I’m tired of telling people I’m all right. Thank you, I’m all right. Man, you could be sitting nice, they’ve got the [cooler] right there, sitting right there, them people are still going to ask you, do you want me to get you a cool drink? If that ain’t generosity, if love ain’t here in the atmosphere, then I don’t know what it is.

I get out of bed and work every morning, so I ain’t got no problems. I had a job. The Salvation Army help me. I ain’t graduated from college. I went to jail. I had a GED, but I got to get it over; they said too many people in the class passed, so we got to take the test again. I didn’t cheat. I’m a certified roofer. I do roofing work. Me and my partner, we roofers. Since 98 I’ve been working for the same person. We’re trying to branch out now, get our own thing going. We’ve done 700, 800 jobs. Whatever opportunities open up here for me out here… I need to have my baby fed, I need to get connected with my family. You know? They mama, I hope she got out of New Orleans.

I ain’t really looking for no handouts. How I was living, you know, where I come from…at any given time, you can build your whole foundation down there and something like this happens, and…everything we had is gone. We ain’t got nothing. I’ve been working all my life. Hard. I ain’t been selling drugs like all the rest of the young people. Doing this or that. And all my stuff gone. I’ve got to start all over again. But you know, I ain’t got no problem with that.

I look at everything from a spiritual aspect. I know if God gave me that the first time, as long as I’m still breathing, and I’ve got, you know, life in me, I can do all that again.

I’m a prayer warrior. I just really got back, spiritually. Sometimes you can’t be spiritual. Cause you be spiritual, you bait. Either you doing it, or it’s going to be done to you. That’s how it’s going down. With everybody.

It was time for a cleansing. I agree with that. But you could have gone to every house and said, you’ve got to get on out of here, we’re going to open these floodgates. You see what I’m saying? This dam is about to break.

Born into Hurricanes

I actually love hurricanes. When the low pressure comes in, there’s an incredible build-up of energy. I find it exhilarating. I was born during a hurricane, the one that destroyed New Orleans in September of 1947, in a hospital called Hotel Dieu, which means Hotel of God. The first light I ever saw was from a hospital generator. My first trip was in a rowboat, going from Hotel Dieu to our home in the Faubourg TremÈ, not too far from here.

Growing up, we moved around a lot. The house I remember most was in the 7th Ward, the old Creole neighborhood. Mostly Creoles of color. My memories of childhood are of big, extended families. Lots of screen doors slamming. Lots of unmarried aunts and uncles. I never understood what they did. Our house had about four or five generations of people in it, all within this shotgun-double house. There was little privacy. But it was a wonderful house because right around the corner was an old Creole plantation on Bayou Road where some great aunts of mine lived, and I had the run of that place. There were always big, long tables of people and food, everyone speaking all at the same time in both French and English. There was no question of child care or of nursing homes. Everyone was nursed at home till their death.

I couldn’t wait to leave. I thought New Orleans was backward. I grew up during the civil rights era, and I was just horrified by what was happening—the racism and violence. I often thought, of all the places in the world, why did I have to be been born here? Why couldn’t I have been born in New York? Or California? But now I’m glad I was, and that I’ve come home.

We Never Evacuated

I remember a lot of terrible storms, the lights were out for days, and we lit candles and made due. We never evacuated. It was unheard of. First of all, a lot of people didn’t have cars. And also I grew up in a hurricane culture. From mid-July on, you were geared to a hurricane coming.

There was a whole set of things you had to do. We had to fill up the bathtub with water so that we’d have some if the tap water was cut off. We put plastic jugs in the freezer to freeze water. If the lights went out, you put them in the refrigerator: they kept food fresh for three or four days. We got out hurricane lamps, we clipped the wicks, we bought candles, we got batteries for radios. It was just part of the way we grew up.

But I have to say that this was during a time when everyone I knew lived in the old part of the city. The houses were traditionally constructed. I didn’t know people that lived in places like Lakeview or Lake Vista or East New Orleans, where houses had slab foundations built flat on the ground.

There are other reasons I don’t evacuate. You need to be in your house to deal with the storm as it’s happening to prevent damage. You see those two French doors? And their storm shutters, that block the wind? During Katrina, the wind snapped the shutters open, and those two glass French doors were about to blow in, which would have sucked everything in my study onto the balcony and into the street. So while my friend JosÈ and his girlfriend Claudia held the door shut, I wedged a wooden soup spoon in between the handles and saved my study. If I had come back a month later and found my entire study had been blown into the street, I would be a pretty unhappy person today.

Another reason I don’t evacuate is because I’m more afraid of the human chaos than the natural chaos. There have always been fires and looting after hurricanes in New Orleans. So everyone has to stay to maintain a civic presence. If people are sitting on their front porches and see their neighbors going about their normal activities, the city will come back much quicker.

The Hurricane Experience

The first news I had of the hurricane was when I saw neighbors board up their windows with plywood. I thought, oh, there must be a hurricane coming. The stores were filled with people buying batteries and candles, stocking up on canned food, and things like that. There was a community emergency in the air. People not usually open to you would talk your ear off. The community behaves like pioneers when the Indians attack, drawing their wagons into a circle. They hunker down and protect themselves.

Of course, this was after an incessant two-day campaign on television—which I don’t even watch—that we should evacuate. All they showed were the evacuation routes. The highways you should take. Or shouldn’t take. Well, I don’t drive. I don’t have a car. And neither do so many people in the French Quarter—and in New Orleans. I’d say maybe a third of the population doesn’t have cars, either because they’re too poor, or they don’t know how to drive, or, like me, they’re temperamentally not suited to automobiles. So there was no way out for a week, even though the authorities incessantly were telling us that we had to leave. It was absolutely the most neurotic thing I’ve even been through. Constantly we were told you must leave, you must leave, but leave how? No cars were allowed in. No cars were allowed out.

The night of the hurricane, my friend JosÈ (JosÈ Torres-Tama, an Ecuadorian-American performance artist) was unsure about staying in his house in the Marigny, so he and his girlfriend Claudia Copeland came over. I cooked for them. We had gazpacho for the first course, red beans and rice for the second. We had Claudia’s Ph.D. celebration cake for dessert. Then we had some cognac that I had just brought back from Spain. We toasted the hurricane on the way.

It came and it blew. The French doors provided the only moment of crisis. After that, we went onto the back gallery and watched the storm with my neighbor Kip. We were having the cocktails I call Peter Monkeys, which is dark Bacardi, tonic water, and lime. We were all so tired and worn out by the preparations, and so in awe of the whole thing, that we really didn’t talk much.

The hurricane was brilliant. It was gorgeous. I’ve never felt so close to God. There was a bluish light. And the wind—there was a tree in the courtyard that the wind was whipping until it was absolutely touching the ground. Then it would spring back. Amazingly enough, the glass French doors on the back gallery weren’t even shaking. When the wind enters a closed brick courtyard, the walls stop it, so really there was little damage. A few bricks fell from the chimneys and slate shingles from the roof. That’s it.

When I woke up, JosÈ and Claudia went back to their house. The electricity had gone out during the night, but I went about living my life. I opened all of the windows and the doors. There was no air conditioning and it was probably 95 degrees. The weather was beautiful, as it often is after hurricanes. I went about clearing up whatever mess there was left from the storm. I had taken all my plants from the front balcony and put them on the back balcony. So I moved them all back onto the front balcony, thinking, well, it’s all over, now everybody will come home. That night I cooked and washed dishes by candlelight. It felt like summer camp. I wasn’t unhappy. There was gas, water, and a working phone line.

People began calling me. My 15 year-old niece, who lives in Lafayette, was insisting that I had to get out of the city. I just explained the situation to her, because she’d never really lived here and didn’t understand. People were calling, curious why I was still here. These were people glued to CNN 24 hours a day. But it didn’t even occur to me to leave.

At night, it was a little boring because the entire French Quarter was absolutely pitch black. For the first time in my life, I could see the stars. I sat on my balcony, watched the stars, and listened to the treefrogs croak. There was no one in the street, except for a couple of neighbors who had stayed, and we would scream across to each other. I found one of those portable lamps that you clip onto a book, powered by battery—I got it free with a subscription to The New Yorker–and I started reading a novel called The Secret History by Donna Tartt, a creepy mystery about some students of Greek who murder one of their classmates. I tried to sleep, but it was incredibly hot. I tossed and turned.

The next day, Tuesday, I got a lot of hysterical calls from people. From San Francisco, from New York, from Barcelona, from Madrid—people insisting that I was under water. “No,” I said, “I’m standing here on my balcony, and the street is bone dry. I’m sorry, I have to disagree with you: there’s no water in the French Quarter.” That was the day the levee broke on the 17th Street Canal. I was told that possibly the water might reach the French Quarter. I really doubted that. I didn’t know the extent of the flooding at all.

