Ten years ago, I sat in front of my television with an overwhelming feeling of helplessness.
A massive storm was raging over the Gulf Coast and leaving devastation in its wake. Hurricane Katrina left coastal Louisiana and Mississippi tattered, bruised and broken when it made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005. It crippled a major American city. And I wanted to somehow help repair the damage.
I remember expressing my helplessness to a friend who told me to get over it because there was nothing I could do. I refused to believe that.
Soon I began hearing word of local efforts to deliver supplies to the victims of the storm. I had the opportunity to write about one such effort as Tanner Carnley, of Leeds, and his brother-in-law Gene Larsen, of Hurricane, gathered supplies to take to the Biloxi, Mississippi, area, where the Carnelys once lived and where many family members remained.
A few days after they left I received a call from a bishop for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in that area. He told me a trailer of supplies from St. George had arrived at his church building, which was serving as a shelter for those who had been displaced. The Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency hadn’t made it there yet, but a load of supplies from Southern Utah did.
He began to cry as he thanked me for writing the story that led to such an outpouring of giving from the residents of Southern Utah. He called us all his “heroes.”
That phone call remains one of the high points of my journalism career.
About a week later I heard about another relief effort. St. George resident Jeff Stelter was coordinating the delivery of three truckloads of supplies from Las Vegas and one truckload from St. George through his company, Coast to Coast Real Estate.
He had been to Louisiana once after the storm, driving the first semi from Las Vegas to deliver supplies immediately after the storm. What he discovered on that trip was a large amount of independent relief shelters housed in Baton Rouge area churches that were not yet receiving help from the Red Cross or other major organizations. The congregations of these churches were simply doing all they could to care for the Katrina refugees — many of whom didn’t even know if their homes were still livable because they couldn’t get back to New Orleans.
While writing about Stelter’s efforts, he invited me to come along on the next trip. He and a couple of employees were going to travel out ahead of the next three semis to scout out shelters in need.
We left early the next morning, driving straight for two days and sleeping in Stelter’s travel trailer because there were no hotel rooms left where we were going. Henry Vargas, a freelance photojournalist from Las Vegas joined us, bringing our little group up to five people.
Day one
Exactly two weeks after the storm, on Monday, Sept. 12, we arrived in Baton Rouge, where many of the evacuees were now living. Our first visit was to a massive Red Cross shelter in nearby Gonzales. Approximately 1,750 hurricane evacuees were still living at the shelter in a sea of beds.
The next shelter on our list was much smaller. New Life Baptist Church in Baton Rouge only had 60 evacuees but was dealing with far fewer resources to help them. FEMA and the Red Cross still had not made it to this shelter.
We spoke with some of the evacuees, including Alma Mack and her two daughters, Kendra, 15, and Melina, 4.
“We’re trying to get back to New Orleans, but we don’t have no money to get back,” Mack said. “We don’t know how to get back home. We’re stranded.”
Mack didn’t even know if her loved ones were dead or alive. The phone at the shelter could only receive incoming calls.
Vargas offered the use of his phone to another evacuee, Donna Livas, who was able to call an aunt, who immediately offered to take in her niece. Vargas gave Livas money for a bus ticket, and she made plans to leave the next day.
All she needed was one phone call.
Less hopeful was the final shelter visit of the day. At St. John’s Baptist Church, also in Baton Rouge. This church had taken in 71 evacuees but with limited resources was only able to feed them two meals a day. The stress of caring for the evacuees, including a small group of troublemakers, was taking a toll on the church’s staff.
Despite its limited resources, they made efforts to help the evacuees feel more at home. They had brought in a pony for the kids and even held a barbecue on Labor Day.
Finally, we returned to downtown Baton Rouge to meet the second supply truck from Stelter’s company. There were only 10 of us there to unload the entire 53-foot semitrailer filled with pallets of bottled water and other supplies, so it was difficult work. The heat and humidity were stifling, especially inside the trailer, as we labored for two hours.
But those shelters we had visited and the people we had met motivated us. We were doing it for them, knowing these supplies would help make their lives just a little more comfortable.
I have never enjoyed sore muscles so much.
Day two
The next morning we visited The Dream Center in Donaldsonville, near Gonzales. Already a homeless shelter before the storm, Katrina provided a whole new group of residents. Among them was Cecil Cain, a Vietnam War veteran who told us some of the storm victims needed to step forward and become leaders.
“What we need to do as people is come together and build that city back,” he said of New Orleans. “God sent a message that we need to come together.”
Cain wasn’t just talking the talk either. Although he himself was an evacuee, he volunteered his time driving people to appointments and helping them fill out the paperwork to rebuild their lives.
“I’m going to help the weak. That’s what God wanted us to do,” he said. “I’m strong. I can take a lick and keep on ticking. The children are going to be most affected by this.”
I saw that firsthand when we stepped inside the shelter and I met 2-year-old Tyreyell Johnson. She was hula-hooping in the hallway when we walked in, but she soon became entranced by my camera. Digital cameras were still something of a novelty 10 years ago.
At first, Tyreyell was easily amused by the camera’s almost magical ability to display images of her on the monitor. Soon, though, she wanted more than amusem*nt. She wanted love. Her mother had been spending her days filling out paperwork and making phone calls in an attempt to rebuild her family’s life. Tyreyell just needed someone to pay attention to her.
