Ten years later, Las Cruces chef recalls Katrina
"Ten years -- time goes fast," he said. "I don't think of it as an anniversary. It's something I'll live with for the rest of my life. I have no joy about it. I saw people dying -- some of my employees from where I worked, at the Fairmont, drowned. So it's been 10 years. It happened, I was there, and there must be a reason for that."
Marceaux was the executive pastry chef at the legendary
In preparation for the storm, the staff was given the choice to stay or evacuate. The French-born Marceaux, who had lived in the city for most of the 20 years he'd lived in
Only once had Marceaux evacuated for a hurricane, he said, when he was living in
He chose to stay at the Fairmont, and brought his family -- his pregnant wife and their two kids -- to the hotel to ride it out.
"I figured the hotel had been there for 150 years, it will probably be around for a while," he said.
They left their home in the
"We had just bought the house nine months before Katrina came," he said. "My wife is from
Marceaux spent all of
On Sunday night, Katrina moved in, battering the city. The storm didn't retreat until Monday afternoon, Marceaux said. It was bad, but not catastrophic. Some power lines were down; some cars were overturned; some windows were broken.
Early Tuesday morning, the levees broke. Outside the Fairmont's front door, four feet of water filled the streets. There was almost no electricity -- the hotel was nearly totally dark, except for exit lights, which were powered by rooftop generators. The basement, where all of the electrical equipment, the air conditioning and the boiler room were housed, was completely filled with water.
As the flood waters rose, Marceaux scrambled to save more than 20 years' worth of recipes.
"The water was up to my waist, and I got my recipes. Holding them above my head, I took them up to the 12th floor. I had a set of knives that my father gave me when I was an apprentice at a bakery we used to have in the South of
As the city flooded, downtown
"It was like nothing I've ever seen," Marceaux said. "Jewelry stores,
At night, the narrow stairwells of the hotel were filled with looters, carrying boxes of baseball caps and cartons of cigarettes, he said.
Marceaux prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner for the guests each day until Friday. Using gas stoves, and cooking largely in the dark, the pantries of the hotel were becoming bare, save for some canned food. Some of the hotel's wealthy guests called private helicopter companies to evacuate them. Other hotel employees would take them by rowboat to a place a helicopter could land.
On Friday, Marceaux said, the hotel arranged for the evacuation of the guests -- using several buses and SUVs. Because the streets were so dangerous, they hired armed mercenaries to escort the guests through the flooded streets to the vehicles waiting on higher ground.
Marceaux and his wife, who were supposed to be evacuated to
"I didn't want to stay in the shelter," he said. "But a woman on the bus used to work for me a long time ago. She said, 'Come to my brother's house, and we'll take you to the airport and see if you can rent a car.'"
Marceaux rented the last car in
Two weeks after arriving in
"It was like a war zone. Because of all the looting, you had to have a pass to even drive downtown. I got to the Fairmont, and couldn't get inside. It was all boarded up. I got my car, which had been parked on the sixth floor of a parking structure, and decided to go see what was left of my house," he said.
It was worse than he had imagined. The home had been sitting under eight feet of water for nearly two weeks. There wasn't a soul in sight. The water, which had mostly receded, had destroyed everything.
"I had photos of my grandfather riding the Tour de France in 1947, all the pictures of my kids when they were little -- it was all gone. There was nothing left, and no amount of money can replace that," he said.
After he received his insurance settlement, Marceaux was looking to get his young family out of
In 2008, Marceaux moved his family here, bought the Big Chair Café and renamed it Le Rendez-vous.
"Maybe it happened for a reason," he said. "
Three weeks ago, he returned to
"The landscape has changed," he said. "A lot of businesses never reopened. But there are a lot of new ones. In some ways, it's like a brand new city. Some of my friends who own restaurants said that it hasn't been the same. It's not like it was before. There's a lot more competition."
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