A Very Crazy Situation

On Tuesday night my neighbor Kip was about to expire. Kip was on dialysis three times a week. He’d had a kidney transplant from a cadaver 25 years ago, and hadn’t had dialysis in six days so he was starting to bloat. He was told he had to go to the Convention Center. At 8:00pm he waded with a flashlight to the Convention Center. There were no buses and no dialysis machines. He waded back and waved at me, sitting on my balcony. That’s when I decided that I should think about leaving.

The only advice offered by the city was to go to the Superdome or the Convention Center. I knew they were going to be chaos because during Hurricane George, which I was here for, they put everyone in the Superdome and didn’t let them out for three days after the hurricane didn’t hit. They only served the people hot dogs and Kool-Aid. In New Orleans, that’s a culinary sin. So people rioted. When they left, they took every computer cable, every door handle, every seat they could lay their hands on. Most people in New Orleans know you don’t want to be part of a scene like that.

That night I heard the sound of crashing glass, and suspected things were being looted. I considered how much food and water I really did have, and how long I could stay. But I really wasn’t convinced yet that I wanted to leave.

Wednesday morning, I woke up and found that the water had been turned off. That pretty much almost did it for me, because we learn two things growing up here: one, you never buy a dead crab, and second, you never drink the tap water after a hurricane. WWYL, the only working radio station, said the reason the Mayor gave was that the water wasn’t drinkable. I knew it wasn’t drinkable, but it was the only thing that kept us surviving here. Without that, we couldn’t use the toilets, we couldn’t take showers, we couldn’t cook. So that really made me mad.

When I walked around the French Quarter; it looked like the day after Mardi Gras. There was a lot of trash. People walking around. Very few cars. Nothing was open. There were already police helicopters flying overhead.

Claudia and JosÈ came back. They said looting was starting in their neighborhood, that kids from the projects were riding around with guns, and that the streets were becoming chaotic and violent. They were the only hold-outs in their block and wanted to stay with me because they were afraid. I said, yeah, come stay with me. Then Claudia said something strange: “Well, um, we can’t use the toilets, so we’ll have to go in the courtyard.” I said, “I don’t know about that. Let me have a cup of coffee and think about this.” Then she said, “We can’t drink coffee because that will make us have to go to the bathroom.” I put my foot down. “First of all, I’m not going to shit in the courtyard,” I said. “Second of all, I’m not going to skip my coffee in the morning.”

Then my neighbor Tedde asked me something I’ll never forget. She said, “I hate to mention this, but what are we gonna to do with Kip’s body when he dies?” I thought about that. You can’t call the morgue. You can’t call the hospital. 911 isn’t working. So at that moment things came together—no water, being told I couldn’t drink coffee, and the thought of Kip dying, right here in the courtyard. I said, “Maybe we should evacuate.”

I was calling people saying, “I think we might eventually want to leave, can you come get us?” No, they couldn’t come get us. The National Guard and State Police were not allowing anyone into the city. And they were also not allowing anyone out of the city. It was a very crazy situation.

The Escape

Someone told me that there might be buses leaving from the Monteleone Hotel. JosÈ and I walked down Royal Street, asking various policemen along the way if they knew if there were any buses. They said, “You have to go to the Superdome, buses are leaving from there.” I didn’t believe them, but I’m always polite to the police. I said, “Thank you, officer.” And just walked on. Stupid cops.

We finally get to the Monteleone at 5:00pm. Sure enough, they had chartered ten buses. They put up $25,000 dollars to hire private buses take out their guests and other Quarter residents. They were selling tickets for $45 each. So we ran back here. I found Kip and said, “Pack! You’re coming.” We had exactly fifteen minutes.

We got there for 6:00pm. We each bought a ticket, which were these little red Admit One tickets you get at the circus. The day was dying and five hundred people milled around in the Monteleone Hotel. It was like Hotel Rwanda, you know that scene when they’re in the lobby of that hotel waiting for the buses to come to take them out? Exactly like that. So we went inside and waited. The hotel clerk was Austrian, and she told me: “Der buzes vill be here at six o’clock sharp.” I doubted it.

By seven o’clock, of course, the buses still weren’t there.

There was a tearful scene outside: two women arrived in wheelchairs being pushed by a third woman. All three of them were elderly and they didn’t have tickets. They were told they couldn’t get on the bus. The entire scene was illuminated by the headlights of one squad car. All the while we were protected by these sixteen-year-old black kids wearing New Orleans police T-shirts with assault rifles thrown over their shoulders.

The most bizarre thing I saw—maybe I’ve ever seen—was in the middle of this, a tractor came pulling a flatbed behind it, on which was seated an obscenely obese man. I mean, he took up the entire flatbed of the truck. He was bearded, and at first I thought it was Paul Prudhomme, but it wasn’t. He was going to get on the bus. The floodlights of the police car were illuminating this tractor, and then like a Mardi Gras float came this obscenely obese man who couldn’t walk.

So we’re talking, we’re waiting. About ten o’clock at night, two headlights appeared down Royal Street, and we all broke into applause: the buses are here, the buses are here. It was one Jefferson Parish school bus. And that Jefferson Parish school bus wasn’t one of the chartered buses. What the drivers told those of us standing near where it parked was that the buses weren’t coming, that they’d been confiscated by the State Police. But this bus was offering passage to Baton Rouge for $100 a seat.

Allen Toussaint was there, and I asked him, “Allen! How did you find out about this?” He kind of smiled, as if to say, uh, we shouldn’t talk about these things. He was staying at the hotel because his house had been flooded, and he was trying to get to any airport that would take him to New York. I had my doubts about this school bus, because I heard that buses were being hijacked by looters or confiscated by the police. If the police had confiscated these other ten buses, why wouldn’t they confiscate this bus? We’d wind up at the Superdome and be out of our money. Then I saw Allen get on. I thought, well, this bus must be going somewhere.

All the seats were taken, and everyone seated on the bus were middle-class black people, probably tourists staying in the hotel. There were a couple of hip-hop kids with their parents, but their hip-hop gear was like five-hundred dollar, brand-name items. These weren’t poor people. We sat on the floor in the wheelchair access section. We’d bargained them down—wound up paying $175 for the four of us.

The driver of the school bus was a short fat Cajun man in white Bermuda shorts. His partner was a barefoot black guy. I asked them about the bus. This is the story they told me: they’d been following the ten chartered buses—I guess they were Gray Line—when they were confiscated by the police. The police said: “Follow these buses! We’re confiscating these eleven buses!” So at the first intersection, being New Orleanians, they took a right and skedaddled. They thought, well, all these people at the Monteleone Hotel are waiting to pay money to get out of here. So they came to scalp their services.

The atmosphere on the bus? Total silence. We were all praying. Yeah, I was praying, because I was very dubious of this bus. I didn’t think they were criminals—after all, to live outside the law, you must be honest—and I knew they were honest thieves. They were just pirates. But like the Battle of New Orleans, the pirates did better than the soldiers. I really don’t blame them. I was thankful that they did it because the authorities weren’t doing anything. And the city was just descending into chaos. There were no preparations—the only thing anyone ever told me was to go to the Convention Center or the Superdome.

I was mostly concerned with the police and their irrational orders. It was the Wild Wild West: anything could have happened. I knew that I might have to bribe some people. I carried about three or four hundred dollars, which I usually don’t carry. That was enough to buy my ticket at the Monteleone, and then to pay sixty dollars to sit in the wheelchair access section of the pirated school bus. I knew I’d be spending some money to get out.

As we drove to Baton Rouge, there were no lights on the Crescent City connection. We were the only vehicle on that completely dry road. On Wednesday evening. Two days after the hurricane. That entire highway should have been filled with school buses. Unbelievable.

When we got to Baton Rouge, Kip bought a ticket to Oklahoma City. He took a flight out the next morning, and got his dialysis done the next day, so he’s alive and well. However, he can’t come back to New Orleans. There are no dialysis machines in this entire city.

We stayed at Andrei Codrescu’s house. I immediately got the commission to write the piece for The Washington Post, and was grateful for that, because I had something to focus on. I sat there shirtless on Andrei’s porch, in a pair of shorts, writing for a day. That completely cleared my head. The rest of the time I cooked. When I got to Andrei’s there were ten people with ten laptops and ten cell phones and nobody was getting together. There were Laura’s two sons—and their girlfriends and friends—and then Jose and Claudia and I, and Andrei and his wife Laura, and Jeb Horn from The Times-Picayune, so I just decided to start cooking and sit everybody down to civilized meals. What did we have? Boiled shrimp one night, pad thai and potstickers another, and asparagus and chicken in oyster sauce another night.

I went to St.Petersburg, Florida, to visit David Wise, a close college friend of mine who has been diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to see him anyway, so I went there to be with him for three weeks. Then I came back here and went through the entire cleaning out of my refrigerator. Then, by a lucky coincidence, I was invited to Spain by Fundacio La Caixa in Barcelona to speak on Jaime Gil de Biedma, a great Spanish poet I translated for City Lights Books. And for a few weeks, at least, I could forget about Katrina.

