Sonya Hernandez

The day of the storm, they started saying in the news about the storm coming bad. So I said, “I need to bring everybody home and try to get them safe. Maybe their family wanna go on and go to the Superdome.”

I used to drive all of the neighborhood kids around the city. “Mama Sonya I need a ride,” they’d say. I used to bring them here, there, everywhere. And they called me when they was out there somewhere. So what I did, I bring everybody to their houses. Then I start working on my house, see what we was going do.

I was not worrying about nothing. My mind already was on the aftermath of the hurricane. Let me tell you why: because I was in Hurricane Andrew. In Andrew, my husband figured out what we was going to do and we got help five minutes later.

The news was talking about, “Katrina’s moving this way and we don’t think it’s going to come to New Orleans.” And then when Katrina was almost on top of New Orleans, then they start saying on the news that it would come to New Orleans and it was going to be a major hurricane. They was talking about evacuation but they were saying, “If you don’t feel safe, you need to evacuate.”

We didn’t went nowhere. We got some money. We borrowed some money and we bought a few things that we needed just in case, like flashlights, candles, canned food, a lot of bottles of water, and stuff like that. Diaper for my granddaughters. But about 11:30 a.m., the police come to the door and they said we have to go.

The police said everybody gotta go. My husband was there, he said, “I’m not goin’ nowhere,” and he hide. He don’t wanna go. He don’t want to evacuate. So he told me, “You go with the kids. I’m’a stay here because I’m not about to let nobody come and vandalize my house.” He never run from no hurricane at all. So we left to the Superdome, but he got his cousins and friends.

My oldest daughter, she’s got a friend—his mama and his grandmama left him—so we got in the van and this boy called my daughter and my daughter said, “Mama, Ronnie by hisself.” So I went all the way to Tulane and Carrollton to pick Ronnie up and then there was a line of police people telling the cars, “Go to the Superdome.” I think it was too late. They should’ve done that earlier. I think that’s why a lot of people died. Some people didn’t know what to do, and some people don’t even have no money to do nothing. Let’s put it to you this way: You got a car, you gotta put gas in. What about if you don’t got no gas in the car, if everything is stopped? Which bus are you going to catch to go to the Superdome? So actually, they should’ve do it early. By the time they was doing the mandatory evacuation, it was too late.

And a lot of people got trapped on the bridge across the Superdome, ’cause when the hurricane was about to hit, they don’t let nobody else get in the Superdome. So a lot of people go through the storm on the bridge.

When we got to the Superdome, we was searched like we was about to go inside jail. The New Orleans police was not there when we got there. It was the Superdome police who was there. It was like security guards. They was trying to run things. And they told the people, “Sit down on the bleachers.” Everybody sat down on the bleachers.

Kalamu Ya Salaam

I was living in Algiers when Katrina hit. I had the belief that it was going to be a bad storm, just from the projections and looking at the size of the storm. It was a huge storm. Many people do not realize just how large it was, even people in New Orleans.

It’s funny, though, because I have this feeling that I will know when I’m about to check out. And I’ve had feelings that, “This is a dangerous situation that I might not make it out of,” but I’ve never had the feeling that I was gonna die. I don’t have a fear of flying. I don’t have any of that. There must be a little bit of reptile in me, and I don’t have certain nerves that other people have and respond to things. I just don’t respond to it. I’m not a worrier.

My wife is an X-ray technician specializing in CAT scans. If she’s on call, we go to the hospital, we go to the Veterans Hospital and ride the storm out in the hospital. And she was supposed to be on call for Katrina, but there was a bureaucratic snafu and her name was not on the emergency personnel list, which meant she couldn’t bring her family to the hospital. So she asked somebody else who was on call if he would they cover for her, and he said, “Yeah, I gotta be there, I can’t go nowhere, so yeah, I’ll cover for you.”

