In 2006, I sat with the physician in my pickup truck in the Baton Rouge strip mall parking lot, outside of Ichiban Sushi where he suggested we meet. Dr. Ben deBoisblanc had served as Director of Critical Care Services at Charity Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures, back when flood waters devastated some neighborhoods and not others, back when people drowned if they could not ax themselves to the roof. He served with other medical professionals in caring for patients during the hospital lockdown. He scrambled and hustled to get help for his patients when the cavalry was nowhere to be found. Dr. deBoisblanc and his Charity Hospital colleagues saved lives until FEMA evacuated the last patients seven days later. They saved lives despite losing electricity and water pressure during the brutal August heat, despite feeling forsaken in the midst of disaster.
Ben, as he asked me to call him, was slim, blond, and tanned, though he looked tired, as if Katrina were still happening. A year had passed, and Katrina was still happening to everyone in Gulf Coast locales impacted by the storm and the aftermath. The more I interviewed people for my “Katrina Experience” oral history project, work I began in Houston just days into the natural disaster and man-made humanitarian crisis, the more I witnessed what it took for survivors to recover and to reconstruct their lives. It would take years to do so, and so much would never be recovered. Ben looked as if he had finished another sleepless night on his boat, Creola. It’s where he had chosen to stay the Saturday before Katrina’s landfall. Ben woke early that night because the Lake Pontchartrain harbor master cut the electricity that powered Creola’s air-conditioning. He told Ben he was headed out because the approaching storm appeared catastrophic.
Ben may have been tired that night of our first interview in 2006, just coming off of his shift at Our Lady of the Lakes Hospital in Baton Rouge, where he worked in his days of displacement, but he was patient as he waited for me to insert a fresh tape into my minicassette recorder. Ben had a seven-day story to tell. For over two hours in my pickup, he spoke nearly uninterrupted. The gray afternoon was soon lit by parking lot lights and glowing business signs. I met Ben again and he spoke for two hours more. He told me what happened when he, the only member of his family still in New Orleans, hunkered down at Charity Hospital. He told me what happened after the hospital lost power, how they made their way through black interior hallways, the walls dungeon-wet. He shared the tricks and jerry-rigs and old school skills they recovered to keep their critically-ill patients alive.
* * *
Dr. Ben deBoisblanc, 50, was the Director of Critical Care Services at Charity Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. This interview was conducted in two sessions outside Ichiban Sushi Restaurant in Baton Rouge in 2006. Interviews were either before or after his shift at the Our Lady of the Lake Hospital, where he worked post-Katrina.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
I woke up early Sunday morning and went over how to prepare my boat. I started grabbing momentos. I wondered 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, standing next to his boat. My dad had been deceased for about twenty years. 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 am I taking this down?” I somehow reasoned that his spirit would watch over Creola. I left his picture there. 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 to 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 who 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 it 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, August 29, 2005
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 a.m. to 3 a.m., 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 (manual resuscitator) 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 check on a patient, initials HR. HR, this 23-year-old kid, he had Goodpasture syndrome. Goodpasture 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. HR was on a ventilator, 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, CW, who was a respiratory therapist helping HR. I said, “CW, are you OK?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine.” I left. Came back about twenty minutes later: “Are you OK, are you OK?” “Yeah yeah yeah.” I insisted: “Why don’t you let me give you a break? “ She refused: “No, I’m fine. Alright. Came back an hour later. Got up to HR’s room and I said, “CW, 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, CW wasn’t going to let anyone mess with HR. 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 CW was a single mom. Her only son, her everything, C, 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 of the hurricane passed the hospital probably 8 a.m. 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 vacc’ing 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 p.m., 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 that were kept in the storage facility at the hospital, but they 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.
* * *
Ben told me this story in my truck. Before, New Orleans evacuee Printiss told me his story in a Houston park outside of the George R. Brown Convention Center. Others would speak to me on front porches, in living rooms, in restaurants throughout Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and beyond. I was not a journalist, but I was a listener and a writer.
I was also a Black woman who felt sickened and shamed to see survivors left to fend for themselves, treated as threats. I found myself pushed and I actively pushed myself to get survivor stories recorded. Inspired by writer Studs Terkel’s oral history work and playwright Anna Deveare Smith’s interview-based theater performances, I gently shaped transcripts into oral history essays to share with anyone who wanted to know what it was like to be a survivor or to come to their need.
