State of unpreparedness
A ghost of Hurricane Katrina: Remembering the woman in the elevator ondisaster's anniversary
More than 350,000 New Orleans homes were destroyed by hurricanes in 2005.Photo by Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA
The woman in the elevator brought Hurricane Katrina home.
In 2006, 150,000 to 200,000 Louisianans made Houston their new home.
At first student evacuees came in with low testing scores, but in 2009 Katrinastudents excelled slightly more in reading than Texas students statewide.
Murder rate per capita in New Orleans took the number one spot in 2007.
I have a bad habit of talking to strangers in the elevator. During one of my treks back to Texas from Missouri, my bad manners let loose at a hotel stop. My victim that night was a middle-aged black woman with a somber look on her face.
I generally like to cheer people up, so I asked her why she was staying there and expected to hear a story about her visiting a grandson gone away to college or a family funeral. Then she me told something that shook the steel doors of the elevator off their hinges — at least, that's what it felt like to me.
“This is my sixth month here in this hotel,” she said. “My home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.”
Gravity relapsed back into my stomach. The door opened and she glided out of our temporarily shared space — a ghost out of a TV news report. My eyes centered and my brow lowered. I quietly wished her luck before she faded away down the hall.
The week of Aug. 29, 2005 was like any other for me. Reading back my old blog entries, I wrote nothing about the Katrina approaching New Orleans (not before it hit). My main subjects were: my high school newspaper's back-to-school lock-in, the cold floors of my stepmother’s house and falling asleep on my keyboard the night before. I was a senior then.
My friend Michael Quartano and former Missouri classmate, was a high school student in Baton Rouge then. Quartano remembers the population of Baton Rouge tripling within a week of the hurricane’s impact. Reports of rioting and crime poured out of Baton Rouge, all, which Quartano says didn’t happen.
“The stories came from people in Baton Rouge who were just bothered about refugees moving into their city,” Quartano said.
Little did I know, Hurricane Rita would soon hit Houston’s Gulf the next month.
The water only began to show after the sons and daughters of evacuees enrolled into my high school, Humble ISD. In a student population of over 5,000 it was still pretty easy to pick out their salty Louisiana accents. Security at school tightened its grip with seven security officers patrolling the hallways, blowing whistles to corral the bursting student population to class, and corridor sweeps getting made by the vice principals.
President Obama plans to visit New Orleans on Sunday — the fifth-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — to remember the tragedy alongside residents of NOLA.
The former chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, who became a scapegoat for the disaster that ensued, is now a radio host in Denver. Brown broadcast his show from New Orleans Wednesday night.
In Houston, we’re gearing up to face our next potential hurricane. Our lights will go out, but maybe not for too long thanks to the State Energy Conversation Office (SECO). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National Weather Service projected a 70 percent probability of eight to 14 hurricanes this season.
I never saw that woman from the elevator again. But I still think about her sometimes.
