Okay. When did we leave? When did we leave? The morning of the storm, it
was me and my brother was the only two that was here. His wife died two
days before the storm. They lived across the street. He
didn't want to evacuate for the storm, grieving process and
that, I can understand that. So I said, "We'll just
stay here." So we stayed here through the storm. We stayed in
my house. I had everything boarded up tight, every window was covered,
and I knew we'd be safe from the winds,
hundred-and-thirty-mile-an-hour winds. The house could withstand that
and it surely did. The following morning, well, I'm an early
riser, I get up at five o'clock, and that's when
the storm was just about really kicking good.
So I come outside on the front porch. You could stand outside without
being wet. The street was flooded, normal street flooding, like from a
rain shower and that, and it pretty much
Page 3stayed like
that for a couple of hours. We're watching the news and the
weather and everything like that. We still had electricity at the time.
It was about seven thirty, the parish president for St. Bernard Parish
came on and said that there eight feet of water in Arabi.
Arabi's like two miles from here. Right after he said that,
that's when we lost power. And I'm just thinking
to myself, "Well, what is that? How could they have eight feet
of water in Arabi? What was he talking about? Was that back by the
levee? Was that by the river? Was it coming from the city?" I
don't know.
It might have been maybe an hour after that, seven thirty, say about
eight thirty, we were still outside on the front porch just watching the
weather, couldn't stay inside with no lights, and it was
already getting warm in there. And the street was still flooded and all
of a sudden, looking down the street from that direction, coming from
the north, you could see waves in the street, not normal rain water,
like white-capped waves pushing real, real quick. The instant I seen it,
I knew that the levee was broke. So the only thing I said was,
"You take one of my dogs. I'll take the other dog.
And get out of the house." I'd say in five minutes
time, just enough to put a leash and a collar on each one of them, I had
a little bag packed with important papers, money, credit cards, that
kind of stuff. There was already one foot of water inside the water in
five minutes time. So you can't say you had time to pick up
anything or save pictures. There's no way, no possible way
you could have done anything like that. You hear horror stories of
people drowning in attics. Well, that's the last place
I'm going to go is in the attic. I said, "Just get
me outside."
So we walked out the door. I managed to pull the door closed and
dead-bolt it locked. We get to the sidewalk right there. It's
almost waist-deep. And we headed toward St. Bernard highway up here,
which seemed like it took forever. It seemed like a fifteen-minute-walk
Page 4wading through water. The whole time, waves are
pushing you and the storm is still passing. So you've got a
hundred-and-thirty-mile-an-hour winds on top of that. You're
each carrying a dog and a suitcase and just barely struggling to get to
the highway. Well, I figured if we got to the highway, we'd
be safe because the highway is much higher in elevation than it is on
the back streets. We made it to the highway, had a chance to stop and
catch your breath, and the water kept coming. It kept coming, kept
coming, kept coming.
We were about four blocks from the St. Bernard Courthouse, which is a
three-story complex, old, old building. I said, "Well, we have
to head to that." So we just walked in the wind and the rain
and the floodwaters on our heels the whole time, watching the water
coming up. We looked down the streets. You could see the water rushing
up the whole time. But it wasn't just normal rainwater. It
was water pushing like white caps, the actual surge coming through. We
make it to the courthouse and the courthouse, I guess, is on a little
bit higher elevation than this. We figured, "It's
alright here." We looked back at the streets by the courthouse;
no, the water's coming up there too just as strong as it was
on this street. That was the day of the storm.
So we got in the courthouse. By the time the water got to its highest
point, the courthouse is maybe on six or eight steps to get to the first
floor, the water was up all those steps plus one foot of water in the
downstairs of the courthouse. I imagine it was like six feet deep in
front of the courthouse and it leveled off; it stopped there. It
didn't get up any higher. We spent the first night in the
courthouse, in the courtroom where they hold court at, with about four
hundred other people in the dark, with no windows, hot, no water.
Somebody managed to get peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So everybody
in the place got one single peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There was
old people. There were sick people. There were
Page 5screaming kids. Everybody was scared, not knowing what to do. By the
time it was nightfall, it was total blackness, no street light, no
nothing. The oil refinery is right across the street, dead silent, no
lights coming from there either, which was strange; you'd
never see that ever. So everybody slept sitting up on the benches.
