Letter to the Editor: An LSU student on campus during Hurricane Katrina recalls her story
Twenty years later, to the day, the sky is suddenly grayed over after an unusually dry and sunny week.
A week already full of horrors to rival the memories of a world-ending storm. A disabled boy torn apart by alligators after severe abuse. A Catholic church full of children ducking under pews, shielding each other, as bullets burst through the windows.
“For you, darkness itself is not dark, and night shines as the day,” they heard before the blast.
It’s as if the overcast sky remembers the cloud of dying things and decay that hovered over the city, sat like a weight in the chests of everyone who got out, seeped into surrounding cities like fog. For a lot of people, it still does.
Everyone here has a Katrina story, and this is mine.
I remember riding across the spillway to New Orleans, the only car on the interstate, carrying college kids wanting to do something, anything to help.
Our LSU Wesley Foundation pastor, now-First Grace Methodist Pastor Shawn Moses Anglim, played a song that would become a balm that year: “Shelter” by Ray Lamontagne.
“Listen when, all of this around us will fall over. I tell you what we’re gonna do. You will shelter me, my love. And I, I will shelter you.”
About halfway across the bridge the smell hit, a wall of damp, rotting air. You didn’t have to know what death smelled like to know that’s what it was, the scent of still water and black mold, when nothing and no one is left. No sounds of birds or engines or air conditioners or footsteps.
People weren’t allowed back into the city yet. A National Guard soldier at a barricaded interstate exit told us to turn around, but we had permission from someone who knew someone. We helped a lady Uptown, near a church whose stone steeple had toppled onto the street. We pulled drawers full of water out of her kitchen, wearing Tyvek white suits and masks like astronauts on a deserted planet — back when no one knew what an N-95 was.
We stopped to rest on the porch of the Columns Hotel, a huge white Southern mansion on St. Charles Avenue. My tall, thin and very pale roommate laid down in the sun on one of the front steps while we ate sandwiches out of Ziplocs and stared out into the empty streets, at house after house marked with how many bodies had been found inside. A Humvee of heavily armed men pulled up, and one of them asked if the girl on the steps was dead. She waved.
She says now that all she remembers is pastor Shawn, our driver, honking and shouting, “Keep hope alive!” on the rare occasion we would pass another human being.
Later, in February, we went back. It was chilly outside, when scents drift farther and it’s usually easier to smell the burning coffee under the high rise and the smoke of Sunday evening grills. This time we went to Chalmette, to The Parish™ as it’s called, and you must pronounce the ahhhh as long as possible in reverence to The Chalmations.
Unfortunately, the parish is even closer to the Gulf waters than New Orleans is.
By that point everything had dried up and fused together. It made things a little easier to haul through doorways and into yards. I vividly remember finding what seemed to be either flattened carcass of a dog, or a fur coat, in a closet with the door closed.
As eager college kids we would excitedly find things that were still salvageable, but the owners almost never wanted to keep anything. They had already detached from the unrecognizable piles of dirt and destruction that used to be their lives.
The last time I helped root out Katrina from New Orleans was in the June heat at Shaw Temple United Methodist Church, a Black church in a neighborhood called Dixon. There were not heaps of debris by that point, but a lot of church pews that needed moving.
I wish I remembered more, but at that point photos were taken via point-and-shoots from the drugstore and eventually lost to software and websites that no longer exist. Elder millennials can only scroll through their lives for so long until they get to the dawn of Facebook in 2004 or thereafter.
The one thing I remember most is the emotional weight of that year for everyone living in Baton Rouge, voluntarily or otherwise. How the city doubled in size overnight, the gridlock of the first day back to school or work.
For every resident there was now a shell-shocked New Orleanian reckoning with a reality ripped from their hands. Katrina permeated every conversation, every plan for the future.
During the storm, I was one of the few students left on campus. Most had fled back to family homes across Louisiana and elsewhere. But everyone thought it was headed to Florida at first, then Mobile, where I’m from. No point in going back to get a direct hit.
I watched Katrina from a small TV in a dorm room while the wind whistled outside. I woke the next morning to find scattered tree limbs and some of the most upsetting TV news coverage I’ve ever seen. Within a day or so it was decided that LSU, a state-funded school, would have to serve the public good in a more immediate way. Buses full of people were brought to sit outside the PMAC, offered clothes and food, and sent on to Houston. Inside were those evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes, or otherwise injured trying to escape the floodwaters.
I volunteered, helping where I could, from sorting clothes to holding clipboards full of patients sorted by priority of care. My boyfriend was assigned to the makeshift pharmacy in the locker rooms, next to where the dying room was. All the areas were color-coded – though that changed multiple times as each new state or federal agency tried to take charge of the chaos. Black was the code for people who weren’t going to make it, and you could hear their wails of agony drift across the arena.
I tried my best, but standing among a sea of people in pain and visibly injured had me shell-shocked. I had no training like the medical professionals who were adept at distraction and mood lifting. After two days, I broke down and couldn’t go back.
Classes eventually restarted, swelled by irritably relocated Tulane and Loyola students. The one bright spot that semester was getting to serve beer at the top of Tiger stadium for Saints games moved from the broken shell of the Superdome.
My on-campus job was at LSU concessions, where they once had to explain to the Alabama native what exactly “au jus” was and eventually write it on a slip of paper so I could get more from the supply area. Alcohol was usually forbidden, but we were hastily “licensed” and “trained” to sell beer as fast as we could get the bottlecaps off. Hilariously, my fly-by-night license had a check next to something like “bartender,” but the most visible multiple-choice option at first glance was “exotic dancer.”
I can’t say we were the most efficient operation, as the line stretched down the length of the stadium the entire first game, but everyone was very grateful.
People eventually figured out how to shoulder the weight of Katrina, carrying it for others when they could not, and vice versa. Slowly, the burden seemed to ease over time. Now 20 years later, the weight still isn’t gone, but shared, it gets lighter.
“You will shelter me, my love
And I, I will shelter you
If you shelter me, too.”
https://lsureveille.com/261564/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-an-lsu-student-on-campus-during-hurricane-katrina-recalls-her-story/
