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In the first week-plus after Hurricane Katrina, it was impossible to turn on the TV, pick up a paper, or cruise news sites on the web without seeing pictures of storm survivors trapped in a drowning New Orleans. What we heard of their stories, though, was almost invariably limited to a couple of sentences--about their most harrowing moment, or how angry they were to be left so long, or how relieved they were to get out. Round about week two, "the survivors" morphed into a human interest beat, and stories about them began giving way to stories about the generous folk taking them into their homes.
The survivors all had stories to tell, whether they could bear to tell them or not. A few first-hand accounts by New Orleans survivors did circulate via email lists and get posted at websites; these were more revealing, and more gripping, than the reports news media offered up regarding conditions in the city during the days between the storm and the eventual evacuation. (One exception: Scott Gold's wrenching coverage in the LA Times.)
We wanted to hear more. So last week, CP reporters and stringers contacted about 30 of them and asked them to tell their stories. We interviewed some of the 1,000 or so Katrina survivors who have made it to Minnesota, and spoke to many more who remain in the area by phone. Here are 20 or so of the stories we collected (along with two of the widely emailed first-person accounts that helped inspire this package--see Denise Moore and Slonsky/Bradshaw, below). The real measure of all that was done wrong by city, state, and federal governments, and of all that people trapped in New Orleans had to do and endure as a result, is in these tales and thousands of others like them.
--Steve Perry
Adele Bertucci, 53, hospitality worker, native of Cuba and 35-year resident of New Orleans
The worst experience for me was being alone for maybe four days in the airport. That's something I'll never forget. There were bodies. There were people bleeding. There were people lying in their own waste. One after another. If you take Gone with the Wind and the Nazi War and the Vietnam war, and visualize that in one place, that's how I would describe the airport. When you watch it on TV, it's like watching a Walt Disney versus an R-rated movie. You only see what they want you to see. You can't smell it. More...
J. Michael Brown, 52, resident of Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish, president of an electronic funds transfer company
Within 15 minutes you had six feet of water in your home, which is about a 6,000 square foot place. In about 30 minutes I had 12 feet. Across the street there was probably 15 feet of water. I watched my BMW go down the street, my daughter's BMW go away down the street. The water was ferocious. You could see natural gas bubbling up out of the water everywhere you looked. As far as you could see, there was nothing but black water. More...
Dumas Carter, 30, eight-year veteran NOPD officer, one of six local cops who stayed on duty at the Convention Center complex in the days after Katrina
Lots of people on the street were asking me where to go. I'm telling them the truth, which is I don't know, they haven't told us anything. They're telling us that somebody told them that they were told by another person who was somebody in charge of something that the Convention Center was being set up as a secondary evacuation point with food and water. Those people went to the Convention Center, and there was no food or water there for them. So now there's no water, there's no police--everybody's left the city except for the six of us. And now there's 20,000 people with no extra security down there. More...
Sandra Carter, 59, retired schoolteacher, Algiers resident
The phones went dead about 9 o'clock Wednesday night. I was in the house by myself, nobody else on the block. The dogs woke me up at about 3 o'clock in the morning and I saw that somebody was staring in my window at me. Fortunately, I had a gun. I put the gun in front of the flashlight and he ran away. After that, there was no question of me staying. More...
Briana Chatters, 36, New Orleans native, University of Minnesota student,Red Cross volunteer in Baton Rouge shelter
I'm volunteering at the Red Cross River Centre [in Baton Rouge] and I can't believe how patronizing the Red Cross workers are. There are always so few black volunteers that I can usually count them on one hand. There are Scientology people and Christians from various groups. I don't speak to them and they don't speak to me. I have the impression that as a black person, I'm taking up space. More...
Calvin Dawson, 36, brick mason, former resident of Jackson Avenue in Orleans Parish
I saw a shotgun fired off. I saw shotgun pumped and stuck under a lady's throat. Cops standing at gung ho, ready to fire. A guy ran over a pop bottle and dude was like on the crowd with a fully automatic weapon in the west bank. He was ready to kill us, man! And he like blasted the crowd with a shotgun over our heads. Boom! Because people were trying to get on the bus! They were only bringing in two [buses] at a time and there were 600 people under the West Bank bridge! People were trying to get on the bus with little tiny babies. They had been standing on their feet all night long. They were sick and tired. They were stressed out. They had lost everything they owned. They were literally at their wit's end. More...
