For most Georgetown students, hurricane season usually means little more than a few rainy days, or perhaps, as in 2003, a couple days off from school. Last year, of course, was different—Hurricane Katrina shocked us all. We were horrified by the images on television. We felt deep sympathy for the plight of New Orleans. Some of us even gave money or joined relief organizations. Our daily life, though, was largely unaffected. But for some Georgetown students, not a day has passed since then that they haven’t felt the effects of the hurricane on a deeply personal level.
Brittany Dye (COL ‘09) moved into her freshman dorm room at Loyola University New Orleans on a Friday night late last August. When she woke up on Saturday morning, the school’s welcome banners had been plastered over with red sheets that read “Evacuate.” Hurricane Katrina was headed toward her school with winds approaching 120 miles per hour, and both the governor of Louisiana and President Bush had declared a State of Emergency. Instead of navigating her way through the first week of classes, Brittany found herself first staying briefly with her extended family in the New Orleans area, and then, as the full strength of Katrina became apparent, driving to Atlanta by Sunday night.
Katrina hit the city of New Orleans on Monday morning, August 29, unleashing the now-infamous damage which destroyed the city. That same day, Loyola posted a notice on its web site that said the school would not hold classes for the fall term. In the span of a day, Brittany and thousands of other area students went from excitement over a short reprieve from classes to the realization that the entire city, and their college existence as they knew it, had been fundamentally altered.
Brittany’s grandmother and her extended family were holed up in a house north of New Orleans. They stayed until they ran out of food and electricity; the National Guard had to chainsaw through the trees which had blocked the driveway to the house.
“I was frantic,” she said, explaining that no one had been prepared for the full impact, especially on the level of the minutia—things so important for everyday life which are forgotten when it hangs in the balance.”The news kept talking about looters, and I’d left all my stuff in my dorm room—my clothes, my printer, my checkbook, my retainer, my contacts … literally everything I’d packed for college.”
A week after leaving New Orleans, Brittany Dye enrolled at Georgetown along with 51 other Loyola students, under the auspices of Jesuit reciprocity. She lived at home for the semester, and her hour and a half commute brought her to campus 2 hours before her classes actually began. Georgetown students, she said, went out of their way to be kind to her. Two girls “adopted” her as a roommate and let her stay in their dorm between classes. Students here were not only concerned with macro social responsibility when it came to Katrina, founding broad-reaching organizations like GU HERE and Blanket New Orleans, they were also concretely amicable to the Loyola refugees.
“Everyone wanted to hear my story, to listen,” said Brittany, with an open smile and a slightly Southern-tinged voice. “They all wanted to know about what the city was like, and what my experiences were.”
While Brittany was fleeing New Orleans, Jennifer Hanson (COL ‘07), was glued to CNN, watching the horror unfold and worrying about her sister at Tulane. It turned out her sister was safe—she had driven to Chicago with friends—but Jennifer continued to be preoccupied with Hurricane Katrina, rushing home from class to turn on the television and see the latest updates. Finally, she decided she needed to do something besides standing by helplessly. After investigating various volunteer groups, she settled upon Common Ground. The group cleared damaged areas, acted as apartment managers for a damaged project in the Algiers section of the city, worked on the Houma Indian Reservation helping residents and facilitated bioremediation of the soil in the city.
From June 1st to August 1st, Hanson rose at 5:30 each morning to work on the gutting crew. Volunteers spent an average of two days working in groups of six on houses that hadn’t been touched since September, often coated in a two or three inch-thick sludge of mud and chemicals. They first tossed out all the detritus left behind—baby toys, couches, paper documents, stoves, toilets, refrigerators full of putrid food that had been rotten for nine months. Next, the crew tore up sheet rock, moldy ceilings and decayed floors. By 5 p.m., they called it quits, showered and usually went straight to bed, exhausted.
Hanson and her fellow volunteers, most of whom were college students or in their twenties, spent the bulk of their time in the Lower 9th Ward, adjacent to where the levies broke. While Bourbon Street and the French Quarter were quickly restructured for tourists, the Lower Ninth, which had been the hardest hit, was still a disaster zone. At the outset of the summer, it was largely deserted—”creepily”so, said Hanson—allowing a section of the neighborhood that had previously been the site of a heavily policed drug war to be taken over once more by gangs.
“They told us not to walk anywhere alone, even in the middle of the day. I had one friend walking at 4:00 in the afternoon, who had a car pull up to them, roll down the window, point a gun, and ask for all their money.” This anecdote wasn’t a scare tactic, but an illustration of the simple truth of life in New Orleans as Hanson had come to understand it: “These are people who don’t have any options.”
By July inhabitants had begun to return and so did a sense of community. Hanson described residents who had next to nothing, but who still went out of their way to bring lunch and beverage coolers to the volunteers rebuilding their homes.
