It’s been TWENTY…YEARS…Another lifetime ago.
And yet – sometimes – it feels like it was just yesterday…
For those who were here – the people who were living, working, raising children here – we still refer to life in New Orleans with a very definitive line of separation: Before Katrina and After Katrina.
Those words are still spoken today.
I’m calling this “Katrina” but it should actually be referred to as The Failure of the Federal Levees. I said it back then, and I will continue to do so until my dying day.
I can still see us standing in our friends’ living room in Knoxville, TN watching the news coverage of the storm coming through. Katrina was a monster. And yet, at some point – based on what we were watching – we were breathing a sigh of relief. New Orleans had dodged a bullet.
And then – the levees broke.
Suddenly, news stations were reporting water pouring into certain neighborhoods. There were three breaks in the levee system. Before anyone could comprehend what was happening, 80% of the city of New Orleans was under water.
We hadn’t really evacuated – we went to visit our friends in Knoxville because we were considering possibly moving there. We got stranded there for five weeks. Stranded is a very strange way to describe it because our friends suddenly had another family living with them. And they gave us everything they could. Our son was 8 years old and in 3rd grade. Eventually, we realized that we had to enroll him in school there – which he attended for three of those five weeks. News from home was sporadic. We had no idea when – and even if – we were going to be able to return home. That wound up being the beginning of October – a little over a month after the storm.
We came back to a gray and eerily quiet Crescent City. The house that we were living in at the time did not get any water inside of it, nor did our rental property. Damage was minimal, but we lost our dog Zeus and our cat Raffie. We had left town knowing there was a storm out there, with plans to do whatever we might have to do when we had planned to return on Monday. We were never given that choice.
When news of the levee failures became abundantly clear, my husband jumped into our car and drove the 10 hours back to New Orleans from Knoxville. He was determined to get to our house and find our pets but also to get his father out of the city. After previously contacting the Louisiana State Police that Saturday before the storm hit, he was told in no uncertain terms by them, “Don’t bother coming back – we’re not going to let you in.”
When the levees broke, everything changed. He leaped into our car to go back for his dad – leaving me and our son in Knoxville. There wasn’t anything I could have said that was going to stop him.
Communication was basically non-existent. There was no social media at the time. I will never forget being woken up in the middle of the night by my friend Judy and her handing me the phone in a dark room, saying it was a phone call from New Orleans. I immediately thought, “This is someone from New Orleans calling me to tell me that my husband is dead.”
Thankfully, that was not the case. But he had seen horrible, life-changing things after finally being able to enter the city from Gonzales, Louisiana – along with a guy named Todd from Arkansas who “just wanted to help.”
He did get his dad out. Our pets were never found. We, unlike so many others, did not lose everything. But to this day, I would have given back every stick of furniture & every stitch of clothing to have my animals back.
We wound up leaving Knoxville to come back to New Orleans after five weeks to assess the damages and clean out our house. Why we decided this at the time, I don’t understand, but we wound up moving across the country with all our belongings to where my brother lived in Upstate New York. Our son’s school was destroyed, our house had been sold to our friend James. We could have found a school for our son to attend somewhere in the local metro area that was not underwater. But it was almost impossible to tell when the city of New Orleans would be up & running again in an even remotely normal way. So we left and spent the next eight months living in a small town called Sayre, Pennsylvania, about 10 minutes away from my brother. It was there that our son completed 3rd grade. His generation will forever be known as “Katrina Kids” – for all the upheaval and turmoil they went through – from grade school babies all the way up to high schools & colleges who were separated from their friends, and Seniors who never got to have their graduations.
We decided to come home and returned to New Orleans at the end of June 2006. We moved into our rental property. It was us and a couple down the street – that was it. There were still refrigerators on the curb, along with hurricane debris & things like mattresses. Water lines were still visible across the city. When we eventually got back things like regular mail delivery, and our neighborhood grocery store reopened, it was almost cause for a Mardi Gras parade.
There are SO many other details of this story that I am leaving out. But I just needed to reflect on what happened – and how we survived.
I recall my mother saying to me right after it happened, “Our relatives are asking me if you are okay – what should I tell them?”
“Tell them we’re alive, Ma” I responded.
Tell them we’re alive.
When we left our little temporary home in that little town in Pennsylvania, the locals we had come to know looked at us with genuine fear in their eyes when we told them we were going back to New Orleans.
We get it, totally. We understand your apprehension.
But – it’s home.
I will end this 20-year-old reflection and remembrance with this: thank you to our friends, Judy & Les, their neighbors, and all the people of Knoxville, including the teachers & kids from my son’s school there, for taking care of us in SO many ways and making us feel loved, comforted, and welcomed. Thanks to the town of Sayre, PA and its local residents for the same – welcoming arms, gentle calming, love and prayers, and all the help they too gave us. To my dear brother, now deceased, and my then sister-in-law, for taking us into their lives and home. If there is an answer now as to why we moved clear across the country with all our stuff – and then back again – it’s the blessing of having been able to be near my brother for those eight months.
TWENTY…YEARS… This date will always and forever have profound meaning in a multitude of ways. To say that the residents of New Orleans have some PTSD even all these years later is not an understatement. It changed us all. And I’m proud of every single one of us – for surviving, remembering, and believing – and having the courage to come back here and start all over again.
God please continue to bless the “City That Care Forgot” – our resilience is astounding.
Oddly Enough 