We evacuated the Sunday before Hurricane Katrina hit. Three of my children—I have five—were living in New Orleans at the time. They all evacuated. The hurricane was Monday. We left Sunday morning about 9:30 a.m. We went with some heavy traffic. I think we got to Houston at 2:30 in the morning.

Father Vien The Nguyen

I guess about 10 a.m. on Sunday, the wind was whipping up already.

I told the people, “You can feel the wind now and the storm is more than 360 miles from here, so get out.”

At 9:30 Mass, I told the people that the Hurricane had reached Category 5—175 miles an hour. And the reporters were saying with that force, residential buildings would just collapse. So I told the people, “All of you are to leave, but those of you who cannot leave,

I will open up the school building,” because that’s a newer structure, and also it has a second floor just in case of flooding, and then they could evacuate upstairs.

So I told them, “I will open it up at 3 p.m., but get out if you can.” By noon, I was watching the news, and I believe that was when the mayor called for a mandatory evacuation. And a lot of people left but some of them still came to the school building.

The first hundred, hundred-twenty evacuees arrived that day. And I told them to bring food and water because we only have enough for ourselves. And so they did. They brought food, they brought water. And that was the day of the storm. Ten p.m. was when the wind was really kicking up. I was watching the news, but I knew that because I was trying to go to sleep and I can feel the wind really, not just rattling, but ramming the window. And my concern was whether or not my window can take it.

At about 2 a.m. was when I started to hear some dripping in my room. We still had power then, and I left my door open. Although I was dozing off, I was listening to the news as well. The wind was, again, kicking up even stronger, and the rain was driving. The force of the wind was driving the water through the top of the window sill.

So what I did was I found some paper towels, got a trash can, just to catch the water where it was falling through my window. About four or five minutes after 4 a.m. was when the power went off. So I called my assistant and I said, “It’s here.” I was upstairs and it was all dark. At about 5 a.m. was when the top part of my house, the second floor, was creaking as the wind pushed it. But it’s interesting that throughout the storm, our phone lines were still on. Although there was no power, we have some of the low-tech phones that needed no power other than the lines—$5.99 Walgreen’s special.

Daniel Finnigan

Well, we didn’t know that Katrina was coming for us until, maybe not the eleventh hour, but the tenth hour at least. The storm was Monday. Saturday was really the first that I knew that it was coming straight for us and it was going to be bad. Maybe some other people knew one day before that, but you know, living in New Orleans you always kinda half pay attention to these things: “Okay, something’s comin’ in the Gulf, what’s goin’ on?” But everybody had the impression that it was going to hit Florida. Sorry for Florida, they got hit bad last year. They always get everything.

But on Saturday we started thinkin’. Your ears perk up and you realize that somethin’s coming. Me being me, I didn’t try to do anything until Sunday and of course all the stores were closed, and everybody who was left was running around trying to find a store that was open.

I went to the bank. I had 150 bucks and I took it out and, to be honest, I was tryin’ to buy cigarettes and stock up on beer. I had water. That sounds ridiculous after the fact, but at the time you don’t know it is going to be all that. This was the first hurricane that scared me prior to it coming. George, I wasn’t that worried. Ivan, I wasn’t worried. I’ve never really been that worried.

Well, for one thing, Katrina was a Category 5. It took up half the Gulf. It was just a big scary storm that was coming at the last minute. I just had a sense that it was gonna be really bad, but I had no idea at all that it was gonna be anything of this magnitude. So normally in New Orleans, you have your “hurricane party” kind of mentality. A hurricane’s coming, you get everything squared away. You board up your windows, you get your supplies, you do all these things, and then all you can do is wait, so you write slogans on the boarded-up windows.

On one window, I drew a bull’s-eye. It sounds insensitive now, but it was a different climate at that time. It was, “You’ve done everything you can,” so now you’re, I don’t want to say egging the storm on, but that’s just kinda how people do it down here. I did that and I heard a phrase on TV, they were saying, “possible tornadic development.” So I wrote, “Tornadic development, Horatio.” I don’t know why or what that means, but I thought it was funny. It wasn’t funny after all.