The Returning Evacuee Experience

I came back before we were officially invited back. I said if the lights are on, I’m going home.

I barely recognized New Orleans. The city seemed like an ancient ghost town. I couldn’t believe how empty and desolate it felt.

I came home, and at first the lights didn’t work. I didn’t know how to turn on the master switch. I thought I came back for nothing. I tried to call Entergy and, of course, I got the recording that said: “For English, press one.” Finally, I found the master switch.

The defining moment in any evacuee’s return was opening the refrigerator. It was filled with live, wriggling maggots. I turned the freezer on high and froze the little fuckers. Then I cleaned out their corpses. How did I clean the refrigerator? I used a mixture of diluted bleach and vinegar. I put opened boxes of bicarbonate of soda in the refrigerator, which absorbed the smell. Within three or four days, it was fine. When I first came back to New Orleans, I recognized this sickly sweet smell of decay. I didn’t know exactly what it was until I opened the refrigerator. Then I realized it was the smell from the refrigerators lining the streets.

The National Guard was everywhere. Everywhere. I really resented that. There hadn’t been a murder in New Orleans since the day before the hurricane, which is saying something. There was no reason for the continued military presence. But everywhere I went, there were roadblocks saying you can’t go in this neighborhood, you can’t go into that neighborhood. My favorite story is of this matronly woman with perfectly done blue hair who wanted to go see her home in Lake Vista. Armed National Guardsmen were blocking her car, telling her that for her own safety, she couldn’t go into her neighborhood. Finally she just gunned the car and screamed back: “So shoot me!”

My life, which used to be, let’s say, three feet wide, is now two inches wide. There are so many things I can’t do. There’s no public transportation, and I don’t drive. My health club is closed so I can’t swim. The mail isn’t being delivered, which is particularly hard for writers. I haven’t received any of the magazines I subscribe to since August. The only movie house in town is closed.

And it’s very difficult to buy things now. It’s like living in Havana, and having to make shopping trips to Miami. I had my Christmas tree tinsel imported from the suburbs because it’s simply not sold in New Orleans—I can’t find it. Little things. You go to store and there’s no milk. You’re constantly spending lots of energy and time just doing basic survival things. I’m not sure that’s what I want to do at this moment in my life.

Plan Baghdad

We in New Orleans have a third-world mentality. A Spanish doctor told me that in Barcelona, when there’s a fire, the Spaniards stay in the building and wait for the firemen to save them while the Moroccans and Latin Americans jump out the windows. This, he said, is a distinguishing third-world characteristic. I said New Orleanians are therefore third-world, because we have no faith in the government to save us. That’s why you saw so many people doing extraordinary things, like borrowing boats, in quotation marks, to go rescue people from rooftops. Or, commandeering school buses.

The authorities in New Orleans have always been so inefficient. Patronage, corruption, poor education, hot weather. But the people are very independent and resilient here, and they usually figure out things themselves. If we’d been left to our own devices, and not forced out, we would have done much better than what happened.

I’m angry that they cut off the water. The water wasn’t potable, I know that, but we could have survived here for many, many days with running water. Why do I think they did that? I think as of Wednesday, there was a sea change. The Mayor said on Wednesday—I was listening to him on the radio—that “we’ve got too many chiefs and not enough Indians.” I think what happened on Wednesday was that FEMA finally tried to take over from Washington. FEMA is now part of Homeland Security. Homeland Security’s been complaining since 9-11 that they don’t have a plan in action to evacuate an American city in case of a bio-chemical terrorist attack. Homeland Security decided to practice on New Orleans, to drive everyone out of here. This is the first time in the history of the world that a major city has ever been emptied, at gunpoint, of all its citizens. They were creating a no-man’s land and, to a large extent, it still is.

Many things made me suspect this. This was not the first time the military’s practiced on us. A year ago, between January 21st and February 17th, there were Marine maneuvers in urban warfare here. Marine choppers flew so close over our homes that they set up a separate hotline for people to complain about structural damage. A convoy of armed trucks came into the Bywater area, announcing over loudspeakers: “We’re friends of the Iraqi people. Stay in your homes.” In English, of course. This was just before Mardi Gras, and we didn’t know if they were making a movie, or if Mardi Gras was starting early, or the Mayor had declared war on Washington. I was complaining constantly to the Military Commander. Later I heard an official say on the radio that the Marines picked New Orleans because “it’s our most foreign city.”

They wanted the whole city empty, even dry areas, like the French Quarter, Uptown, the Marigny, the CBD, where people were happy to stay. Molly’s had opened—Molly’s as selling ice—and if we had stayed, and formed a civic presence, the city would have recovered much more quickly. That’s what we’re used to doing. And yet soldiers were going around in Humvees, pointing guns at people. Making them leave their houses. The most tragic case was of an 87year-old woman who was living in the house she was born in. She had never left New Orleans in her life. She didn’t know anybody elsewhere. And they were forcing her out at gunpoint. She said, “I have food. I have water. I have candles. I’m happy to stay here.” So this absolutely irrational attempt to empty the city of everybody was what devastated New Orleans. It wasn’t really the flooding, or the hurricane. It was the one month of sending everyone out of this city. People put their kids in school elsewhere. They bought houses elsewhere. They started jobs elsewhere. Being forced at gunpoint was such a traumatic experience for many people that they’ve decided they never want to go through that again.

Up until two or three weeks ago, the National Guard controlled the city. One horrible example I have is when my friend Maggie first got back. She called up all of her friends and they decided to meet at Muriel’s, a restaurant at the corner or Jackson Square. They were glad to see each other—table hopping and kissing, then sitting down to eat. Suddenly a Humvee pulled up with four National Guardsmen. They walked into the restaurant armed with M-16s, then stationed themselves in sentry positions along the four walls of the restaurant. And just stood there. Well, of course, the restaurant went silent. People didn’t know what to think, what to say. Then twenty minutes later, the soldiers left. Now what was the point of that? What was the point of a military presence through December? It makes no sense to anybody. This was a humanitarian crisis, but why a military response? Instead of immediately sending in food, water, medical attention, and buses, they sent in soldiers. I call it Plan Baghdad. As if the government can only respond in one way, whether in Baghdad or New Orleans: Halliburton, Blackwater, and the National Guard.

A Necessary Pruning

What was New Orleans like before the hurricane? The murder rate was up to 430 by August 25th. Compare that to 70 murders in Manhattan. The city was spinning out of control. Guns, drugs, violence, and just total incompetence. The public schools had just absolutely collapsed. To the point where the state had brought in an independent auditing firm from New York that said that the schools had been an open candy jar for twenty, twenty-five years. The schools were such a violent mess where girls were raped in the bathrooms and boys were machine-gunned during general assemblies. The public schools, or course, are the measure of the future of a city.

This summer I was in Spain doing my book promotion. But when I returned home, I found out that a good friend of mine had been murdered in a demented love triangle. It involved strip clubs on Bourbon Street, a world like that. After Lark was murdered, I just wanted to go on Canal Street and scream New Orleans stop! Just stop!

That’s what Katrina did. So in some sense, like my friend Joanna says, it’s a necessary pruning. You’ll notice a lot of fallen limbs on the ground from live oaks that have been standing for three or four hundred years. These trees have been pruned by worse hurricanes, a lot of dead wood has been lost over the centuries, and that’s why they’re still standing. Now we have the opportunity to rethink who we are, where we’re from, and where we’re going.

“Hello! He’s talking to you!”

I don’t watch the news. I didn’t hear about Katrina until it was a really big deal. To be honest, I thought the same thing everybody else did: oh, wow, a hurricane that big, well that’s gonna really suck to live through. I mean, I had never seen a hurricane like that before. I had no reason to believe that it would be devastating.

I kept tabs on it. Maybe once a day or so. I’d check on-line news and see what was going on. Once it became evident that everybody was in a lot of trouble, the TV stayed on in my house. We have three TVs. They were all on news channels.

I’ve had a very sheltered life. I don’t know anything about poverty. I don’t know anything about not having options. So, I really thought that the state of Louisiana was going to take care of the situation. I thought that they would get everyone out that couldn’t get out.
I wasn’t working very much during that time. My parents have a lot of concern for other people, so whenever there’s a disaster, they’re glued to the set. We weren’t sleeping very much. We were watching the news constantly.

The Superdome really bothered me. Everyone went there seeking help. They were under the impression that they were going to get it, and there was nothing there. I thought, helicopters will come, the national government–somebody’s got to do something, you know? There are governmental institutions in place to take care of this situation. After a few days, it became apparent that nobody was doing anything. That became distressing.

I didn’t have any money to donate to the Red Cross. I have an uncle who works for the Red Cross, so I started catching him when I could. But he was pretty busy.

They decided to bring people to the Astrodome. My plan was to wait until the volunteer wave calmed down and then go out there. I figured there were tons of volunteers headed out towards the Astrodome.