“Most people had the attitude of ‘I’m so happy to be back,’even though they had nothing,” said Hanson. “One woman we met had been in Dallas [with friends] and she decided she just couldn’t take it there. She came back to New Orleans to live in a 12’ by 8’ FEMA trailer.”
Not everyone was positive, though. She recalled one man who asked, at the mention of FEMA’s relief efforts, “FEMA? Who?” When someone earnestly began to explain what FEMA was doing, he interrupted again and said “Who? FEMA? I didn’t get anything from them.”
Brittany returned to a surreal New Orleans in October when she went to pick up all the possessions she had left behind in her dorm room.
“I was one of maybe ten people in the airport. There are usually hundreds, but no one had any reason to be flying in there,” she said, her normally cheerful tone dimming as she recalled the images that had struck her most vividly upon her first return. “It was like a deserted town—there was wood over the windows, and they were all marked with X’s.” The bottom quadrant of the orange Day-Glo X’s, she explained, was marked with a number signifying the amount of dead bodies which were found, if any; the left was the date of inspection; the right was the national guard troop number; and the top was the section of the city.
Though her family was all safe, her uncles’ homes were up to the ceiling in water. Everything, including irreplaceables like her cousins’ childhood photos, was gone. Loyola itself was essentially empty. Grass was beginning to grow, but debris was piled everywhere across campus.
Molly Jaye Moses (CAS ‘08) hails from Biloxi, Mississippi, one of the hardest hit areas of the Gulf Coast. When she spoke to The Voice a year ago, her family, whom she had presumed dead for several days, was still holed up in their house on the banks of the Tchoutaccabouffa River. After she desperately called the hospital where her father works, the CEO told her, with the minimalism of someone who doesn’t want to spell out bad news, “Molly, we’ve already lost 16 doctors and we haven’t heard from your dad.” She finally got in contact with her parents when her mom, standing in line for ice, asked the girl ahead of her in line with a working Montana cell phone number to ask her father in Montana to email Molly and tell her they were alive. In the wake of the storm, Molly went home every six weeks or so to visit her family, whom she described as relatively lucky in the amount of damage their home suffered. Still, they had to undertake fairly serious renovations and took in another family on the top floor of their house until January.
“I had to be there emotionally for my parents, which was hard since I couldn’t be there physically,” she said. “I was glad, in a way, that I was up here, since I didn’t have to deal with the depression of it. I could deal with the physical damage, but the idea that you have to start over completely is just so depressing.”
Her brother’s private school is holding classes in the back of a church, but most of its tuition has been subsisidized by the government, and Brett Favre bought new uniforms for the varsity football team.
Still, she says, it is unnerving that they have to play their games on a makeshift field. “He just won’t be able to experience everything I did in high school. Nothing like that is the same any more.”
Over Christmas break, Molly drove by herself to the mall when, her first day back, the bridges that made up the highway system were finally reopened. That’s when the dramatic alteration of her hometown hit her with the most force.
“I took the beach road, like I normally do, and all of a sudden I had no idea where I was. I was lost. I’d lived there 20 years, and I didn’t recognize anything. I was screaming and crying, calling my mom … at Gulfport, instead of seeing these beautiful old antebellum homes, it was totally empty. You could see for miles.”
Molly spent the summer at home and said that few of her friends did the same. That trend towards dispersion, in her mind, is the main challenge still stopping swift progress in the region. Fast food restaurants like Wendy’s are offering $250 signing bonuses, but even with these flashy incentives, they simply cannot find anyone willing to work in Biloxi. Molly herself had worked at a souvenir shop on the boardwalk of a beach for the past several years, but couldn’t this year—it was closed, and the beach was empty anyhow, except for the occasional mound of scrap metal.
“You can drive for hours through the whole state, and you’ll see blue tarps over all the roofs,”said Molly. “It’s almost like you can’t feel sorrier for some people than any of the others, when there’s such a large amount of devastation.”
In November, it was announced that Loyola would reopen for the spring semester. Georgetown, in an effort to boost its sister school’s recovery, required that students return in January. Brittany headed back to New Orleans. Despite the physical changes to the city, she said Loyola still functioned as a regular campus, with most faculty returning and the administration doing its best to accommodate students with transfer credits. Student social life, however, was altered¬¬—shops were closed, most of the few open restaurants couldn’t be trusted to be sanitary and bars near campus, including one owned by her uncle, had been decimated by looters. Instead of worrying about police breaking up their parties, as most college students do, Loyola kids lived in a city where national guardsmen, with Hummers and guns were omnipotent. The icebreaker de rigeur became “Where did you go to school last semester?”
Still, said Brittany, the altered city resulted in an odd new atmosphere of community. “You had the sense that everyone was friends because everyone had been in the same position. Everyone was nice and tried to help out [to the best of their abilities], but literally, everyone had lost everything.” Loyola, in keeping with that spirit of solidarity, sponsored community service projects every weekend. Some students, she said, were glad to resume life with some semblance of normalcy and had thought of their Katrina semester as a semester abroad of sorts; but she, a freshman, had put down roots at Georgetown. Brittany began the process of applying for a transfer here, not only because of the friends she’d made and the teachers of whom she spoke with admiration, but also out of a sense of concern for the immediate future of her education.