I had another one that said, “Amnesty for the hounds, Katie.” I’m a dog guy. It’s like, “Do what you want to us, but let the dogs live.”

I drew a picture of Blue on another one. Blue is my dog. He’s pretty much why I stayed. I don’t have a vehicle, I don’t have any of that.

I coulda caught a helicopter ride out, but I don’t wanna go anywhere without my dog. So I drew a picture of Blue that said, “Bad God, Good Dog.” And then I heard on the radio, even before the storm, maybe on the Christian right or some radio station or something, they were saying, “Possibly New Orleans deserves it.” So I said, “Down with the preachers, long live Gomorrah,” and then on the last one I just painted a painting of a woman named Katrina.

So we got everything done we could. I helped JD and Sandy across the street put their boards up. We all put our boards up, and then it was just wait. There’s kind of an excitement. I’ve always enjoyed the excitement of storms, the intensity, and you kinda have some butterflies. You don’t know what’s going to happen. This is supposed to be the big one. They’re telling you, “Get out or you’re on your own,” because it’s gonna be that bad. So it’s exciting.

My boss had given me a bottle of Patrón tequila a couple days before the storm, just as a little bonus. I was working for a guy named Kim, up in the warehouse district; we were doing a remodeling project on a condominium. He was a good guy.

So anyway, I was hangin’ out with my friend JD. He was with his girlfriend, Sandy. We drank that bottle of Patrón. We were just drinking and you’re kinda anxious and just waiting to see what’s gonna happen. So, you just try to mellow out. About ten o’clock that night the power went out in our neighborhood and the storm started coming in, just the outer bands. This is Sunday night.

When the power went out, we’re like, “Okay, there it is. That’s the first step. That’s probably the last power we’re going to have for a week.” So we hung out until maybe midnight and then we all kinda went to our own little hideouts and kinda holed up, and just watched the storm start to come in. I maybe fell asleep around 2 or 3 in the morning. The storm had come in and it was windy. I woke up periodically through the night. The storm was getting pretty bad—a lot of wind, really bad wind, really bad rain. It still wasn’t even the heart of the storm yet, but it was already pretty bad.

I’d look out the window, and I kept thinking that I saw a dog hunkered down underneath the truck parked in front of my house. I wanted to go out and check. Things can play tricks on your eyes and I guess your mind can, too.

Jackie Harris

Well, on Saturday I had two meetings, one of which I kept and one

I didn’t. I came home and quickly went to the Internet to find a ticket to get out. And so I had to decide where I was going. Since we had an event with the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation in New York taking place in November anyway, I would take this opportunity to go there to advance the date. I thought I’d be away for three days, four days at most.

I actually had to buy a first-class ticket, as poor and as cheap as I am. I hate to spend over a thousand dollars for a seat, but I got the last seat on that particular American flight. And so I flew out on Sunday. And the flight was leaving at 6 a.m. I left my house at 2:30 because I didn’t know what to expect from contraflow and I was not going to be left.

And when I get to the airport, man, there were so many people there trying to get out of New Orleans, they had already began to cancel flights and people were trying to buy tickets to get out, people were on standby trying to get out. Let me tell you, I was very happy to have had a first-class ticket. I flew out. I couldn’t get a hotel room in New York. I think there were a couple of conventions and I couldn’t get a room. And so Phoebe Jacobs, a friend, told me not to worry, that I could stay with her.

God is good, that’s all I can say.

Dan Bright

So I’m in central lockup and I’m like, this is a nightmare. I’m seeing death row all over again, like everything is flashing back. I don’t want to see this no more.

I used the phone but I couldn’t call no one because there wasn’t no one to call. I called my family. They was about to leave and they tried to find bail bonds and they couldn’t. They couldn’t stay here so they had to leave. All of them have left, so now I have to stay here and wait the storm out.

