I remember riding alone into New Orleans in my white pickup truck back then, on the first day the public was officially allowed to drive into the city after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
I am remembering that as we approach the 20th anniversary Friday of the cursed, 175-mph storm’s making landfall in the city where I was born and raised. As I drove past the dreadful sites of white dust, brown grass and blue tarps, downed power lines and uprooted trees and damaged homes and businesses, the song on the Josh Groban CD that started playing was “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
“Word of God, our flesh that fashioned
With the fire of life impassioned
Striving still to truth unknown
Soaring, dying round Thy throne”
Hearing those words, while trying to wrap my head around what I was seeing, I started crying. I was not alone. There were lots of tears related to Katrina.
John Brady, LSU’s head basketball coach at the time, who was about to embark on an NCAA Final Four 2005-06 season, was the featured speaker at the United Way Campaign Kickoff in Alexandria. After his speech, he told me how Glenn Davis was affected. Nicknamed “Big Baby,” the 6-foot-9 power forward and center who that season was a consensus All-American and SEC Player of the Year, was one of a handful of LSU players who stayed at the Maravich Assembly Center for several hours one day when it was transformed into a triage unit.
Davis stood beside a doctor who was opening a breathing hole in the throat of a patient who died, and he “got so overwhelmed by what he saw, he went back to his room and broke down,” said Brady.
My parents arrived from an extended summer trip to New Hampshire that day I arrived, in early October, not expecting what they saw in their home. They had received a message from someone who had passed by that it appeared to be OK. Looks can be deceiving. The front of the house looked OK, but it didn’t show the roof toward the back of the two-story house, much of which was torn off. That opened the way for massive rain damage and, of course, the loss of electricity.
My parents were both in their 80s at the time. Dad was outwardly stoic but fuming inside, and Mom was shouting and crying and angrily threw a package of rotten, molded lunch meat across the kitchen before breaking down. They were fortunate to be able to move into an apartment, vacated by my nephew, a few blocks away. Their house, built in the early 1900s, had good bones and was able to be reconstructed. They were able to move back into the house in October of ’06.
Yet, the storm and its aftermath was a sad turning point in their lives as they never were the same afterwards.
When the hurricane was approaching, my friend Bucky, a pathologist in New Orleans, elected to stay rather than evacuate for a variety of reasons, some naïve but all honorable. Like everyone who stayed, he got a false sense of security after the storm passed Monday without much damage. But on Tuesday the waters from the broken levee started rising and rising — rising four inches an hour by nightfall.
Tom, a friend of his from Ferriday, almost miraculously got through to him on his landline and asked if he was still in New Orleans, and if so, was he OK. When Bucky told him what was going on, he offered to come get him. He knew he couldn’t drive in to New Orleans but offered to come by his boat on the Mississippi River and find him.
Bucky convinced Tom not to take such a risk, and then he lucked out when he heard some newscasters on his little TV say, “If you are uptown, you need to get out of town, and here’s how you do it.” Bucky, wearing hip boots, turned to his family and said, “Let’s go. Grab what you can and let’s get out of here.”
In darkness and flooding waters, they drove through, around and over all sorts of obstacles, got out of town and eventually made it to Tom’s house in Ferriday around 1 a.m. Wednesday.
Yes, it was a nightmare. The Superdome, with its shattered roof, became the world’s largest human toilet, and there were shootings and pillaging and worse. But you know what, it wasn’t the end of civilization in the Crescent City.
After all the rooftop wailing and gnashing of teeth, it was as if New Orleans, a place with rich faith, collectively shouldered its heavy cross in working to revive and even improve the city.
And looking at the place 20 years later, it did a darn good job. The city’s NFL team, the Saints, went to the NFL Championship game in 2006 and won the Super Bowl in 2009. Since Katrina, New Orleans has hosted two NCAA Men’s Final Fours, one NCAA Women’s Final Four and two Super Bowls, with the most recent, earlier this year, being acclaimed as the crown jewel of all Super Bowls.
JazzFest, since Katrina, hasn’t skipped a beat, unless you count a couple of years when it couldn’t beat Covid. And this year the New York-based media brand Time Out named New Orleans as the best food city in the world.
I’d say the doomsayers who predicted New Orleans’ demise were wrong, as they usually are. It’s not fun on this 20th anniversary to recall the horrors of that storm, but it’s satisfying to see how resilient and even energizing that city has since become.