Cory Delany, 24, resident of Waggerman, Louisiana, was in New Orleans with his family during and after Katrina
I was on the roof trying to flag down helicopters. Nobody would stop. They would give us a thumbs-up and keep on going. You would see them going places. Looking around with their guns out the window, but they wasn't helping. I don't know who they was going to save, but there weren't saving us. They wasn't saving nobody around the neighborhood. Nobody in the area. More...
Jason Fraude, 22, carpenter, resident of New Orleans' Lower Garden District
When I got down to Canal Street later on and we met back up with Coy, he said he ran into Kim Siegel of CNN and she needed someone to drive her around for the day. So I was like, uhh, I don't know. But then I was like, yeah. I'll go down there. So we go down and pick up CNN and we go around with them. More...
Tysuan Harris, 24, nurse's aide, resident of the lower Ninth Ward
The Coast Guard told us we had to leave. I'm thinking I'm gonna die if nobody's gonna come help us. They didn't help us. They just told us to leave, they was evacuating the whole city. They told us to go to the Convention Center. It took us two days to get there. We walked the water through the darkness, flashing flashlights on each other to make sure nobody drowned. Oh, that water. Gas, oil, brake fluid, chains, bodies, snakes--everything. All kinds of snakes. More...
Jeffrey Hills, 29, tuba player, resident of the Lafitte housing project
When we woke up Friday morning, we heard that a couple of kids were missing. Later on, they were found in the bathroom with their throats slit and possibly raped. I'm talking about young kids--from the age six to eight. I didn't see anything, but the parents verified that their children were found dead. Word gets around in an enclosed place like that. More...
Harold, 56, last name withheld by request, politician/professional decorator and New Orleans native
Me, my mother, my aunt, my girlfriend and her mama made reservations to go to the hotel, the Lake Plaza in New Orleans. When we went to check in, we found out that the mayor had cancelled all the residents and left it over for police, fire, and hospital people. More...
Machelle Lee, 31, Tulane Law student, one-time Minnesota resident, stayed in the Garden District during the storm and the days after
For two days, we didn't go further than a block away. During that time, someone we knew went biking by, and he's a chef at a really good restaurant. He had all these fillet mignon and really good shrimp that were going to go bad. So he came over and we grilled it all up. We sat by the swimming pool at a mansion, and we had really good wine. It was just so surreal. We said, "This is crazy," with all these people that we knew down in the convention center. We knew what was going on down there, and there was nothing we could have done. But it seemed so callous to be sitting here, with this almost "let them eat cake" attitude. More...
Jackie Mang, 32, nightclub manager and University of New Orleans, Bywater neighborhood resident, four months pregnant at the time Katrina struck
There were no phones working at that time that we knew of. We had flashlights and we had battery operated lanterns. It got dark early and it was very dark. You had to stay in after dark. On the third day it started getting bad with gangs in the neighborhood. I guess after downtown was already done getting looted, they started coming into the neighborhoods because they knew people were evacuated. They paraded around in cars and they started stealing city buses. You would see a group of men in city buses with weapons driving down the street real slow. One even announced going down the street that he could rob the whole street. There were still no cops around. More...
Denise Moore, one of the 20,000 who went to the New Orleans Convention Center
Denise said the people thought there were being sent there to die. Lots of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. Cops passing by, speeding off. National Guard rolling by with guns aimed at them. And yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a certain point all the people thought the cops were coming to hurt them, to kill them all. More...
Edith Moore, 70, resident of Johnson Street in Uptown, near the Superdome
There was an old lady that was sick. She didn't have anybody with her, so evidently they must have rescued her. When they'd come through to take a count, they'd say, "Everybody down, everybody down! Get off your ass, get on your feet!" She said, "I can't stand up." They'd say, "We need you over here, Jefferson Parish, you got to get over here. You can't get over here, you ain't gonna eat. The trucks is coming to count you." She couldn't get there, and they acted like they was gonna leave her. I guess what made the Guard so angry over there where we was, a police had got killed over there, and they was angry with the world, so they had to blame us for what had happened. More...
