Reliving Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of 10 people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
10 people. 10 stories. 10 perspectives.
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As Katrina bore down on
"She was going to try to leave and the phone cut off, and that was the last time that we spoke to her," DeStefano said.
The night before Katrina hit, when the rest of her family decided to go to Stennis, they went to retrieve Meeks but she said she would stay with her friend if the storm got bad. After sandbags were placed around the house and everybody left, DeStefano said she had a feeling it would be the last time she saw her mother.
Once the storm had passed and left miles of destruction in its wake, DeStefano left the shelter as soon as she could to look for her mother. It took her three days to get within walking distance of her childhood homestead.
There were no roads, no stoplights and no street signs. The path to her driveway was covered with trash and debris, and it took DeStefano and her family six hours to walk two blocks.
"It was like walking through a garbage dump," she said. "We were really trying not to think. When we did think, it was just hoping to God my mother got out."
But DeStefano said she knew in her gut that her mother wouldn't leave the home that was custom designed for their family's needs decades earlier. Meeks was a collector who had one room full of Tupperware and a space she kept locked that was full of computers. Once everyone left home, she also made one wing a farm area for a pet pig, who along with the German shepherd that lived with her.
When they finally got to the lot where their home once sat, DeStefano and her sister,
Nine weeks later,
DeStefano said she often thinks that she should have handcuffed Meeks to her side.
"There's not a day that goes by that we don't think about what happened," she said. "It still hurts. It will always hurt."
DeStefano said her mother always wanted her to take art classes. Since Meeks' passing, she began taking painting lessons and said she paints at least once a week.
"I always think of my mother when I paint," she said.
Katrina's winds started flexing the
The building on
Allen watched his vehicle float away. Debris cut them. Gasoline from vehicles filled the water and stung their cuts. Roofs, trees, animals -- everything imaginable -- floated by.
Allen thought about his house south of the highway. He thought about his girlfriend and her two children. They had moved in together three months earlier.
"I remember making a pact with God and saying, 'If I get out of this, I'm going to ask Brooke to marry me," Allen said.
When the water subsided, the officers and dispatchers clambered to the ground and started walking.
They had no equipment, no vehicles, but they were problem solvers. They found a way. At first, Allen said, he caught a ride to
Allen's girlfriend thought he was dead. She broke down in tears when he reached the family in
"I said to her, 'I don't have a ring, As a matter of fact, I don't have anything anymore, but will you marry me?'"
David and
"If right now my house was to burn down and I lost everything," Allen said, "you know what? My kids are OK. My wife's OK. Stuff is stuff. We've lost all of our stuff once already.
"So, for me personally, it put a different perspective on things."
Mother and son had fought before Hurricane Katrina crashed ashore.
It was one of those silly fights that would have passed as inconsequential except, later,
The day after Katrina,
She pictured Dustin's body in the water. She feared they would never find his remains.
The Duvalls surveyed what was left of their beloved Point, as the community is called. Rubble, piles and piles of rubble. She searched, calling her son's nickname.
And then she saw his bedraggled blond head. Dustin had spent the night in
A body was the first thing he saw when he went to search for his family on the Point, where
Dustin heard his mother's voice. He ran to her. They locked in a hug captured by a
Their house and all their possessions were gone. But that was OK.
Since the storm, they talk every day. The married father of two never forgets to say, "I love you, Mama."
The count was 97 dead, three missing, in
"I owe an obligation to the public, as an elected official, to do everything I can not only to protect the public, but to protect the rights of the deceased and the family of that person," Hargrove said. "It is my responsibility to make sure that everyone is identified, that there is a cause of death and a manner of death.
"Now, I take it personal because I know if it was my family, I would want whoever was doing this job to do everything they could to get them identified and returned back to me so they could be put to rest in their final resting place."
Hargrove,
His assistant,
Hargrove identified Will in
Hargrove had hoped Strength's tattoo would crack the mystery of his identify. It appeared to say, "
The coroner talked on more than one occasion to a woman whose son was still missing. Once, she said the young man had no tattoos; another time, she said he had a bunch of them. Then the young man's half-sister called, saying their mother had passed away.
Her brother, she recalled, was trying to give himself a tattoo that said, "
On
"That," Hargrove said, "was probably the best day of my life."
In Hurricane Katrina's aftermath,
The family returned to the Coast
"My very worst moment was when I crawled over 5 feet of debris, nine months pregnant, to get to my house," Robertson said. " . . . We walked through the door that was already open and saw the destruction. I mean, it was all around us, but when I walked through my personal living space, I just kind of fell apart."
And then the unthinkable happened.
"Honestly," Robertson said, "there was so much going on that I wasn't really thinking about the fact that I may go into labor while I was there."
" . . . When I realized I was going into labor, it happened so fast and I was so far along that there wasn't really time to think about anything except, 'Where am I going to have this baby?' "
She had meticulously planned the birth of
Instead, she and her husband drove from the home near the waterfront in
A midwife delivered her daughter. There was no pain medicine. The next morning, she had to check out.
She left newborn Sofia with her mother in her parents' relatively undamaged
"The adrenaline and everything else that was going on, I didn't feel like I had just given birth," Robertson said. "I was fine." In hindsight, she realizes that she was "in survival mode."