The following morning, they evacuated us by boat from the courthouse to
the St. Bernard Jail, which is about six or eight blocks from there. We
got on the boat. They brought us as close as they could get to the
jail—the jail was on a little bit higher
ground—until the boats started dragging and then they
stopped, let us out, and you had to wade through the water to get to the
jail. We get to the jail. They were taking maybe fifteen, twenty people
at a time, registering them just to identify who's there, and
letting you come in. They promised us, "Oh, there's
electricity at the jail. It's air-conditioned and
everything." No, there's electricity, but no,
there's no air. There's just vent air, just a fan
running, no cold air. In the jail, I've never been in jail
before, but it's made out of cement. Everything, the floors,
the walls, the ceiling, everything is cement. So everything is sweaty.
Everything is wet, damp, people slipping and falling, really really
nasty, and they put us up in the cell block, which was about eight
people, ten people, each one had like a little bedroom cell and a
gathering place where you would sit and eat your meals together in a
glass-enclosed room. We was in there for a little while.
Oh yeah, by the way, they wouldn't let the dogs come with us.
They had an area outside, an enclosed area that was an exercise area if
you was in jail, where they play basketball, tennis, and things like
that. That's where they was putting the dogs. So
nobody's really taking care of the dogs and we're
talking ninety-something-degree heat. So I would go out there and bring
them water and food and come back in. Well, we come back in one time and
for some reason, somebody slammed the door of the cell and we were
locked in the cell. So
Page 6everybody panics. It was a
strange feeling. I've never been in jail before and I
don't like the feeling. It took them maybe fifteen minutes
before they found the right person with the key to come let us out, to
open it up.
Well, they let us out and I said, "Get me the hell out of
here." I said, "We're going outside.
I'm not staying in here." My brother was all for it,
no problem. And so we went outside, got the dogs out of the yard,
because in the yard was everybody's dogs, big dogs, little
dogs, old dogs, sick dogs. I'd seen a couple of them die from
heat exhaustion, stroke, or whatever. I said, "That
ain't going to be my turn." So we just stayed
outside the jail. We found a seat out of a van and we brought that and
put it underneath a tree and we spent the night outside that night.
From there, the next morning, they decided that we can't stay
at the jail no more. You have to leave the jail because
they're going to make this a medical facility because there
were still people in the Chalmette De La Ronde Hospital and they were
going to evacuate those people to the jail. So they told us we have to
go the boat launch, which is right down the street from the jail where
the ferry that goes across the river can take you across. We get to the
ferry. Everybody's on foot and it was everybody that was from
the courthouse and whoever made it to the jail on their own too. To get
on the ferry, the landing for the ferry is damaged, so you had to get to
the end of the ferry, like where the cars would drive on it. Then you
would have to have somebody kind of help you to get from one area to the
other, because it was all bent. We get to there. They get us loaded on
the ferry. Then we took the ferry ride upriver to what's
called the Algiers Point.
At Algiers Point, they let us off and we had to sit there and wait for
school buses. So we waited for maybe three hours there for the school
bus. School buses come. We finally get on a
Page 7school
bus. It takes us from the west bank in Gretna, or I guess
that's Gretna, Algiers. They're going to take us
to the I-10 around the causeway to take bigger buses out of town. So we
get to the school buses. They take us there. They drop us off on the
interstate. There's thousands of people here. People are
still being air-lifted, evacuated from New Orleans East by helicopters.
That's all you heard every minute or two, no exaggeration,
was a helicopter taking off or landing. That was more people that they
dropped off. They just kept dropping them off, dropping them off. And
the school buses are continuing to bring people to them.
We're waiting for the big buses like Greyhound or whatever
kind of bus line they're going to have lined up for us.