The night they started bringing in buses, my friend Regina and I had bought some frozen pizza and beer. We sat around watching the news. The reporters said they needed medical help: nurses, people with experience. I don’t have any experience to speak of. But there was one doctor in particular who said, whoever you are, if you’re watching this please, we need help. We need help now.

I sat there listening to him for about a minute before something clicked in my brain. It was like hello! He’s talking to you! You’re watching this and they need help. I was like, oh my god, I have to go down there. I woke my friend up, and I was like, I’m going down to the Astrodome. Do you want to come with me? She said yeah. We called her boyfriend. He has a lot of military experience and would probably do very well in some situations that other people might find disturbing. He said he wanted to go.

At the Astrodome

We got there about 3:00am. There were quite a few volunteers there. They were having trouble organizing the volunteers. Understandably so. It wasn’t clear who was in charge. Of anything. There were people who had official looking badges on, who were just looking very bewildered.

They kept us upstairs in the place where they usually have all the food at the conventions. I don’t remember which building that is in the Astrodome-Reliant Center complex. Every so often they’d come in and someone would say, OK, this is the job I need you for, and I need 5 men and 6 women, or whatever, and preferably African-American.

They needed volunteers to check people in on the bus. They told us that it was going to be real messy, and might smell bad, because they’d been on the bus for so long. That there were old people and young people. They were just preparing us for the worst. I kept trying to volunteer for that job, because I was confidant in my ability to be able to handle that kind of situation, but it was unlikely they were going to take a white woman. They were trying to stick with African-Americans. Or minorities in general. When that wasn’t possible, then they would go with white men first, so I didn’t have much of a chance to do that.

I think “they” were Red Cross. You know, to be honest with you, I’m not sure. I know the Red Cross wasn’t in charge of the Astrodome. Someone else said they were Red Cross. They had nametags on. But they didn’t have anything saying who they were. Someone else said that they were from a church. For all I know, they were volunteers who showed up and just started organizing people. I had no idea who there were. I know that they’d been there for a long time. They were really tired.

Whoever they were, they kept everyone calm. They were not panicked. They talked easily in front of everyone. They did a good job picking people out, getting things done quickly.

Some of the volunteers got angry. They’d been there for a while and they hadn’t been used yet. They started saying that they don’t know what they’re doing. I thought that was weird, you know, from a volunteer’s perspective. You’re there to help. Not to instigate.

I got picked. They didn’t tell us what we were doing. They said OK, follow me, try to stay in a straight line. Of course we get outside the building and the first that happens is it turns into a big crowd. Me and a couple of people were like, hey guys, you know, we were asked to stay in a straight line. Everybody’s like, yeah, whatever. It was kind of funny. It reminded me of high school. But really, they asked us to stay in straight lines because there were crowds everywhere. It was really easy to get lost. If our group was just another crowd, then how are they going to know which volunteers are with us? There were no nametags. There were wristbands, but that was it. We lost a few people along the way. I don’t know where they ended up. There were a couple of instances where somebody came over to the group unbeknownst to whoever was leading us and said, “I need two people to do this!” And took people away.

There were people everywhere. We were stepping over people. Everybody was really tired. There were a few people on their feet, mostly men, kind of wandering around. The women and children were mostly sitting on the grass. There were people getting off buses. People with dogs, and children. Everyone looked very bewildered. Everyone was very tired. The person leading us kept emphasizing that we stay together. It was kind of weird, because you’d see people that needed help. If you left the group to go help someone pick up the stuff that they just dropped, there’s a good chance that you were never going to see that group again. We didn’t know where he was taking us. We tried to stay together.

We were not allowed in the Astrodome. They stopped taking volunteers. It was like Don’t Go There! It was this big forbidden zone. People were stationed in front of the doors to keep people out. I remember kind of peaking inside and seeing people everywhere. Like from all the way up, and all the way down to the bottom. And all the way around. People kind of leaking out the sides of the doors and stuff, you know, and just sitting on the ground. All those people.

There were people vomiting into their hands. There were naked babies, that kind of thing. There was an old man with this really, really old dog. It was sweet. He was this really old man, and he had this really old terrier mix clutched up under his arm. The dog had cataracts, and it was just going along for the ride. This is my buddy! You know? He couldn’t be left behind.

When we got there, we figured out pretty quick that we were at the medical building. Every once in a while, someone came in and said, I need 2 people. All the volunteers shoved towards the front. It was really very strange how chaotic it was. There was one girl in my group who had worked on a cruise ship. They teach you crowd management on cruise ships. She stepped up. She stayed at the front of the door and managed our volunteer group. Which was interesting to me, because I figured that was probably how the people that were organizing us started out, too.

They pulled us in two by two, sometimes four by four. I ended up in the medical records room. This was also the patient waiting room. There was a guy there who had been there for like 48 hours. He was my age. Everyone was real pleasant. All the patients who came through were pleasant. They were tired, but they knew we were trying to help them.

In this room, people came in and someone helped them fill out this form. They’d pass it off to someone who entered the information into a computer. They passed it off to us, and we filed it alphabetically. Whenever the doctor was going to see someone, they came to us. We’d find the file. It was organized. It was probably 4:00am. There weren’t a whole lot of people there. They were really shortstaffed, as far as medical staff goes, but, the organization of it was going pretty well.

My friend felt sick. I had to take her home. We left around 6:00am.

I went back about 7:00am. They didn’t check me or anything; I had a volunteer bracelet on, so they were just like, come on in. I went back to that area.

In that one hour, everything fell apart. Nothing was organized. The doctors and nurses were all digging through the files. There were files laying on top of files. Where’s this file? And where’s so in so’s file? There was a 19-year old boy who had been there since well before I had gotten there. He had on a pair of old cloth pants and they were tied with a rope. He had a lot of bad abdominal pain. He still hadn’t been seen because nobody could find his file. Nobody would like fill out a new one for him. There were doctor’s writing prescriptions before they were actually seeing patients. We’d get a patient who would come to us with a prescription and would tell us the pharmacy said I need a file to go with this, and they didn’t have a file, because the doctor wrote them a prescription for whatever they said they needed. That was difficult.

The doctors were real testy. That didn’t help. Everyone needed something right away. My friend’s boyfriend ended up checking people into the medical building. He ended up in a better place, because it was just him. He filled out forms for people.

I tried to reorganize everything. There were two other people there who were not medical staff, who were just volunteers. No one told them what they were supposed to be doing. I got them together and said, hey, let’s try to organize these boxes and the files.

The number of files was growing, and growing, and growing. We kept trying to reorganize the boxes. A doctor or a nurse would come along and dig for their own file. We would put our hands over them and be like, please ask us for the file, because it’s really important that you don’t confuse all of these; there are 10 people in line behind you and if they all do the same thing, you know… But they were in such big hurries, because everyone was so, you know, all the patients were in dire need of attention.

How did it smell? It smelled like bodies. Like sweat and piss and shit. And vomit. There were a lot of homeless people in there, too. I don’t know what the far-reaching effects of it were, but I think it was positive that all these homeless people got medical attention. There were a lot of them. I mean, I’m assuming they were homeless. They didn’t have just a week’s worth of dirt on them.

It smelled like anti-bacterial gel. I hate the smell. But there were people going around and squirting everyone’s hands pretty frequently. When the food got there, the food smelled got all mixed in with it too. Barbecue. I think Cisco catered it. Brisket and mashed potatoes. The smell of food was making me sick, so I didn’t go by the table.

I used the bathroom the first time and it was all fine and dandy. It was a little dirty, but nothing big. Nobody was cleaning the bathrooms. When I went in the second time, the toilets, all of them, were plugged up to overflowing. Some of them were covered in trashbags, overflowing to the floor. Like, don’t use this toilet. And the others, you basically had to just go in a toilet that was filling up.

There was a mom who kept calling out her son’s name, while he was in the stall, and he was like, yeah, OK, I’m here. There were instances where this was reversed, there was a kid who was like, Mom, Mom, are you still there?

Some people didn’t have shoes on. They tried to wash themselves off in the stalls, using the sink water. No one knew what to do, because we didn’t know if there were even any supplies. We kept trying to find a way to clean the bathrooms. We didn’t have any buckets or anything. Eventually, I’m sure they got cleaned. But I don’t know what everyone was doing. I imagine eventually just going outside.

I was there till afternoon. I was about to leave and this old woman came up to me. She had a prescription in her hand. I walked her over to try and find her file. There was no file. I walked her back to the front to get her a new one. A social worker was there and she was like, what are you doing?! And I was like, I’m trying to help this woman get her file, so that she can get her medicine. And she was like, you need to go to the file room! I told her, I’ve been there for 12 hours. There’s no file there. She’s like, this isn’t procedure. This isn’t how we do it. And I was just like, well, what’s the procedure? I kept asking people, whose in charge here? No one knew. I kept asking all these doctors and nurses: Who are you answering to? Whose in charge? They were like, I don’t know, I don’t know. I had never been a volunteer before. I didn’t know that that was pretty normal in an emergency situation. Eventually I just had to leave because I didn’t feel like I had the skills that were necessary to help in that department, in the thick of everything.