I did this to build understanding and empathy. To let people know that this could be them, and what to expect. To help the fearful see the humanity of each person impacted, so that maybe, next time, fear would not play such a central role in our response to catastrophes destined to repeat themselves as our climate crisis intensifies.
Now I am writing a book for my son, to help him understand what I learned from this experience and how it taught me that we cannot look away from crises in society.
But on August 29, 2005, the day Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, I lived in Houston, Texas. I taught creative writing to elementary school children and my residencies would not start until later in September. I was not yet a mother. I had time to watch news coverage for hours. Spellbound, I sat on my living room floor and switched channels between CNN and other major networks. They all reported live from New Orleans.
A Million Mouths Formed the Same Question
On Monday morning I watched live feeds from the French Quarter and the Central Business District. Broadcast journalists reported that New Orleans dodged a bullet. The high-rises lost windows, but look here — pavement, wet, but no standing water. No apocalypse. Only debris.
Only once before had I visited New Orleans. I knew enough to know that the national news correspondents stood on high ground. Why not take their cameras elsewhere?
I waited for the gravitas of the evening anchors, the comfort of Aaron Brown on his CNN show NewsNight. What is dread but brackish water rising inside us? Alone in the Houston apartment I shared with my first husband, K, I grew more anxious, certain that the cameras were tethered to safety. That what lay beyond…
Hours later CNN broadcast veteran journalist Jeanne Meserve reporting live from New Orleans. No video–we heard her voice on the phone. Finally, I thought. Someone left the high ground. On a boat. With a cameraman and his broken ankle. They traveled past the French Quarter and finally reported what so many of us feared. Meserve softly told of the screams. Of the pleadings. Of the calls for help from those huddled in their attics. Waiting. Praying and crying.
A million mouths formed the same question: Where was the help?
1-800-HELP-NOW
“The Red Cross needs our help. I urge our fellow citizens to contribute.” – President George W. Bush, August 31, 2005
Donate some money and you’re done. Is that true? I wanted it to be true. If I wrote the modest check I could afford, I could watch the news and not cry as hard, for I did what I could do.
Problem one: I had little cash. Problem two: I wouldn’t be done. But what could I do?
Everyone has limits. Mine was our apartment. K and I lived in a two-bedroom new construction apartment house north of Montrose near the Heights. One bedroom for sleeping, one bedroom for shared workspace. Our office overflowed with books, papers, and K’s sculptures-in-progress, with walls thinner than the walls I complained about growing up when I played the radio every night so I wouldn’t hear my stepfather snoring.
Thin walls. Paper wall thin. There might as well be no walls.
Houston is a six-hour interstate drive from New Orleans, a city very much connected to Louisiana by families that for generations migrated to Texas for work, with extended families working and living along the I-10 corridor. Once people in harm’s way knew how catastrophic Katrina could be, many evacuated to Houston on their own, rented hotel rooms, or stayed with family and friends.
Then came the storm. Then came the levee breaches. Then came the catastrophic flooding of an American city at a scale we’d never seen before. That’s when so many Houstonians blew my mind. They opened their homes to strangers. Single women adopted single mothers. Whole families adopted whole families. They gave them their spare bedrooms, living room couches. They gave more if they had it, or they shared what they had even if it wasn’t that much.
What did I say? No. Not that. Our apartment was too small, I said. I don’t know if I even brought up the question with K because the answer was so firm in my mind.
I once read that Americans do not sacrifice. They give of the surplus. Is that true, though? Maybe the writer didn’t talk to enough Americans to know. But maybe the writer meant me. That I didn’t sacrifice. When was the last time I gave up something I needed?
When I read about a clothing drive, K and I went to Target. We agreed to twenty dollars. We bought men’s and women’s underwear, and a baby’s blanket. I wished we could have bought more, but we were in credit card debt as it was. There had to be limits.
Right?
That Feeling in the Air
Dread, but a flood of it. All over Houston. In my heart and in my stomach. The earth broke open six hours away and the wettest hell on earth was so close and here we were, getting espressos and breakfast tacos and living in air conditioning yet also living in this weather that rolled into our region that was not weather but dread from the millions of lives impacted from here to there and the emotions released, many of us hurt, many of us trying to help, trying to count our blessings but that dread was as real as any humidity, as real as anything saturating the swamp air in August.