As it turned out, Robertson never left. Her sister's power was restored, so the family spent more than a week in one bedroom, then found a duplex the owner was willing to rent because of their circumstances.
The little girl said, "They were so amazed that my mom was one of those survivors and that I lived."
The affable restaurateur managed
After the storm, Hispanics poured into the community for construction work. Their nail guns pounded from sun up to sun down, seven days a week, as they re-roofed damaged houses.
"A lot of times, you would find them sleeping in trucks in parking lots because there were no rooms to rent and no places to stay," he said, "but they were able to help tremendously in rebuilding the community."
Workers came from
Carranza's volunteer work as an interpreter was more in demand than ever. He organized dinners where the newcomers sampled one another's cuisine, arranged dental and doctor's appointments and put workers in touch with the
Two years ago, Carranza opened a new restaurant, El Agave, in downtown
"Katrina was an event that really changed my life," he said. "I started looking at things in a different way. We started focusing on what really mattered because we can have a Katrina moment at any time in our life.
"You know, when you think you have it all, when you think you're the healthiest person, it can hit you, something like that. You're never prepared for it. But if you focus on the right thing, which is the family and the people we love ... We grow stronger and we overcome everything."
As a child,
Washington found herself on the second floor of a two-story house in the same community during Hurricane Katrina, having waited too long to evacuate. She thought of the Bible story in which Jesus calms a raging sea. "Peace, be still," kept running through her mind.
The water lapped at the top step before it started to recede.
"After the storm," she said, "it was destruction and death, and the smell of death in the air. When people came out, it was, to me, like turtles coming out of a shell. They were disillusioned, and everyone was happy to see someone alive, whether we knew you or not: the hugs, the kisses.
"The language barriers, the cultural barriers, the old feelings of racism died . . . "
Soon enough, though, federal dollars arrived and the old walls started going back up, Washington said.
Her neighbors, especially the elderly, had a hard time navigating the myriad avenues to assistance. She started a newsletter to keep the community informed about relief opportunities. She worked at a church-based food bank, delivering meals to the elderly.
"That's how I got through the aftermath of Katrina," said Washington, whose house was rebuilt over 18 months by non profits and volunteers. "I came out of self and saw that there was a much greater need."
Watching weather forecasts,
Her bed and breakfast,
But the
Moon and six friends retreated to the second floor. The surge soon mounted the staircase. The old inn collapsed under its force.
They launched one couple, two friends in their 80s, into the water on roofing material. Moon feared she would never see them again.
Moon, her Scottish terrier Maddy and two friends,
The three friends clung to the oak branch for hours, pounded by one wave after another.
"I really did think I was going to die," Moon said.
Once the water receded, they jumped from the tree. The two couples separated from them had also survived, they later learned. The oak tree fell victim to the cleanup, its roots smothered by debris.
Moon had the bald oak, angels carved into two branches, anchored into the ground on the waterfront. She can see it out her kitchen window at the rebuilt
"It's a tree of life, really," Moon said, "And it's a tree of a town, I think, that is so strong. It survived so much and 10 years later is just amazing."
The activation was special, Downey recalls. It marked the team's first deployment since the
"My dad had built the urban search and rescue system in the country, he was one of the godfathers of the
The newly rebuilt team traveled 36 hours to
"It almost looked like a small bomb hit that area, where houses were knocked down, houses were swept away, houses were filled with mud up to second level," Downey said.
The team went to work soon after they arrived, surveying the sections they were assigned, hoping to make an impact on the community just like the country rallied around the
"We were overwhelmed with the support we got during 9/11," he said. "We had teams coming from all over the world to help us with our rescue, and we always felt we wanted to give back in some way."
Seeing the destruction became a difficult reminder of what they endured only four years prior to Katrina.
"These people (were) going through what we went through -- losing loved ones," Downey said. "To hear their stories was kind of difficult."
But the NY-TF1 carried out its mission to help
"Whether it was putting tarps on the roof or crawling through a collapsed house looking for people or recovering someone's loved one ... it was done with dignity," Downey said. "Although the team made no excuses, they did whatever they could to make an impact."
"They were giving us support, which was heartwarming to us, offering us their water, and basically they had nothing left of their homes. They were giving us what they had."
At 85 years old, Capt. Ronald Riecter hasn't lost a step.
Riecter, found one morning sanding down the mast of the great schooner boat "
Plus, the warm weather doesn't bother him as much as the cold up north did.
"Before the storm, we took the schooner boats up the river as far as we could and tied them up. They had minor scratches on them and were ready to go immediately after the storm," he said. "But the real problem we had was the fact that we didn't have a Coast to dock them to."
The seasoned sailor rode out the storm in his house in
Despite that, he vows to stay behind if a similar threat came to be.
"It's easy to leave because it is tempting to get away from the chaos and the aftermath of the storm," he said. "But once you leave, they won't let you back in until the authorities deem it fit and under control. Meanwhile your property lies there, and there is nothing you can do about it."
His views on the storm are unorthodox.
"I like to think that the storm did a lot of good for the city of
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