The Astrodome was busting at the seams. There was all that stuff on the news about shootings in the Astrodome. Nobody knew what to believe. People in the Astrodome were hearing that and getting freaked out. But everyone was supportive. If people saw your wristband, they’d be like, hey right on! And these were the evacuees, you know. They would ask you if you knew where something was, and thank you for being there, that kind of thing. That was cool.

I tried to go back one other time. It was still really disorganized. After that, I stayed home. I think I slept for like two days. It was a really exhausting experience for me. I have a lot of admiration for my friend’s boyfriend, who was unfazed by the whole thing. He was really helpful to everyone, and it didn’t really seem to take that much out of him.

Telling the Story

I had never really been in a crisis situation before, not like that. I was really affected by it. I tried to tell a couple of people about it, but it wasn’t really enough.

The discrepancy between what I saw at the Astrodome and what I heard on the news really bothered me. I didn’t feel like the news stations concentrated on what the real story was. I realize in hindsight that they were trying to keep everyone positive. I mean, you can’t broadcast what was actually going on there. That disturbed me. I thought people needed to know that these people were in dire straits. That we were being warned to stay out of the Astrodome, just because everyone was so desperate, you know? Everyone was really sick.

One of the times I tried to leave, there was a reporter for FOX News set up in the data entry room of the medical building. This was like a reporter who supposedly has a reputation for “hard-hitting reporting.” And she was set up in the data-entry room, which was like not anywhere near where any of the sick people were. Interviewing volunteers. I was disgusted with that. There were definitely places they weren’t letting media go.

I understand to some extent; you want to protect peoples’ privacy. Those people have been through a lot; you don’t want cameras in their faces. But I was disturbed. No matter what you saw on the news, all you knew was that there were people there. You didn’t really know what was going on.

I needed to write something. I needed to have a witness to all of this for my own personal reasons. So I wrote an email, and sent it out.

I got mixed responses. I got a couple of people who thanked me for my honesty. My friend Andrew sent it to a friend of his, who has an online magazine, and it got published. But I got a lot of negative responses as well. People said that’s not the way that it was. That when they were there, it was very organized. I said send your own letter out that tells everybody how great it was. It was not great for me. I’m not going to pretend like it was. It was not a horrible experience; it was a very trying experience. It was really awful to see people in that much trouble and to know that they had had to go to another state in order to receive help. That really pissed me off.

I felt like I understood the need for being positive about it, but I didn’t feel like I needed to sugarcoat. I did sugarcoat. I didn’t talk about what happened to my friend’s boyfriend, how this woman was like, can you help me, please, [her hands cupped in front of her face] and he’s like, sure! What do you need? And she brought her hands down and she had vomited into them. And didn’t know what to do with it. It’s like, nobody’s going to talk about that shit because it’s disgusting. People don’t want to hear about it. I felt like part of the problem was that people don’t want to hear about it.

Saturday

Saturday was the first time we realized that Katrina was taking a bead on New Orleans. That morning, Katrina intensified from a Category 2 to a Category 5. At one point 175mph winds. Just unimaginable. 175mph wind is like a tornado. It just would have scoured the earth. When they reported that Katrina had achieved 175mph winds, and the lower limit of Category Five was 155mph winds, I think a lot of us went whoa. This was the real deal.

I was living on a boat, out in the Marina. I did a little bit of preparation, with the intention that I would finish Sunday morning, then go to the hospital for the Code Gray. We have an activation team that goes into the hospital and gets locked down for the duration. I had done that a half-dozen times before. No big deal. But this one seemed a little more worrisome. Saturday night I was going to have some friends come over. I called them up and cancelled.

I went to sleep about 8:00o’clock, reading a book. About 9:30pm, I woke up. The air conditioning was off. It was hot. I said, “Son of a bitch, what’s the matter?” I realized the electricity was off. I got up and noticed that the electricity was out on the whole dock. I walked up to the harbor master’s office. He said: “We’re shutting down. We’re leaving.” I ask, “What do you mean you’re shutting down?” He says, “Doc. This one’s going to be a bad one.” I probably thought it was going to be a bad one, too, but I wasn’t ready to completely give in to the idea that I might not see my boat again.

I spent the rest of the night there, tossing and turning. I was unable to sleep. Not so much because of the heat, but because of the concern going over the scenarios in my head.

Sunday

I woke up early Sunday morning. I went over some last minute details of how I wanted to prepare my boat. I started grabbing momentos. I started to wonder whether I was going to see my boat again. I knew what hurricanes had done in Florida and other places to marinas. So I grabbed up a few pictures of my kids.

I looked over and I saw a picture of my dad. My dad had been deceased for about twenty years. There was a picture of him standing next to his boat. The only picture I had like it, from when he was a younger man. I was very fond of it. I said, “Oh, I’ve got to get that picture.” I started to take it down. Then I said, “No, why I am taking this down?” I somehow reasoned that his spirit would watch over Creola. “Creola” was the name of my boat. I left his picture there, and I walked away. I thought, hell, if the boat goes down, at least he would want to go down with the ship.

I arrived at Charity around 8 or 9 in the morning. Got my activation bracelet–a little bracelet that tells people you belong there. I went up the ICU. We had been through this drill before. It turns out to be a party. People arrived with lots of food: chips and dips, hot dogs. We took over our call room, the little family area/waiting room. We put down air mattresses. The air conditioning was going. It was very comfortable.

I was there as the Medical Director. There was an attending physician there named Francesco Simeone. Francesco’s job was to focus on taking care of the patients, so I brought some work with me to do. We were getting all the news broadcasts. Everything was non-stop Katrina, bearing down on New Orleans.

We sent home a lot of family members that were staying in the hospital. Only one or two family members were allowed with each patient. We had toyed with the idea of closing down the hospital, but the hospital had been a place of refuge for the city of New Orleans for so long, that we didn’t think we could close it down. They’d done a mandatory evacuation order, but you could just sense that there were maybe a hundred thousand people that could not, would not, evacuate. The Superdome was filling up. We didn’t think we could close a hospital when there were so many people who might try to turn to the hospital as a place of sanctuary.

Sunday evening was very routine. I did a little bit of preparation. Not a lot. Mostly watched newscasts and worked on my computer.
The rain started to come down. The wind started to blow. I went and lied down in our call room.

Monday

I remember waking up about midnight. The wind blew pretty hard and the windows started to rattle. I could feel the building shake–a big, massive, concrete building that had been a civil defense shelter during the Cold War.

From 1:00am to 3:00am, we heard windows popping out of buildings and crashing to the ground. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I couldn’t tell where the windows were popping out of—our building, or the building next to us. I just knew that they were popping and crashing. It was all very exciting.

We first lost power right around daybreak. The emergency generators kicked on. For reasons I still don’t understand, the power went out again on our side of the hospital. We were plunged into darkness. There were very few windows in the ICU. The flashlights popped out. We’d done this drill a hundred times so four people ran to the bedside of a patient, grabbed a bag and started squeezing the bag. We had about 11 patients in the Medical ICU. Nine of them were on breathing machines, mechanical ventilators–all of them very sick. Each person would grab a bag. I went around and I checked with each one. I went from bed to bed to bed, checking to make sure everybody was OK.

I remember getting around to bed 11, to Hunter Reeves. Hunter, this 23-year-old kid, he had Good Pasture’s Syndrome. Good Pasture’s Syndrome is a disease that causes you to have hemorrhaging in your lungs, and kidney failure. He was sent to us maybe 2 or 3 days before the hurricane, from a small hospital in Independence. They sent him to us because we’re an academic medical center. Hunter was on a ventilator with, on a breathing machine with a tube down his throat, on a very high oxygen concentration because of his lung failure. His respiratory failure was very severe. He was also getting dialysis.

There was a woman, Celeste Widell, who was a respiratory therapist. I said, Celeste, are you OK? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine. I left. Came back about twenty minutes later. Are you OK, are you OK—yeah yeah yeah. Then I got to Celeste. Why don’t you let me give you a break? No, I’m fine. Alright. Came back an hour later. Got up to Hunter’s room and I said, Celeste, you’re still here? Why don’t you take a break? Let me give you a break. No, I’m OK.

It kind of gave me a little chill. I realized, whoa, Celeste wasn’t going to let anyone mess with Hunter. That was her patient. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I really think that it had something to do with the fact that Celeste was a single mom. Her only son, her everything, Christopher, had died the year before. Sudden cardiac death, during football practice. Very sad. She was devastated by that. Took a long time before she could come back to work. This was a chance for her to feel like a mother again. A protector. No one, me included, was going to get in the way of that. I think it was people taking ownership for individual patients was why we did as well as we did.