We're waiting and waiting and waiting. Finally, somebody comes
up there and we have water, bottled water, hot, okay, but there was
water. So they was throwing it, just throwing and tossing them out to
the crowd. So we got the water. We're waiting and waiting and
waiting. There must have been six, eight hours passed, nothing else,
nothing, just water. So then I guess maybe sixteen hours passed. So then
they finally out with those MRE meals. So they start tossing them out to
the crowd. Well, people are going crazy for these things because
they're starving or something. I don't know. So we
got a few of them like that and we opened them up, never seen anything
like that before. They were very nasty, I must say. I ate stuff like the
cookies or crackers or snacks or something out of it. As far as the
food, I didn't want nothing to do with it, but at least it
was there. It's something that you could survive for a day on
one of these meals.
All total on the interstate, we waited for thirty-two hours for a bus. At
the end, it got to a pushing and shoving contest to see who was going to
get to the bus. The thing that pissed me off most about the buses was
Governor Blanco was there and the news media is there. And
Page 8they're going to set this up to make a big
production that, "Oh, we've brought the buses to the
people," and everything. So they held the buses up.
We're out there in this ninety-something-degree heat,
sun-burnt like you wouldn't believe, for thirty-six hours.
Tempers are real short, fights left and right all around us. If
that's what it takes for you to get on a bus,
we'll just sit to the back and wait. We'll get the
last bus because I'm not getting into it with anybody over
this. But they held up the buses for so long. Then finally the news
people were there. Finally she's lined up there, made her
little speech and everything. Five minutes after the little commercial
is finished and the news item's done, the buses are there.
That's what it was. They was holding up the buses just to
make this big production that, "Oh, here's the
air-conditioned buses coming to take these people to evacuate them out
of town."
They wanted to make it look like it was a racial thing. The only thing
was the poor black people that was left. Which yes, there is a lot of
poor black people, but there's a lot of white people too and
class or means or anything doesn't have anything to do with
that. We were all in the same place. This is not something we had
control over, but don't make it look like, "Oh,
it's just the black people and this is the blacks."
Now yeah, some of them were acting up. Yeah, there was a lot of white
people acting up because everybody was just, nerves were frazzled, and
we couldn't take it anymore and waiting and waiting and
waiting, very unorganized how the buses come. They know that the buses
hold between fifty-five and sixty people. We've got National
Guard. We have police. We have state troopers. Why they
couldn't round you up to a gate, give you a number or count
off fifty people, keep them in line right there. The next bus comes up.
Let them fifty people come on. No, the buses come, the doors open, and
people plow in there like it's a rock concert with free
tickets, just pushing and shoving to get in it. Then the next bus, the
next bus, the next bus.
Page 9
Well at first, from what we heard is: "We're taking
you to Baton Rouge. That's going to be our next evacuation
point where we can house the people." So I said,
"That's fine." All I wanted to do was get
to Ponchatoula where my niece lives. I knew if we could get any further
away from New Orleans and closer to Ponchatoula, that would be good.
Baton Rouge is not that far from Ponchatoula. All it would take is a
phone call, if we had a phone to call with, and get through,
we'd get somebody to come get us. But like I said, thirty-six
hours later, by the time we got on the bus, it's no longer
going to Baton Rouge. We have to go further west. So we ended up in
Houston. That was like an eight, maybe nine hour ride on the bus.
I don't remember too much of the ride because I was just
totaled out sleeping. In the meantime, I'd been in the same
clothes for like four days in contaminated water and everything. My legs
was both infected. I called it a "Katrina rash." I
have no idea what it was, but from my knees on down was like a blood red
rash, that by the time we got there, I needed medical attention
immediately. We pull up in the—was it the Reliance Center or
the Astrodome? And they said that there's like a triage
operation where people who need medical help was going to be able to go:
"So just remain here on the bus until we get all of this
straightened and get your information and everything."
I got up, got out, carrying my dog with me. I'm getting
treatment right now and nobody's stopping me. I get to the
Reliance Center and everything and there was a part outside where people
with notebooks are going through the information and if
you've got a medical card, give it to them, and blah blah
blah, all that stuff. So I filled out what I've got to do and
I'm waiting and waiting and waiting. Then they take you
inside for that. So then they tell you, "We can't
treat you because you've got the dog with you." I
said, "What am I supposed to do? The dog, I kept her from
drowning in the flood. You think I'm going to give her up
here
Page 10because you don't want to take the
dog inside? Like she looks like she would really hurt somebody. She
weighs like nine pounds." So I said, "The hell with
you all." I didn't get any treatment there.