At the Red Cross
Buses of evacuees arrived in Houston that Friday night, four days after the hurricane’s landfall and the subsequent levee failures in New Orleans. The news said they came from the Superdome. I was so proud of our Houston Mayor Bill White who said we would help with open arms, not reluctance, and that we would not be a city that barricaded highway exits to block evacuee buses or gave them city jail cells as emergency housing. The city–in partnership with corporate, church, and nonprofit leaders, staff, and volunteers–would show survivors compassion and care. And that was final.
Saturday morning came and I wanted to volunteer at the Astrodome. I assumed I had to go through the Red Cross to do this, so I drove down to the Houston chapter offices.
I signed in, affixed my nametag. Two seconds later I’m commandeered to the phone bank. Now. No matter that this is my first time at the Red Cross, ever. I would be their voice.
They led a group of us to a cramped square room, the air dense with fatigue and anxiety. We waited for instructions near a long table filled with donuts and chips. Up in the corner, a TV played, the volume loud. A shot of buses arriving a few miles away. Someone began reciting a litany of things to know, pointing to a whiteboard.
That was part one of orientation. They walked us again, now, to a second building tucked behind the first. Up to the second floor. Not the third–that’s where management lived. We were to stay on the second. In an expansive space three times the size of the “normal” phonebank, tables lined the walls. On each table were phones that never stopped ringing unless you left them off the hook.
A supervisor sat at the table near the elevator. So much ringing. Talking, but hushed tones. Volunteers, from age 18 to 70. Men and women. Different races, shades of skin. Again, that same tense air, same anxious mission. No TV played here. An older white man talked as a circle of other phone bankers formed around him. They all had urgent questions. He was busy explaining something. Wait. I’m confused. Was he talking about fishing? He looked and sounded like Cliff on Cheers. Someone said he’s a volunteer as well.
The supervisor identified himself. He showed us phone numbers on whiteboards, handed us Xeroxed info sheets. But mostly, information came from the whiteboards:
Want to donate? 1-800-HELP NOW / Church Shelters (713) 313-5231 / Wal-Mart Connection: 1-800-236-2875 Option #9 / www.familylinks.icrc.org / Blood Bank: (713) 790-1200/ 211: United Way (Food stamps, United Way Help Line for Baby Supplies) / At Astrodome, a list, wall…PA system…people are calling out / Coast Guard #s (225) 925-7708; 7709; 3511 (get location, cell phone #, building address, on a roof..) / Medical volunteer? Go to Green Room, bottom floor of Astrodome. Bring your license…
Callers stumped me often. I could answer “How do I donate?” or “How do I come volunteer?” Everything else, well…the whiteboards never provided full answers. I tried to ask the supervisor. But that took too long, or, he didn’t have real answers. If you worked in the phone bank, you needed to figure things out for yourself and fast.
Some things I said over my first six-hour shift:
“Right now, they’re not giving out vouchers. I’m sorry. But you should go to a Red Cross shelter and register, so if they do give something, you’re ready.”
“I’m sorry it took you six hours to get through.”
“You can try ‘Somebody Cares.’ It’s an organization, I think. Maybe a church group. We’re told they’re giving out gas and grocery cards.”
“You should try going to one of the smaller shelters. Just go there, and tell them that you’d like to take a couple, or a family with you, and they can help you. That’s my advice to you, person to person. Go to a smaller church shelter, that way, you can feel out the situation, make sure you’re comfortable, and they’re comfortable, you know?”
“If you know nurses, please tell them that yes, they need nurses. If there’s anyone you can call and tell them, please let them know they need medical help.”
“I’m sorry. You have to try to get through on those numbers. We don’t have a list of the evacuees sheltering at the Astrodome.”
“I’m sorry.”
If I needed a break, I left the phone off the hook. A restaurant donated big aluminum pans of prepared food, but they were licked clean. The soda machine flashed empty, too. I asked a staff person if there was another machine. She said, “Upstairs.” Then she turned to her colleague and asked, “Is she allowed up there?” The colleague laughed: “She can go get some soda.”
The third floor felt hushed like an expensive department store in the morning. Yet I could still feel tension, expectancy. The pain of so many but I only heard one man in an office on his phone. I bought my water and got out.
In the meantime, I overheard that the Astrodome was taking walk-in volunteers. That’s what I wanted. It was the whole reason I showed up here. But I didn’t get up. I felt I should stick to the Red Cross phone banks. They’d get me over there when the time was right.