The eyewall passed the hospital probably 8:00am. The building shook in the face of the wind. The windows rattled. The windows above us blew out. The rain poured in. The rain water soaked down to the acoustic ceiling tiles. The tiles saturated like wet sponges. They started falling off the ceiling, right on top of the patients. The light fixtures fell out of the ceiling. It was a very exciting time. We were in the dark. The electricity had gone out. So Monday morning was just an adrenaline rush. We could see outside signs and trees being blown down. Just the ferocity of it all.

The rest of Monday was a struggle to keep patients alive. Most of the equipment in the ICU continued to operate, although it was alarming that it was on battery backup. We bagged the patients—actually squeezing the bags—because the ventilators were not happy very long on battery backup. We could see on the other side of the hospital that there was still electricity. Our side was black.
A few of our residents found some extension cords and strung together 300 feet. We plugged eight ventilators into this, using surge protectors and all these little multi-port extension cords. We stretched it as far as we could toward the other side of the hospital. It’s a huge hospital. We got to the middle; we couldn’t quite get to the other side. We plugged in to the only outlet that we could reach with our extension cords that had electricity: the Coke machine. We were able to power up a few of our ventilators that way and get back into business.

We had about an inch of water in the ICU. We started to clean up. Mopping up an ICU with an inch of water is a big deal, so we said, gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a wet vac. We called our housekeepers, and they brought over a wet vac. They started wet vacing up. Well, they had a long extension on the wet vac, and started in the central hallway, and started moving toward the ICU, cleaning up the water. At about 2:00pm, the power went out for our ventilators. The extension cord power went out–only to find out that the janitors had unplugged our extension cord to plug in a wet vac, not realizing what it went to.

We plugged back in. We had power, via that extension cord, for most of the day.

We did have small portable generators. They were kept in the storage facility at the hospital, but they themselves did not have fuel. The fuel was not stored on site. So we had these emergency generators in boxes that were totally useless. They were sitting in the hallway. We had plans, if we had had fuel, to bring them out to the fire escape and fire them up, and we could have plugged our extension cords in there instead of running all the way across the hospital. But we weren’t too worried about it at the time. We did have this one outlet that was working more often than not.

The patients were doing OK. We experimented with different types of artificial ventilators. Some of them were gas driven. Gas-driven works on a compressed oxygen source. We had oxygen stored in liquid oxygen cylinders. That continued to work throughout Katrina. The actual compressed air requires a compressor. That failed when the electricity went out. As long as we still had power on the other side—most things seemed to work. The suctions still seemed to work.

By Monday afternoon, the telephone service grew weak. The cell networks were overloaded. They were still working, but it was hard to get an outside line. You got a busy signal all the time. The water pressure was still on, but it grew weak as well. Systems were starting to fail.

Monday was so adrenaline filled that when the wind started to die down, we started high-fiving each other. We just survived something really bad. The streets were dry. We thought we’d be going home Tuesday morning. We still had our extension cords plugged in, just kind of powering up our side of the hospital.

Monday night, the power went out again. We chased the extension cord—it was still plugged in, and we realized that the power was out in the whole hospital. We didn’t realize then what had happened. As the sun came up Tuesday morning, we realized that the city was flooding from every direction. That’s when the story really begins.

Tuesday

I remember waking up around 3:00am. When the sound of all the electrical equipment goes dead—you know how white noise puts you to sleep? The absence of white noise wakes you up. When everything got quiet, I immediately snapped to, ran in the ICU, and started the drill all over again. Squeeze the bags, try to troubleshoot the extension cord, figure out what’s happening. This time, it was obvious the other side of the hospital was black.

The radio said something about a levee break. Not until sunrise did we realize that the city was flooding from every direction. The generators, or their connections, or circuitry, or whatever, had been submerged. We figured we weren’t going to get out that day. We still had aspirations of getting out soon.

I went down to a meeting that we had of our emergency operations. We discussed our evacuation plans. We were told that we were going to leave the hospital that morning. FEMA was due to arrive with trucks, boats, whatever, to evacuate all of the patients. When they arrived, we were to stand down. I remember saying that well, I’m sorry, but most of these people who are going to be working for FEMA are not critical care personnel. They’re not critical care physicians. Some of them may be nurses, some of them may not be, some may be doctors, some may not be. We are struggling to keep these patients alive. We’re trained to do this. We know the patients. And we are struggling to keep them alive. I don’t think it’s a good idea to turn these patients over. With no more resources than we have, I think we ought to go with the patients. “Oh, no, no, no, no. That’s not the way these things operate. When they show up here, you’re just to stand down.”

We prepared for FEMA to arrive. We went back to our respective areas and started packing up the patients. We taped them to spine boards. We created medical records. We put that in a little plastic bag and taped that to the forearm of each patient.
Monday night, we had lost our internet. We had already lost any television communication. We still had portable radios. Most of the telephones didn’t work. Ours still worked. But every number we called had a busy signal. The Police, the Fire Department, Health and Hospitals, the Governor’s Office, State Police, the National Guard—everybody had a busy number. We figured the circuits were blown. Very few people could get cell phone calls out. Occasionally someone could get an outside call. On Sunday we all had five bars. By Tuesday most of us had none. A few of us had one or two. We lost our internet, so we had difficulty communicating with the outside world. In fact, we could not communicate with the outside world. We couldn’t even communicate with University Hospital, which was right down the street.

All of the infusion pumps, defillibrators, monitors, and batteries started to fail. The infusion pumps control the rate of patients’ medications, so nurses went back to counting drops again. It’s a skill that a lot of people had forgotten. We didn’t have water to bathe our patients. More importantly, we didn’t have water to flush the toilets.

The first thing people do when there’s no water to flush a toilet is run to the bathroom, because you don’t want to be the last guy in there. There were probably 1300 people in the hospital. There was about 300 and some odd patients. There’s 600 staff, and visitors that stayed with the patients, and a lot of the staff, had dependents, had their own families with them. So we had about 1300 people in there. Within hours, the bathrooms were just untenable. There was solid liquid waste in every commode, and no way to flush them, so they became off-limits. And of course people do what they’ve got to do. They started urinating in stairwells, in plastic bottles. They defecated in cardboard boxes. They did whatever they had to do. Eventually we got some porto-lets. I’m not sure where those came from. They must have been in some warehouse somewhere, because those showed up. I’m not sure how they even got to our floor, because the elevators weren’t working. But we had one on our floor. We also had little plastic bags, and little bedside commodes that people could use, so that was an improvement. The stench was horrible.

The sun came out. It got very, very hot. The east side of the hospital, where the NICU was unbearable, and the windows wouldn’t open. We put chairs through the windows and created our own ventilation. I think other people did that around the hospital as well.
The inner hallways had no windows. The walls were a little cool to the touch, but the air was very, very humid, so you got all this condensation that would form on the walls. Walking down the hallway in pitch black, you could just feel the air and the stench. You touch the wall and it was like being in a dungeon.

Needless to say, FEMA didn’t come Tuesday morning. FEMA didn’t come on Tuesday afternoon, didn’t come on Wednesday. Wednesday afternoon. Thursday. To make a long story short, FEMA didn’t come until Friday afternoon. But we didn’t know it at the time. We were expecting this evacuation. So at first, our posture was really, let’s wait. Let’s wait to be rescued.

In retrospect, that was a mistake. Waiting for someone to help you is always a mistake. It was a mistake for several reasons. One, is it wastes valuable time. But two, it creates a sense of helplessness. From that is borne despair and fear. Having a mission is very empowering. Having a goal distracts you, keeps you from thinking about what else is going on around you.

So Tuesday, we just waited. Morale started to tank. No one had bathed in a couple of days. We didn’t have water. We didn’t have electricity; we were squeezing the bags on the ventilators. The back-up generators that we had didn’t have fuel.

We realized that we weren’t going to get out on Tuesday. Rumblings started in the ICU. That nobody cared about us, that we’d been forgotten.

We continued to take people from the community. Patients, family members, and healthy people continued to come to the hospital. At some point, they just overburdened the system. We did turn some people away. But when you see kids and old ladies, there’s nothing you can do but accept them. We continued to increase our numbers well into Wednesday or Thursday. Those people were processed down in the emergency room– which had been moved from the ground floor, up to the second floor, to the auditorium–then vertically transported to other areas of the hospital, carrying each one up the stairs. Some cases, 12 flights of stairs. That’s where the SICU (Surgical Intensive Care Unit) was, on the 12th floor.

Food was not an issue on Tuesday or Wednesday. The hospital had enough food for 48 hours. That was the disaster plan. We had ravioli. We did get food airdropped toward the end of the week, if you call Spam food. Vienna sausages. Granola bars. And Dasani water. So a little slice of Spam, on a granola bar, with a little sprig of Dasani water was just perfect. We didn’t have good food, but I don’t think food was on the minds of most people. We had just enough to keep us alive, and we had bottled water.