In the meantime, my brother gets off the bus and we get separated and
we're at the Astrodome, which is a huge, huge place.
Everybody is everywhere and nobody knows anything. So we're
separated. I don't know what to do, how to find him, just
walking around, walking around, walking around. I haven't
eaten in all of those days either, just with water mostly, water and
cigarettes. I remember it was starting to get dark. The next thing I
remember it was dark. I was laying on the ground and people were pouring
water in my face because I blacked out. After that, I was just
disoriented. I was way in the front of the area where the stadium was. I
had no idea how to find my brother or anything.
I said, "Well, I'm going to find a hotel room and
I'm going to rent me a car," because I did have
money. I had a nice sum of cash and twenty-something credit cards on me.
I'm going to find something. But at that time at night, no,
you couldn't find it, not in the city of Houston. So I walked
to the interstate, which I don't know how long it was from
there, but it must have been like fifteen miles and I walked to the next
exit on the interstate with the dog and my little backpack, got off the
interstate, and walked to a service station and got something to drink,
something to eat, junk food or whatever, asked them, "Is there
a hotel around here?" Well, they only had one of those hotels
that they rent by the hour, if you know what I mean, but a
bed's a bed. "Where is it?" He says,
"It's about a mile down the road that way."
I made it there. They had a room. Good. I got to take a bath, bathe the
dog, and sleep in a real bed.
The following morning I get up. I go to the lobby to use the phone. I
said, "I need to get a rental car." The only place you
can rent a car is at the airport. I said, "Can you get me a
cab?"
Page 11So they called me a cab. I got in
the cab, rode to the airport, got me a rental car, went back to the dome
to look for my brother. Well, it's daytime and I'm
in a little bit better frame of mind the next morning anyway. So you go
to each one of the exits: north, south, east and west exits. Outside
there was a Red Cross thing set up, like you're looking for
somebody's that lost, where you give them their name and
inside of the dome, the banner—you know how you can light up
the banner with information and everything around
it—they'd have that and they would flash the name:
"Meet your brother by the west gate," or something
like that. Still, you're not going in the dome with the
animals, with the dogs. So I got one and he's got one. So I
figure he's probably going to be around the Red Cross thing,
but he's not going to be inside. So that's not
going to do me too much good. What happens is I guess he was doing the
same thing, but he might have been at the east gate while I was at the
west gate or the north or the south. We just must have been crossing
paths the whole time.
I forgot to mention I didn't have any shoes. So somebody gave
me a pair of flip flops and I had been walking for all those miles on
the interstate with flip flops. So both of my feet were covered in
blisters that I couldn't do too much walking. I spent about
six hours that day around the dome looking for him until I
couldn't walk anymore. The dog couldn't walk
anymore; the bottoms of her feet are bleeding. So I got to carry her
now. I said, "We can't do this. I got to
go."
We just get back to the car. I said, "Well, I'm going
to make it to Ponchatoula by my niece's house;"
that's his daughter. We got in the car and drove, but I was
too tired to make it all the way in one day. So I stopped around
Lafayette, Louisiana, I believe, and spent the night again. The
following morning, I got up, made it to Ponchatoula. When I got to
Ponchatoula, I found out that my brother did get in touch with them
finally and they were on their way to pick
Page 12him up
from Houston. So we finally got hooked up with that and he came back
with them maybe three or four hours after I got there. At least we got
reunited and the dogs got reunited again and we was with family and
that's where we needed to be. I stayed in Ponchatoula until
the first of the year. My brother was a lot luckier than me. He ended up
getting a FEMA trailer within the first month due to where he works at.
His boss managed some kind of way to get trailers delivered on the site
where he works at and gave him a trailer; so that was good for him. I
had to do it the slow way, going through FEMA and everything else and
apply for it and wait for it to be delivered, this, that, and the other
thing. I got this right before Christmas. This was my Christmas present.
It was like the twentieth or the twenty-first of December it came. And
that's when I come back, was maybe the second of January, and
I've been here ever since.