A new supervisor spoke up, an energetic woman who announced she’d only been there a day, but alas, she was picked. She helped us better than the man before. I took my seat and answered calls:
“If you want to be a Red Cross shelter, there is a meeting at 10 a.m. in Classrooms E & F.”
“I know. I can’t believe it either. I don’t know how they can be abandoned like this.”
“This is just me to you, OK? But you should try Lakewood Church, or Second Baptist Church. They’re the more affluent churches here. I know they’re helping people. This isn’t the Red Cross talking, this is just me to you. I’m sorry that the Red Cross can’t help you right now.”
“I’m sorry, I’m just a volunteer.”
“Sorry, you need to call the press officer.”
“I’m sorry I can’t be of better help. I know. I know. I’m sorry. Good luck.”
“You know, you might try calling journalists. Call CNN. Try to get your story out there. I know it’s not fair.”
The man next to me answered a call a minute as well. We hadn’t introduced ourselves. No time. Early 50s maybe. He looked like a vibrant upper-manager. We exchanged glances. Grimaced faces. Sighs.
A few hours later, he decided to get food. Fajitas. He came in from the suburbs to do this, he told me, and that’s what he wanted. Did I want anything? No. He came back with white Styrofoam containers of chicken fajita nachos to share with our side of the room. He had to go. He brought them back just to feed us. I waved goodbye. I never learned his name.
I left my phone off the hook and ate.
On that Saturday, nearly a week after landfall, the American Red Cross had yet to offer financial assistance to Hurricane Katrina evacuees. No money. No grocery, no gasoline, no clothing vouchers. Not yet. Every second or third call, I choked up. Sometimes I cried. I tried hard to keep it together, because a crying phonebank woman helped no one. But someone talked about what they saw on TV. Someone told me their story of survival, and I told them that the Red Cross could do nothing for them.
A new batch of volunteers waited at the supervisor table. A Red Cross staffer appeared and asked us when we started working. If it was over four hours ago, it was time to leave. No exceptions. For me, it was over six hours and I was ready to keep going. But the staffer was firm. I went downstairs and signed up for another shift. The 3 a.m. shift, which was later that night.
Back home, I didn’t sleep well. When I left at 2:40 a.m., I drove down empty freeways. I stopped at a 24-hour CVS to buy alcohol pads to wipe down the phones. I didn’t want to get sick. This made me a little late.
When I showed up, they made me supervisor.
After I Sit Through a 2-hour Red Cross Orientation that Supposedly Qualifies Me to Volunteer Even though I’ve Supervised the Phonebank
I learned that the Red Cross didn’t run the emergency shelters created in the Astrodome and Reliant Center stadiums nor the refuge created in the George R. Brown Convention Center. If you wanted to work there, you just had to show up.
Next day, I showed up.
At the Astrodome
My friend Ronnetta and I drove in together for a daytime shift and said we wanted to volunteer. They quickly took us in to work a lunch line. We handed out Chick-fil-A sandwiches. There were so many of us. Once Ronnetta and I finished our assigned tasks, we were somewhat jealous of other volunteers, not wanting to find ourselves “role-less.” For now, the Houston volunteer response was incredible.
The shift went smoothly. No hitches.
Spreading the Word
Via email:
“Please. Go volunteer. You will not get jacked. These are normal people. Please help. And for those of you not down here, please hold charities accountable. All this money goes to them, but does it ever reach the survivors?”
Former Presidential Advisor Sidney Blumenthal wrote me back. He’d been a mentor to me for years. Go listen to people, he said. Get stories down. Now.
No, I thought. People still needed immediate aid. But at the Astrodome, and at the George R. Brown, there were so many volunteers. You could call it a glut. Each day I returned, there were more volunteers than the previous shift.
I listened to Sid.
* * *
Printiss Polk, 24, is a roofer, from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. This interview was conducted on Sept. 5, 2005, one week after landfall and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans in the park across the street from the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. There were several people around, mostly men, sitting on the benches. The mood was calm. Towards the back of the park, several young men pass around cigarettes, some marijuana. On occasion, Printiss himself stood up to take a drag off a friend’s cigarette. He appeared tired, as if still in a state of shock.
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 it’s 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 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, it’s 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 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 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 work partner of mine, his wife, and his kid, my godchild. 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 from somewhere else. Y’all need to pump that into the river somewhere. These 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. People’s 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 160 miles per hour! 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 to them. 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, 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.
[Aside, 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 of 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 Superdome 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?