We didn’t have any water to wash our hands. We did have a lot of Purell, which I now call liquid gold. It was the only modicum of sanitation we had. You could clean your hands with it. You could mousse your hair with it. You could use it for deodorant.

Tuesday night was unbearable. No way to get any sleep in the hospital because it was so hot and humid. Someone discovered that the roof was a great place to be. So several of us went up to the roof.

It was a starry, starry night. Cool, a little bit of a breeze blowing. No clouds in the sky. First time I saw stars in New Orleans in my lifetime. It was an eerie feeling. You could look out and see the reflection of the stars on the water. You could make out the outlines of buildings, that the whole city was underwater, like a modern day Atlantis. Every now and then you saw off in the distance a flashlight, or heard the siren on a police car on the elevated interstate. But really there was nobody around the hospital.

Looking up at the heavens, seeing the starlight on the water below, it was a little bit like being in Venice, except in the country, because there was no light pollution. It was quiet. There was something so comforting about it, the solitude, the heavens above. But you kept saying to yourself: there’s something wrong with this picture. Because you could see there were all these unlit buildings around you. And you just knew what a paradox this was, the fact that it was so comforting, yet so distressing at the same time. It was like being sandwiched between the heavens above and the hell below. It would be like being in Iraq, in a firestorm, and then being able to step out of that, for just a couple of hours, into Eden. Knowing you had to go back in.

The rodents were also escaping the flood waters, so there was the occasional rat running across your mattress. It would wake you up, but it didn’t bother you. I think they realized something was happening to their hometown, too.

Wednesday

The sun came up and it was another hot day. We were told that FEMA was coming. Shortly after our morning meeting, we heard on the radio that we had been evacuated. Morale hit an all-time low.

We heard reports that there were armed gangs. Looting. Lawlessness. People became fearful. People thought that hospital was going to be stormed by armed gangs looking for drugs, looking for whatever. You’ve subsequently learned that most of those reports were just vicious rumors. That there was some lawlessness, but it wasn’t on the scale that was reported. The total sum of people murdered in the Superdome I think was zero. The same is true at the convention center. The only dead bodies there were people who had either died outside and were dragged in. A couple of drug overdoses, but there was little violence. There was some looting. But it wasn’t on the scale that was reported.

Those reports made people fearful. We had nurses who started to cry that we were going to die there, that nobody cared about us. We’d been forgotten. That what we should do is leave. That was the lowest point I think in the whole experience for everybody.
We realized we had to do something. It was a mistake to sit around and wait to be rescued. If we were going to get out of there, we were going to have to get ourselves out.

We formulated several plans, almost in parallel, of how we were going to evacuate people. The medical intensive care unit had its own plan. We couldn’t call anybody—not the police, the fire department. We couldn’t call anybody–except for one person who answered his phone. That was Wolf Blitzer on CNN. One of the residents was able to get a live feed on Wolf Blitzer’s show and let him know that we had not been evacuated. We were still there and we had all these sick patients.

The President of a helicopter company picked up on that and called us on this phone. He told us that he would send us helicopters if we could find a place for him to land. He was already doing evacuations at Tulane Hospital. You could see there were helicopters everywhere. Hundreds of helicopters buzzing around the city.

We went around looking for places for the helicopters to land. The Superdome, we thought, was under siege. Wasn’t, but we didn’t know that. That was the only commercial heliport in the area. We looked around at University Hospital. I went down the street by boat, talked to them down there. They thought the building could not support any helicopters. No one could land on top of Charity Hospital because it’s an uneven rooftop. We learned then that helicopters were landing on top of a parking garage over at Tulane Hospital. Someone thought we could use that to evacuate our own patients.

We formulated this plan to evacuate our four sickest patients. About this same time, I remember walking down the hallway and kicking the boxed-up generators. How could we have generators but not have fuel? Then one of the respiratory therapists said, “Well Doc, I’ll getcha some fuel.” I said, “Well, how are you going to do that, Nelson?” Nelson Paige. He said, “Doc, I’ve got a Mississippi credit card.” I just dismissed him. I didn’t even think about it. He came back about an hour later with a jerry can full of diesel. I said, “Nelson, where did that come from?” He said, “I bought it with my Mississippi credit card.” I said, “Nelson, what’s a Mississippi credit card?” He takes out a hammer and a screw driver. He and a couple of other people had waded around the hospital, found some stalled trucks, and just banged open the fuel caps and siphoned out fuel for the generators. We were able to power up these little generators, which did take a load off of some of our personnel who had been bagging for hours.

Hunter Reeves was in bad shape. I think Hunter was last dialyzed on Friday or Saturday. It was Wednesday. One of the things that happens when your kidneys fail is your potassium level goes way up. We had no idea what his potassium level was. Things were, to say the least, desperate for Hunter. We were barely able to keep him alive. We had a couple of other patients we were barely able to keep alive.

So, we took Hunter. We also took this kid who had lymphoma, kidney failure, liver failure, and hypotension. We took two patients from the neurosurgical ICU who were in bad shape: both of them had closed head injuries. One of them had had a pulmonary embolism. Both were very sick and on breathing machines.

So this guy said he’d send four helicopters and we decided to take those four patients. He said, “I can get you helicopters over there. We’re going to leave from the New Orleans International Airport, we’re gonna have a helicopter come every fifteen minutes, but you’ve got to get them over there [to the Tulane Parking Garage].” So we were like, how are we going to get them over there? The water was about five or six feet deep between us and the hospital. We had seen some big National Guard trucks negotiating the flood waters. But they weren’t around.

Somebody went out and found a National Guardsman who had a truck, and said look, you’ve got to come help us. He said OK. We brought the first four patients down the stairs, all six or seven flights of stairs, and loaded them in the back of this truck.
We proceed to Tulane’s parking garage in the flood waters. The sun was getting low. Halfway there, Hunter’s blood pressure dropped. His oxygenation level dropped. We made an empiric diagnosis that he’d collapsed his lung. He’d already collapsed his right lung. He had a tube in his side. So halfway over there, using flashlights, we put a tube into his left lung. What you do is make a cut about two inches long on the side of his chest with a scalpel and poke a big clamp through his chest wall into the space on the side of his lung. It’s a surgical procedure. We did that without any anesthetic. We didn’t have any anesthetic or any sedation, so people were holding Hunter down. Thank God he doesn’t remember this. We did this surgical procedure on him in the back of a truck in the middle of swamp with flashlights. It was just the craziest thing. But his blood pressure came up. So did his oxygenation.

We got to the garage. We waited there a long time, under instruction from the people who were operating the garage. They said, “Wait down here until your helicopters get here.” In all the confusion, the helicopters came and went. They didn’t realize that they were our helicopters because they were evacuating their own patients.

At sunset, we were able to get Hunter onto a helicopter. It was an air ambulance: it had a critical care nurse, and a critical care technician. We felt really good about that. He flew off. To make a long story short, he survived.

We had the other three patients in the back of this big truck. It’s dark. The commercial pilot said they can’t fly after dark. They don’t have any way to see unlit buildings and towers. We were screwed. I thought I was going to have to bring these three patients back to Charity Hospital. We waited. And waited. It was probably 10:00 pm, 11 pm. When I found out that the helicopters had come and gone and had taken other patients, I was pissed off.

I was planning to bring the patients back, but there was this guy over there, Jim Holland, who was able to get a Blackhawk helicopter to land. These military helicopters used night vision equipment and they had no problems negotiating the dark. But they didn’t have any medical technicians. We had to fly with the patients.

As we lifted off, I saw the city below me with all of these beautiful stars just shining off of the water. It was a very weird feeling. The noise was deafening. I couldn’t speak for three weeks after that, just from screaming over the roar of these helicopters. We flew for about fifteen minutes.

When we landed and the doors opened, it was like the Emerald City. There were lights everywhere. I couldn’t figure out where we were. I could tell I was on this interstate somewhere, and I later surmised it was out near Clearview, on the 10. I could see ambulances everywhere. All these resources and no coordination. I said, “Show me who’s in charge here.” They took me over to a guy who was an ambulance driver. I said, “You’re in charge?” He said, “I guess so.” No command and control structure. So I said, “Look, I’ve got all these critically ill patients we need to get out.” We loaded them on the ambulances. We wound up sending one of the docs with one of the patients. I said, “How long have you been here?” He said, “Three days.” I asked: “What have you been doing here for three days?” He said, “We’ve been waiting for patients.” They had just been sitting there waiting for patients to somehow get there from wherever they were.

After we offloaded our patients, we jumped back in the helicopter and flew back downtown. We wound up getting back to Charity Hospital sometime around 1:00am.

I slept on the roof.

Thursday

I went down to the morning meeting and shared the story of how we evacuated our first four patients. Up until that point, the administration’s policy had been, let’s just wait. Remember that the decision to take those patients out was made by us, by the NICU, not by the administration. So when we shared our success of the evacuation of those four patients, and I told them that this was a resource we could use again, if we wanted to, that was embraced.