I didn’t sleep. I think the lights went out. After breakfast on Sunday we didn’t see the guards no more. That’s the only time we ate, that Sunday morning. They gave us grits, boiled eggs, and that’s it. This was maybe like six, seven in the morning. So the guards left maybe like nine that morning.

See, every two hours or three hours, they’ll come and count us. When they didn’t come around to count, I’m thinking, “Where everyone at?” They didn’t come. And then lunch came around, they didn’t bring food then. I’m really worryin’ ’bout “How can I get out this place?” There ain’t no bail bondsmen. Living conditions is very bad. Anyone who knows about Orleans Parish Prison know how bad the living conditions is. It’s filthy, filthy. You know, it’s just rats, roaches, spiders.

I hear guys hollering for the guards to come. They wanna eat. Some guys might want to take a shower. They don’t come. It’s just total chaos, everybody hollering, banging on things, tryin’ to get their attention. No one comes.

Renee Martin

I was living on the West Bank. I had a one-bedroom apartment because my son had died and I couldn’t live in that house no more. There was too many bad memories. I wanted to be alone, but I was real depressed because I had lost him.

He had yellow jaundice, liver problems, and I didn’t know. I don’t think he believed it because he never complained about it hurting.

I was there when he died. It was hard on me. I remember when he was sick for a week and he was throwing up. He couldn’t keep his food down, so I thought that maybe he was dehydrated, so I went to the store and got a lot of liquids, but he still wasn’t able to keep nothing down. Then his eyes started getting yellow.

I said, “Your eyes are yellow. In the morning I’m going to bring you to Charity Hospital.” He said, “Okay, mom.”

I thought he was going to be all right. I went to sleep. Later on,
I woke up, and I took a shower, and I got dressed. I went to check on him, and my baby wasn’t even dressed. I was tryin’ to get him dressed. I am talking to him and I’m struggling. I thought he was just sick. So I called the cab to come and pick us up. I had a pad laid on the floor, and I laid him on it. I noticed he wasn’t moving at all. His stomach wasn’t even going up and down. I put my ear to his chest, trying to hear a heartbeat. I checked his pulse and nothing. Put an ear up to his nose to see if there was air. Nothing.

So I called the taxi driver back and told him to cancel the cab because I’m not sure if my son is dead or not. I don’t even know. But I think I might need the ambulance. He kept me on the phone. Called the ambulance.

He had turned eighteen on March 1, and he died April 7, 2003. He had two kids. My granddaughter’s birthday’s August 6 and my grandson’s birthday is September 20. That little boy looks just like him, acts like him.

I was dealing with deep, deep depression. It was hard on me. I used to get sick a lot. I wouldn’t eat. I wouldn’t go nowhere. I wouldn’t talk to nobody. I was giving up. My daughter, she would say, “Come on Mom, you can’t give up. You can’t give up. What I’m supposed to do if you die? I’m here.”

And I’m like, “You’re right,” but it was sticking in my head to do it. She was right. I guess I wasn’t thinking. It was hard. I was depressed, really depressed, you know?

I was doing a lot of unhealthy things to my body: not taking vitamins, not drinking no water, not eating the right food—I might eat junk food and stuff, drink liquor or beer, smoke cigarettes. I used to throw up a lot because I was weak, and my daughter tried and make me eat. She’d cook and the food would be too heavy on my stomach because I’d gone so long without eating. Then I was going through a lot of pain. I had a back injury, but I had back surgery twice and the doctors put me on medication. I suffered a lot of pain, and the medication that they had me on, I had to take them two at a time. They had me addicted.

If I didn’t have the medicine, I’d get sick. And when I had the medicine, I’d get sick. And I knew that all of my problems were because of the medication. It was too strong. A doctor puts you on medicine, says, “Stay on this regimen because of the sickness,” but they don’t tell you the side effects, and the side effects had me where I couldn’t walk. My daughter had to pull me around. She had to bathe me. She had to do everything. I don’t like to feel where I need help. I knew what I had to do. I had to wean myself off that medicine. And I was doing that. And the night of the storm I was sick. I was very sick. I had gone almost two weeks without taking my medication because I was tired of being sick.