Johnny Williams (CAS ‘06), a native of New Orleans, also spoke to The Voice a year ago about his initial concern for the safety of his home and family. Though the family’s country home east of the city on a bayou was destroyed, Johnny counts himself among the lucky, and said that, like Jennifer, his immediate reaction was that he needed to do something to help. He first returned home at Thanksgiving and said the first thing that struck him were those same blue tarps Molly described as replacing the roofs in Biloxi.
“It broke my heart to see them,” he said. “You could see everyone on the plane just staring out at them as we circled.” He then took what he described as “the disaster tour.”
“You can’t really capture it on TV or get a sense for how vast the damage is until you’re there.”
Meanwhile, Johnny was in the process of applying for the first deadline of Teach for America. At the time of his acceptance, TFA was not assigning anyone to New Orleans, since the status of the public schools in the region was so uncertain. Eventually, they assigned 11 teachers to the greater New Orleans region, the smallest corps in the nation, which was further divided among Orleans Parish, Jefferson Parish and St. John the Baptist Parish. For the past three weeks, Johnny has been teaching 9-12th graders in St. John the Baptist parish, which serves a small rural town about 40 miles from the city proper. Though there is a FEMA camp in the town, Johnny said that he does not know of any students at his school who live there and noted that the school was able to re-open just two weeks after Katrina hit.
Brittany, described the nervousness her Loyola friends have experienced during this ongoing hurricane season, and says one friend has a bag packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice.
“If there was another hurricane, I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to have to pick up my stuff and leave home again,”she said. But she was careful to point out that she hasn’t written off New Orleans. “It was a really tough decision for me to make—lots of my friends stayed, lots of them didn’t like their schools they transferred to. New Orleans is a city you fall in love with. But I fell in love with D.C., too.”
Brittany plans to go back in October to visit her family and friends again. “There’s definitely hope in everyone down there—students, teachers, people who live there. And there’s already been a huge progression. I think [the city] will eventually be the same with time.”
Molly is optimistic about Biloxi’s prospects, and said that the hurricane has provided an unprecedented opportunity for the city to remake itself as bigger and better, with an increased emphasis on entertainment rather than historical tourism.
“We’ve been handed a whole new beachfront. It’ll be Atlantic City before you know it!” she said with a big grin on her face.
When I asked Molly if she sees herself going back to live in Biloxi in the future, her eyes widened as if the very implication that she might leave offended her—”Of course! It’s a Southern thing. I could never leave,” her drawl itself tangible evidence of her devotion to Mississippi, come hell or, literally, high water.
Hanson said she would go back “in a second” to New Orleans, to help be part of what she described as a second chance for a city that had a lot of problems.
“I got more out of this experience than I put in,” she said. “And when you’re doing 9-10 hours of hard physical labor a day, that’s saying alot.”
Williams lives in downtown New Orleans now, near Tulane, but though he declared that it’s time of great civic revival and the perfect opportunity to visit, he also expressed some reservations about the rebuilding process.
“I don’t think the city will ever be exactly the type of city it was before the storm. There are a number of contributing factors [to Katrina] that are only getting worse—global warming, sinking soil, rising sea level,” he said. “Personally, I think that there are certain areas of the city that shouldn’t be rebuilt, but the problem is that people have been living in those communities. There’s been no real planning on a city-wide basis because no one wants to make those decisions to kick people out.”
Like many others, Johnny sees an opportunity in this challenge: “The new New Orleans could be a physically smaller but more livable city. People here are having a hard time, but these same people also have hope and are working hard.”
Brittany, too, was hopeful for the future of the region. She was able to extract a nugget of positive spin even from the difficulty of her past year. “My dad said, ‘Brittany, this makes you a part of history. Someday you can tell your grandkids you were a part of the biggest natural disaster in America.’”
Brittany, Jennifer, Molly and Johnny all shared that same wine-from-water optimism—something that will be useful in the civic renaissance of an area that has certainly been given more than enough water to work with. They all acknowledged, both implicitly and explicitly, that although their lives had been altered by the storm far more than the average Georgetown student, compared to many others they are extremely lucky. They lost country homes and boats, suffered water damage and blisters, but none lost a friend or family member in the storm. All seemed, too, to have taken that knowledge as a civic imperative of sorts, preferring to talk about their hopes and plans for the future of the region rather than dwell on the difficulties of the past year, breezing almost matter-of-factly by details that make the average person shudder. Brittany’s father pointed out the inescapable place in history they have been handed, but these four, at least, seem to want to be able someday to tell their grandkids not just about being part of America’s biggest natural disaster, but about America’s biggest urban renaissance as well and how they helped in the rebirth.