Three of us went over Thursday morning and talked to the Tulane Hospital administration—actually the HCA administration, about bringing over all of our critically-ill patients and evacuating them. We got a thumbs-up. We were given instructions to bring them all over at one time.

We gathered up all of the fire department boats and National Guard trucks we could find. We loaded patients into the back. We brought them over to Tulane’s parking garage. We set up a mini-intensive care unit on the roof-top, or just below the rooftop, just below where the helicopters were landing. We had 30 some-odd patients up there, all the one’s that had respiratory failure, being bagged by hand, by nurses, therapists, and residents.

Watching all of these doctors deliver care without technology was a wonderful, wonderful thing. I struggled to understand at the time: why was it so moving? I think there were several reasons. Everywhere you looked there were outward signs of compassion: of touching, of holding, of petting. Emotions that I would have thought would have been reserved for a kinder, gentler time. I would have thought that, in the midst of all this chaos, people would just be running around doing things, and wouldn’t have time to stop, to talk to a patient, to stop and pet a patient. But just the opposite occurred. Everywhere you looked, there were nurses and doctors petting patients. Men don’t do a lot of hugging, but there were men hugging each other, patting each other on the back, and I said, gee, why is this? And then it was so obvious to me, it was almost like one of those duh moments, that for a nurse or a doctor to express compassion to a patient, to touch a patient, it’s therapeutic not just for the patient, but for the caregiver. I think we were all scared. Not scared that we were going to die, but scared because we were trusted to take care of these patients, and honestly, we didn’t know how it was going to turn out. Because we were scared, we needed that touch, and we got it by giving it.

I didn’t realize how much technology shrouds the patient. We cover them in this veneer of technology and insulate them from ourselves. They become diagnoses, the guy with Good Pasture’s, the woman with the stroke, the man with the appendicitis. When we lost that technology, it was almost like a little blossom erupted into this beautiful flower of a human being. We discovered the humanism in medicine again. And that very act seemed to make us more human. Made us vulnerable. Put us on the same level as our patients. No better, no worse, just different. Different responsibilities. But all equal.

It was interesting to watch the most senior physicians, our Chief of Neurosurgery, a Boyd professor, the highest academic rank you can achieve in the LSU system, sitting on the concrete, squeezing a bag on a patient, petting her on the forehead, not asking for anyone to help him, to relieve him, doing what he was moved to do. That day, that Thursday on the rooftop, was singularly the absolute pinnacle of my experience during Katrina. It was just a beautiful thing to watch.

We stayed up there with our patients a lot longer than I hoped, because of problems getting them evacuated. We finally got the last patients off about midnight. I lied down to nap sometime around 1:00am. It was too late to go back to Charity, so we just slept on the concrete, on top of the parking garage there. Most of the Tulane people had been evacuated by this time. Late in the day on Thursday, we started to send out some of our doctors and nurses. Since we were getting lower on patients, they became a liability—more mouths to feed, more people to take care of. We sent them out with a patient. They got on a helicopter and just cared for a patient, and didn’t come back. Some of them though, you couldn’t get rid of them. You’d send them out, and they’d come right back. Those are the people I want to go to battle with.

At 3:00am, I snapped to. There was this deafening roar moving through the building. I opened my eyes and the sky was bright red. In that moment between sleep and wakefulness, I thought, oh my god, they’re bombing us. I thought that the Feds decided that they couldn’t fix it, so they’d nuke it. We jumped up and realized that a plant right on the waterfront exploded. What a weird moment that was. As if the city wasn’t broken enough, now it was burning. I was heartbroken.

Friday

The sun came up. As if to add insult to injury, the wind blew smoke from the fire right to the parking garage. It smelled like petrochemicals. Fortunately, it didn’t last long.

About 7:00am, we waded back to the hospital. I talked to some of the administrators. We still had some red-tag patients left, but they weren’t critical. There were other critically-ill in the hospital that could not be evacuated by land—broken femurs, and the like, so we loaded them up on boats and brought them back to Tulane’s parking garage.

Everyone was gone. There was a single helicopter on the rooftop, a police helicopter. I begged and pleaded with this guy. He managed to get on his radio and get Chinooks to land on the rooftop. They took away the last of the patients.

There was a young kid that had come over Thursday night. His name was Ross Kraft. He was a young Marine who was on leave from Iraq. When the storm rolled through, he ran to New Orleans, got on the first helicopter he could get on, and flew in to the belly of the beast to help out. He single-handedly provided security for us, and did some other things, too. There was nobody around. There was still this sense that this wasn’t a secure environment, although I personally never saw any lawlessness. This guy could hot wire trucks. We actually had to have a vehicle take patients from the ramp, where the boats would offload, all the way to the rooftop. He was able to break into a truck, or something, using his Marine Corps skills.

So we flew out about fifteen patients on Friday. Beginning about 10:00am, finishing sometime in the early afternoon, with a big Chinook carrying the last of the patients off. At about 3:00pm, we returned to the hospital.

FEMA had arrived.

They were like cowboys. They had an armed guard with a shotgun, riding up on the bow, and these were big, giant airboats. They came in there like the cavalry. Dozens at a time. With tractor-trailer trucks.

There was a long line of employees getting on to these boats. Everybody was really excited that we were leaving. The ambulatory patients, the psychiatric patients, were being loaded into big tractor-trailer trucks. The water had dropped by a foot, so there was only about four feet of water outside the hospital. You could drive a big tractor-trailer truck there.

Within 2 hours, the entire hospital was empty.

I caught a boat over to a staging area on Loyola Avenue. I found a bus that was heading up to Baton Rouge. The sun started to set. Everybody on the bus, they were all of my colleagues, employees of the hospital, were hoopla-ing, very excited, and I remember feeling very melancholy, that I had probably left Charity Hospital for the last time. I was so proud of what Charity Hospital had done. Charity Hospital had served for, since, as an institution since the 1700s. That building itself had been there since 1939, serving the underserved of the city of New Orleans with great distinction. For a lot of people it was the only resource they ever had. Born there, received all their health care there, died there. And then it died, doing exactly what it was supposed to do—taking care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves. And did it in a wonderfully heroic way. I remember feeling very sad, sitting back, in my bus seat, looking out over the marsh as we drove towards Baton Rouge on the interstate, watching the sunset, thinking that the sun was setting on an era. Things would be different for me, going forward.

We were brought to the Belmont Hotel, which is a little deserted hotel. We had sandwiches, and a place to sleep. I actually didn’t sleep there, I knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone who had a grandmother who had just gone into a nursing home, whose house was abandoned, and I wound up sleeping on a mattress on the floor, in some stranger’s house.

Saturday

I picked up my cell phone. I had five bars. I called my nephew and said, “Come get me!” He asked, “Where are you?” I said, “I don’t know!” I knew I was in Baton Rouge, but I had no idea where.

He picked me up. He said, “Ben, I just want to tell you I think Creola’s floating.” I said, “No, impossible.” He showed me a satellite picture, and sure enough, it looked like Creola was still alive. We went to Madisonville and talked some guys into giving us a boatride across the lake. We went in to New Orleans, and sure enough, there was Creola, floating like a cork. I truly was teary-eyed when I saw her floating there. I got on board, and I just walked around, and touched her. She had a few bumps and bruises, and within five minutes we had the engine fired up and cast off and we were out of there.

The Present

I wound up in Baton Rouge. I didn’t have a home to go to. My kids–one of them sent off to Houston, one of them up to Natchitoches. I needed to make some money for the university, so I wound up in Baton Rouge, and this woman, Nadine Russell, had told a friend of mine that she wanted to help out some refugees, and he told me I should go talk to her. Never knew her. I introduced myself. She was very lovely, very charming. Said sure, you can have a room. I’ve been there for two and a half months.

How do I like being a boarder? Well, it’s not a tough gig. She lives in a 10,000 square foot house. I have my own maid. I have my own cook. I have a warm bed. Live in the country club. It could be worse. She’s a very lovely lady. She has, she’s become a friend, a confidante, my very own psychoanalyst who shrinks me anytime I need it. Been good.

Some people have been embittered by Katrina. Some people are angry. They’re angry over their sense of loss. Some people have lost a lot more than I have. But I have found the whole experience to be wonderful. It has reconnected me with what’s important in life. It’s made me a much better doctor. A much more caring physician. I think some of what I felt on that bus ride was a little bit of a disappointment that it was over. I did enjoy being tested. Disasters don’t make character, they expose character, and I was witness to so many incredible acts of heroism. There’s so much character in the people around me. There were very, very few disappointments. A few people, but, on the whole, I was quite proud of all the work people did.

For me, Katrina was a wonderful experience. I don’t know any other way to say it. I could not have paid to have that kind of experience. So many people sent me emails saying, I’m so sorry for what you went through, it must have been so terrible. And that’s wrong. It wasn’t that at all. It was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my life.