We didn’t really take the storm seriously because we were used to having storms heading our way, and they die or they get there and turn another way. On Thursday, it was flashing on the news that we had a storm heading our way to New Orleans. They didn’t have nobody coming around saying, “Y’all need to evacuate.” If they would have, I think it would have been a little more smoother. But Saturday they were saying it was heading straight to New Orleans, as a Category 4. I’m like, “Oh well.” Sunday, it was a Category 5, and that’s when we were really started taking it serious, and I left from the West Bank where I live, and went into New Orleans.

I decided to go in the city for shelter. I thought I’d be more safer coming on that side of the river than on the West Bank. The West Bank is always known for flooding real bad. I stayed with one of my friends in the city right off Canal Street. Just us two, but there were the people in the neighborhood, like the neighbors and stuff. It was the morning. It was Saturday morning. I couldn’t hardly walk. I was sick, but my friend had went to the store to get candles and stuff, and they had nothin’ else on the shelves. We didn’t have no candles or anything.

The newscast on TV telling us that we had a Category 5 building up, coming our way, that the eye part of it is headed for New Orleans area. It’s a mandatory evacuation. Everyone must get what they need and pack up and leave. But everybody didn’t. It was mandatory evacuation but a lot of us couldn’t afford to even leave. The storm came on Sunday. We watched TV and everything that night, and then it started raining all that night.

I also called 911 and told them that I was a sick person and I was alone and I didn’t have no way out—could they please send, you know, a policeman or somebody to get me? They told me that someone would come out but it was, you know, pretty full and busy and I waited and I waited. I called like nine times. After like five times, they told me that there was too much water to even travel to that street.

Patricia Thompson

When Hurricane Katrina hit, I was in a state of desperation. I was doing work for my church for two hundred dollars a month. We were getting paid once a month, the last day of the month. The hurricane hit August 29.

I know you’ve heard all of this foolishness about the people that just did not want to leave: those are bald-faced lies. I had one dollar in my pocket. I did not have a vehicle, so there was no way for us to get out. It was two people living in my house when the storm hit, me and my youngest daughter.

My son went with his girlfriend and her family, and my second-oldest daughter and her kids left with her job—she’s a supervisor at a convalescent home. But my oldest daughter, my third-oldest daughter, my fourth-oldest daughter, and my baby daughter were also stuck in New Orleans.

We was hearing on the news and everything that the hurricane was coming. I was watching the meteorologist on the news, listening at the radio and everything. I remember seeing one particular weatherman who had a very, very worried look on his face, and he was explaining that what we were about to encounter we were not ready for. And if I could understand what the man was saying, then I knew the mayor, I knew the governor, and I knew the president knew what time it was. We got a mandatory evacuation order less than twenty-four hours before the storm made landfall. Less than twenty-four hours.

I know the race card was being played. I don’t know exactly what percentage of the city had evacuated, but there were masses and masses and masses of black folk left in this city. There were some whites, but I guarantee that for every white person they had in New Orleans, they had a few hundred blacks.

So anyway, once we got the mandatory evacuation order, right now you’re like crazy, you don’t know what to do, you can’t evacuate, you don’t have any way. So now this leaves desperation. The whole city is like one big riot. People are trying to get water, people are trying to get food. People are trying to steal cars, whatever they can do to help themselves and get out of that city.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun

Sunday night I didn’t sleep.

Late at night it starts, the winds start getting stronger, stronger. The wind and the trees moving, a very strong wind, many things flying outside. I didn’t go outside. The roofs start blowing away—a few pieces here, a few pieces here, and the water starts coming in. It comes inside the house, and I start using a container to catch it because I have hardwood floors. I try to save it. What I did, I opened holes in the ceiling to make the water come through one place instead of too many places. And I never give up all night, and the rain stopped finally early in the morning.