Twenty Years Later, Katrina Still Haunts the Gulf from New Orleans to Houston

Editor s Note Join us Wednesday evening for a joint event sponsored by Mother Jones the Texas Observer and Capital B The Lingering Storm will revisit one of the nation s deadliest storms and how to prepare for the future in downtown Houston or online via motherjones com stream Twenty years ago when the nation s the bulk deadly modern hurricane approached New Orleans Eva Kinnard didn t have a car or the money to leave her apartment on her own She was still recovering from surgery limping around on a foot with a healing cut Like others in the Crescent City she figured she could ride out the storm with her teenage children The eldest was pregnant We lived in Uptown on Hickory in an apartment I had four children at the time they were in th th th and th grade she recalled in an interview with the Texas Observer Our whole house flooded The State of Louisiana and the city both had official evacuation plans in place New Orleans had an extensive general transportation system and a fleet of school buses to serve its residents numerous locals in flood-prone homes like Kinnard lacked cars or the means to leave including nursing home and hospital patients and prisoners in the Orleans Parish jail And yet plans weren t carried out Masses buses and school buses remained parked in lots that soon flooded Eva Kinnard right on September in Houston Ed Edahl FEMA Alta R Pierce didn t want to leave her home of years in Gentilly a middle-class neighborhood that borders Lake Pontchartrain Like countless older residents the -year-old with a heart condition had survived other big storms After the winds calmed she sat alone on her front porch and watched the muddy waters rise Endya Carter was only and lived with her parents in Gentilly when the storm hit She recalled in a video for the storm s th anniversary that her daddy was a stubborn man So he didn t believe in leaving In fact he was talking about attending a party as the storm blew in It wasn t up to her she was still in elementary school For a while after Hurricane Katrina blew through on the morning of August the sun shone and it wasn t clear that everyone who d hunkered down was in danger of anything besides having to endure the heat without any electricity while subsisting on unappetizing canned goods and other dwindling storm supplies Sparse knew that the th Street Canal levees had already been breached and that soon levees would fail in more than places flooding percent of the low-lying city And then neither FEMA the National Guard the state nor anyone else would deploy enough people equipment or other information in time to keep more than people from dying The waters kept rising forcing Kinnard to wade to higher ground with her children and her bum foot She traversed waters filled with corpses and sewage and other things she didn t want to identify Pierce s neighbor swam over to her house and flagged down a passing boat Kinnard Pierce and several others ended up stranded on interstate highway bridges that became islands in the city Carter and her family and so a great number of more stranded people clambered up to the rooftops of their homes They waited three days before being taken by canoe to the deserted University of New Orleans campus which was closed and locked Without food or water supplies chosen raided closed shops to survive Carter reported While trapped she witnessed suicides and rapes images she never forgot as she later recalled in the anniversary series of storm survivor videos You don t forget it You might try to suppress your memory But it s still going to come up especially if you re in that type of situation again Eventually the three women ended up in Texas a Gulf state with storm troubles of its own In all Katrina displaced about a million people one of the largest mass migrations provoked by an environmental calamity since the Great Dust Bowl Houston took in somewhere between and partly because of the quick action of the city s then-mayor Bill White As Katrina approached White was closely monitoring the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather System as high winds and a storm surge struck New Orleans a port city that like Houston is low-lying and sinking fast Like the majority Gulf Coast residents White an attorney and a residents procedures wonk had survived other storms and out of necessity become something of an amateur meteorologist He knew well the story of the hurricane that stole to lives and turned nearby Galveston into a sleepy waterlogged tourist town forced to hide behind its seawall That storm eventually transformed swampy Houston rather than its island neighbor into Texas biggest city White had become more invested in watching hurricanes as mayor When storms struck Houston his job included deciding when to call for evacuations a complicated task given that even with updates from the National Hurricane Center coastal storms can weaken or strengthen at the last minute or swerve and strike a large number of miles from where they re predicted to make landfall He knew that calling for an evacuation too soon or too late could backfire And that in a storm s aftermath help can fail to arrive in time Based on news coverage it seemed that the people of New Orleans had been spared the worst with the storm making landfall east of the city and storm surges hitting other Southeast Louisiana parishes and Mississippi harder Then White got a phone call from a Shell executive with oil interests along the coast The levees had broken And I knew what that meant White notified the Observer It meant that