I felt her tugging on my pants and looked down to see her little arms raised toward me. “Hold you?” she asked in a small voice.
I spent the next 20 minutes forgetting about my job. I didn’t take any more photos. I didn’t conduct any more interviews. I just held a little girl and let her know that someone cared.
When it was time for us to leave, tears filled my eyes as I reluctantly let go of Tyreyell.
Thankfully, the next shelter we visited was a bit of a pick-me-up. Iglesia Lugar de Sanidad catered to Spanish-speaking evacuees but welcomed all. Pat Dalupan, a Catholic woman of Filipino descent, raved about the treatment they had received. She praised the church’s cleanliness and the positive attitude of its staff, including the church’s pastor, the Rev. Fernando Gutierrez.
“I believe if you can’t provide five-star service, at least try,” Gutierrez told me. “It’s a community effort. Everyone is doing something.”
Knowing where our supplies were needed most, my group determined to spend the rest of the day gathering information for my articles and Vargas’ photos. We decided to see if our press passes could get us into New Orleans.
We successfully passed through two military checkpoints along Interstate 10, stopping first in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. The damage here was minimal though some massive trees had been uprooted and a few roofs were missing. Blackhawk helicopters flew overhead and we passed soldiers with machine guns on the side of the road.
Finally, we made it into New Orleans itself and started toward downtown via Canal Street. A few of us climbed into the bed of Stelter’s pickup for better photography opportunities.
Many of the side streets were still flooded. Badly damaged vehicles had been deposited by the storm surge in yards or on the median that ran down the middle of Canal Street.
It was almost like a ghost town. Signs of life were rare. Time seemed to stand still.
“This is so surreal,” we kept telling each other.
As we crossed a patch of water stretching across Canal Street we caught a whiff of the toxic water news reports had mentioned. The reports were accurate. The stench was unbelievable.
At the French Quarter, we ventured out on foot for the first time. Civilians were rare but soldiers were everywhere and law enforcement officers from around the country patrolled the streets. We even spoke with a couple of cops from New York City who were so grateful for the country’s response to the terrorist attacks in their city four years earlier that they decided to come and help out in the aftermath of Katrina.
I had previously visited New Orleans twice. As a teenager I walked down Bourbon Street on a Saturday night. It was alive with music and people and food. It was alive with life.
This time it was different. The only traffic was in the form of military Humvees.
Without much to see beyond the quarter’s boarded-up windows, we continued to drive around downtown. In the central business district, we noticed that none of the traffic signals were working. It didn’t matter. There was no traffic anyway.
It was getting late, and we didn’t think it would be wise to still be there after dark, so we got back on I-10 to return to Baton Rouge. From the elevated view of the freeway we saw that many of the streets below were still covered in water. On one road, we saw a desperately scrawled message from those who had gathered on the high ground. “Send water A.S.A.P.,” it read.
Day three
For our final day on the Gulf Coast, we decided to venture into Mississippi. Before crossing the state line, though, we stopped in Slidell, Louisiana, where a boiling order on the water had recently been liftedbut a swath of destruction remained.
The worst damage was found in a neighborhood on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain where all of the homes had once stood on stilts to avoid flooding. That extra height didn’t help as they were pulverized by Katrina.
“My house is nothing but a hole in the ground,” said Rachel Parrish, who had recently returned from Georgia to rummage through the debris pile that was once her home.
Parrish pointed out her bathtub and dishwasher strewn across the ground with other pieces of her house. She lost most of her clothes and family photos. She said some reptilian residents had moved into a water-filled hole on her lot.
“Yeah, there’s a gator in here,” she confirmed. “This is straight-up bayou. I killed four water moccasins in there yesterday.”
Even more disturbing was what stood at the corner of her lot: a large refrigerated trailer. Rescue workers were using it to collect bodies from across the lake in New Orleans.
The destruction was even worse in Waveland, Mississippi, which bore the brunt of the storm. The eyewall of the hurricane passed over Waveland with sustained winds of 120 mph. A 27-foot storm surge penetrated as far as 6 miles inland here.
Along the coast, Waveland was flattened. Out of dozens of houses, we only saw one still standing. Cars were covered in rubble from when the homes and garages collapsed around them. In some places all that remained were concrete steps that once led from the beach to front doors that no longer existed.
But there were signs that the owners would return. Some had makeshift signs with their contact information and insurance policy numbers and new American flags flew over the crumpled remains of the homes.
It was a trip that would change my life. I’ve had much more enjoyable vacations through the years but few that were as meaningful.
Traveling to the Gulf Coast after Katrina gave me a rare storytelling opportunity. But it also gave me the chance to step away from being a reporter for a time and to concentrate on simply being someone there to help those in need.
Email Brian at brian@thespectrum and follow him at Facebook.com/PasseyBrianor on Twitter, @BrianPassey. Call him at 435-674-6296.
Read more: St. George resident Rahim Skeith Muhammad rode out Hurricane Katrina from his workplace at the University of New Orleans. His home was severely damaged in the storm but the most memorable aspect of Katrina for him was how his community came together to help each other out in the aftermath. Read his story in the news section.
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