Katy Reckdahl, 40, Gambit Weekly staff writer, former City Pages staff writer, went into labor at New Orleans' Touro Infirmary on the Saturday night before the hurricane hit
The generator for our part of the hospital failed around 7 o'clock that night and we left were in total darkness. It was bizarre to live that way, no electricity for two days, then no water. We were using the light of the cell phone to get around the room at night, and to light up my nipples. It was so crazy. Merv would be standing there with an open cell phone, pointed at my nipple, and we'd try to get the baby to latch on. More...
Sidney Smith, 51, Uptown resident and owner of Haunted History Tours
When I woke up on Tuesday morning, my street was a river, my front yard was a lake, and it was rising. So we started frantically moving things--important papers, my computer hard drive, things like that things--to the second story of my house. I didn't know that the levee had broken. By Tuesday night, the water was four to five deep in my house and we had all evacuated to the upstairs. Tucker Carlson's show called me up and said, "Well, what do you think now, Mr. Smith?" And I said, "I think I might have made a colossal mistake." More...
Lorrie Beth Slonsky and Larry Bradshaw, emergency medical technicians from San Francisco who were in New Orleans for a convention when Katrina struck
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move. More...
Derrick Tabb, 31, snare drummer for ReBirth Brass Band, lifelong New Orleans resident
I got five cars altogether. One SUV Yukon, two 15-passenger vans, and two Ford Explorers. I had to start the cars for people. A couple of them knew how to start them once I popped it up for them. I loaded up my family and I left. I dropped off my mom and them at the Convention Center, then I went to look for my wife and daughter and my mother-in-law, because the last word was they had to get up out the house. When I got there, they wasn't there. I went back Uptown to the Garden District and kept looking for them. More...
Jennie Lynn Waters, 62, legal secretary in the New Orleans city attorney's office
One of the guys, his name was Zach, said, "Miss Jennie, I drove an ambulance in Iraq. I can drive that car out of here." So I gave them the keys. Meantime, my dad died Saturday. He died in the Methodist Memorial Hospice, which got hit with two or three stories of water, and all those people died. It was horrible. My dad couldn't have handled that. God is good. He spared Dad that. More...
Quvandra Ballard, 37 years old, lifelong resident of New Orleans, housing archivist for the state of Louisiana
I had a friend that died in the water. The rescue people tried to pick her up from her roof. Whatever they use to pick them up, they said she slipped through trying to carry her up. She drowned. I don't know what happened with that. I don't know if she was afraid and let go or what. She was in her house for three or four days.. More...
Also in this issue:The Diaspora, Blowing Down the Road by Steve Perry
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Also in this Issue
- The Diaspora, Blowing Down the Road Katrina and the lessons of the 1927 flood (Cover Story)
- Viewmaster Panhandling in our times (Viewmaster)
- More articles from this issue...
About CP Staff
From the Archive
- Fall Film Events (Film - Sep 14, 2005)
- A Day at the Fair (Cover Story - Aug 31, 2005)
- My Summer of Love Minnesota filmmakers remember the warm-weather flicks that got them hot (or bothered) (Cover Story - Jun 29, 2005)
- Summer Guide (Cover Story - Jun 8, 2005)
- Minnesota's Fifty Greatest Hits The greatest Minnesota-made records of all time (Cover Story - Jun 8, 2005)
- How Could You Idiots Forget...? Ten (or eleven) more Funkytown favorites (Cover Story - Jun 8, 2005)
- Summer Film Events (Film - Jun 8, 2005)
- Stadium Wars: Back From the Dead The ballpark deal that wouldn't die: After a decade of threats, insults, and doomsday scenarios, how did the Twins get the most Pohlad-friendly stadium plan yet? (Cover Story - May 11, 2005)
- More articles from the CP Staff Archive...