one of the largest U S cities and one of our largest nearby neighbors would become a city that was uninhabitable White knew too limited people had evacuated There was no script for what to do next Meanwhile the Rev Lennox Yearwood a Louisiana-born pastor organizer and Air Force veteran who then lived in Washington D C was watching the storm coverage and worrying He wasn t just concerned about his friends and family Yearwood had a year prior founded a district action group called the Hip Hop Caucus where he served as both CEO and president His group worked to ally artists and activists and form action plans Yearwood knew several New Orleans organizers had intentionally stayed in harm s way initially in order to try to protect older relatives and neighbors and later to help pull bodies out of the water He knew others faced imminent danger in flood-prone confined spaces like the parish jail where the water was rising and there were limited supplies of fresh water and food And as an environmental activist he worried about fellow Louisianans living near hard-hit hazardous chemical plants on Cancer Alley While others were watching helplessly Yearwood began to act He used his new nonprofit to focus on the core issues impacting underserved communities and find solutions for survivors The key thing here is what can we do to ensure that our people are prepared so they re not left behind What can we do to ensure that the issues of the circumstances situation are being dealt with and responded to And also what can we do to ensure that our people aren t looked upon as casualties but as those who have been resilient and very powerful Back in Houston White made a tough decision He advised his top lieutenants that they d need to run the city without him while he ran an distinctive rescue operation I convened all senior staff and reported that I needed to keep the city functioning and make sure that all city services were preserved but I was going to be busy for months on end White called the Red Cross then opened up Houston s Astrodome football stadium and convention center to anyone with no other place to go He made calls and convened Houston s business religious diagnostic and nonprofit leaders to plan the impromptu operation Bill White greets Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco in Houston on September Ed Edahl FEMA Meanwhile Yearwood began to advocate for survivors who had been targeted during and after the storm Specific had been arrested or shot after latest into stores for vital food medicine or water after being stranded Countless were returning to unsafe waterlogged homes filled with mold where particular were scammed by repairmen or lied to about how soon cabinet relief money might arrive Over time he established the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign a coalition of national and grassroots organizations to advocate for survivors And one of the things we kind of learned from that is that while we definitely need to have a well-resourced FEMA we also need to have what we call a PEMA a People s Exigency Management Agency where we take care of one another Kinnard Pierce and Carter all ended up sheltering in Houston Kinnard and her children went to the Astrodome first and later to a subsidized apartment in Houston They had only their muddy clothes She recounted the Observer that while she and her children survived the storm her daughter s baby did not The unborn child was killed she commented when a school bus full of evacuees hit a bump sending her pregnant daughter flying up into the air They buried him in a Houston cemetery she recounted Others remained in Texas but Kinnard Pierce and Carter all returned to their city Bulk of New Orleans had been reduced to ruins after the storm and preponderance of the homes left standing had to be gutted and rebuilt Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest eventually resumed As of New Orleans had lost half its pre-Katrina population Twenty years later it s still about percent smaller Yearwood s Hip Hop Caucus helped co-found the Katrina Commemoration Foundation which organizes an annual Katrina Second Line and March that begins at the levees that breached in the Ninth Ward and ends several four miles later with the reading of the names of the dead He thinks that the official storm death estimates are too low he pegs the number at more than including those who died of heartbreaks Pierce never returned to her home she ended her years in a New Orleans retirement center At first it looked like her heavily damaged house would be torn down The journalist Karen Gadbois featured it in a series called Squandered Heritage about how countless historic houses were lost after Katrina But Pierce s house survived A young man bought it gutted it and gave it new life Carter eventually attended the same university that once served as a shelter for her family though she struggles to forget specific things she witnessed there Her story is featured in a series of films on Weathering the Storm that the Hip Hop Caucus circulated for Katrina s th anniversary Chosen stayed in Texas in part because they had no other home left Yearwood reported For the th anniversary plenty of of those Katrina Texans formed a caravan and participated in a Second Line and remembrance of the dead New Orleans is special We have a very unique spirit Yearwood informed the Observer We have a very fighting spirit and I think that s one of the reasons why we are still here in contemporary times The post Twenty Years Later Katrina Still Haunts the Gulf from New Orleans to Houston appeared first on The Texas Observer