I will always think of Katrina not as a story about a hurricane, but as a story about the failure of the levees intended to protect New Orleans from flooding, and the political inaction and ineptitude that ensued. I will also remember it as one of the finest hours for Calcasieu Parish, as our community and public officials responded to assist the people fleeing New Orleans who ended up here needing shelter and assistance.
Katrina first made landfall on the Atlantic side of Florida, crossed that peninsula, then stalled and regrouped in the exceptionally warm waters of the gulf.
Initially, it didn’t appear to be a huge threat to New Orleans, a city familiar with tropical storms. But Katrina intensified in record time to become one of the largest category V storms ever seen in the gulf.
On Aug. 28, the day before it made landfall, a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans was ordered, sending an estimated 200,000 people fleeing west on Interstate 10.
Traffic on the Interstate was reduced to a crawl, and it took 12 hours or more to travel 200 miles to the relative safety of Lake Charles. Our hotel rooms quickly filled up, our parks were crammed with campers, people with relatives in New Orleans opened their homes to them, local churches took many in, the Civic Center was opened as a temporary shelter for 2,000 and McNeese State sheltered another 1,000 in its facilities.
No one knows for sure how many ended up in Calcasieu Parish, but I have heard credible estimates of 15,000 to 20,000. Most of these people left New Orleans with little more than the clothes on their backs, expecting to return home in a day or two, after the storm passed.
The morning of Aug. 29, Ann McMurray, who was writing for the American Press at the time, called me at my office at McNeese. She was working on a story about the economic impact of Katrina. I said it looked like New Orleans had dodged a bullet and would have little more than major roof damage. A couple of hours later she called back and said the levees had broken and flood waters were pouring into the city. I told her to throw the old story away; it was a whole new ball game.
Katrina had weakened to a Category III storm by the time it hit New Orleans. But it was pushing in front of it an enormous amount of water that it had gathered when it was a monster storm in the Gulf.
It made landfall just east of New Orleans, and pushed all that water up Bay St. Louis and along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The water then poured into Lake Pontchartrain and attacked the city’s levees from the north, where they were weakest.
Within hours, homes in the low-lying areas of the city were flooded to their roof tops, trapping many of those who had stayed behind. It quickly became clear that the evacuees would not be returning to their homes any time soon.
Although this precise “worst-case scenario” was well known, it seems no one had developed a plan to deal with such an eventuality. Government at all levels — local, state and national —was paralyzed, while television news crews broadcast round-the-clock coverage of the plight of those trapped in the city.
Nearly 2,000 people died, not because of the hurricane, but in the chaos and anarchy that erupted in the aftermath of the storm.
Meanwhile, Calcasieu Parish had to quickly change its response from providing temporary shelter for the evacuees for two or three days, to providing support and assistance for weeks or even months.
In contrast to the chaos in New Orleans, our local officials acted swiftly. Within three days, the children of the evacuees were enrolled in our elementary and secondary schools, and McNeese opened its classrooms to college students from New Orleans so they could continue their education with minimal interruption. (I had several added to the rosters of my classes.)
The community response was even more impressive. Calcasieu Parish was pretty much on its own, because state and federal efforts were focusing their efforts on New Orleans. On the Saturday after the refugees arrived, I took a couple of my kids to the Civic Center to volunteer to help. It was an incredible scene: it looked like a food festival with barbecue pits from local churches and civic clubs lined up in front of the lake, with cooks cooking their Cajun specialties. Kids were playing in the PPG fountain; there was a tent set up to care for evacuated pets; while inside, culinary students from Sowela and chefs from the casinos were busy preparing 2,000 meals, three times a day.
This was an especially difficult task because it wasn’t a two-choice menu: meat loaf or chicken. The kitchen crew had to work with whatever food was donated by local citizens who emptied out their freezers.
So many people were down there to help we had to stand in line for half an hour to sign up. The task we were given was to go around with trash bags collecting paper dinner plates and cups after dinner. Everyone we encountered was very grateful for our help, but they were also worried about their friends, neighbors and relatives left behind in New Orleans.
I was aggravated that the major news media only focused on what was going wrong in Louisiana, and I contacted several news programs, trying to get them to come to Lake Charles and do a story about how things here were going right. But none was interested.
So I decided to take to the Internet.
I returned to the Civic Center on Monday with my camera, hoping to interview some of the evacuees and document what was going on. But the place was virtually deserted.
“Where is everyone?” I asked. I was told that all the children were in school; local business and industry had created 800 temporary jobs for the evacuees; and those who had driven here in their cars were either out looking for work or shopping for items they needed for an extended stay.
It was two weeks before FEMA and the federal government got around to Calcasieu Parish. Just 10 days later, our “visitors” from New Orleans had to be re-evacuated to escape the path of Hurricane Rita. But while they were here, I was extremely proud of how our community and our public officials responded to help these people in need.
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