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Katrina's Lessons, Pt. 2: Would FEMA Bungle Another Disaster? |
Many in New Orleans remain nervous about the future. While he has been working to restore his 1920s-era home in Broadmoor, out-of-work mechanical engineer Matt McBride has been keeping a wary eye on the flood gates the Corps has been installing on the outfall canals.
The canals were built to drain rainwater out of the city and into Lake Pontchartrain. But while the gates should keep storm surge out, the Corps has not installed enough pumps to empty the city in a major rainfall. At the 17th Street Canal gate, there is currently only 10 percent of pre-storm pumping capacity.
The Corps acknowledges that there is decreased pumping capacity and says it is working as fast as it can to improve it.
But based on his examinations of the Corps' paperwork and visits to the stations, McBride considers 60 percent of the city's pumping capacity unreliable. He says delays in paperwork, failure to bid out work that was already funded, and the refusal to acknowledge some pumps need repair have set the city up for major flooding in a tropical storm, never mind another Katrina.
“For them to have abandoned the city like this is unconscionable, immoral and reprehensible -- and possibly criminal, frankly,” says McBride, who now regrets the money he's spent restoring his home.
Others say all the investment in New Orleans will be for naught if more is not done -- and quickly -- to restore the city's natural defenses.
In a single day, New Orleans lost wetlands that were expected to last another 50 years, but the U.S. Congress has yet to earmark a single dollar for wetlands restoration, complains environmental advocate David Helvarg.
“The lessons that seem to be learned are how to do better evacuations, not how to prevent the need for the evacuations,” says Helvarg, president of the Blue Frontier Campaign.
“The floods ain't going away. They're just going to intensify. But the present policy seems to be designed to create a Third World in this country ... that's never fully able to recover from the last series of storms before the new ones come in.”
All together, the refrain is clear: The culprits who brought New Orleans to this sorry state are still not doing enough to reclaim its future.
Kroloff, the architecture school dean, thinks the federal government could easily have doubled or tripled the amount already committed to New Orleans when its importance to the country is considered. And he doesn't buy the excuse that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or other national priorities should prevent it.
“The rebuilding of this place neither taxes the imagination nor the resources of this country in any way,” he says. The amount sent to the city so far is “ludicrous when you think of the relative value of this area to the rest of the country.”
National Writer Martha Mendoza and New Orleans staffer Mary Foster contributed to this report.
Aug 19 20:32
By ERIN McCLAM, AP National Writer
DECATUR, Georgia (AP) -- With riveting cadence, the pastor quotes from the book of Acts -- assurance from the apostle Paul that only through tribulation might disciples enter the kingdom of heaven.
“I'm talking about real tests,” the pastor booms. “Every time you go through and you come out, you ought to thank God for confirmation. The devil thought he was gonna take you out. But he couldn't take you out.”
At this, from the front row of the congregation, Mary Ann Williams nods and smiles.
She has been reflecting on tribulation -- about the deluge from Hurricane Katrina that wrecked her New Orleans home, about her frail mother's perilous passage to safety out of a hotel while the waters rose.
She has been reflecting on wrangling with the government for aid and on the struggle, after she and five relatives settled in an apartment in this Atlanta suburb, to be accepted here -- not to be seen, in her words, as “dirty bums, thieves, robbers.”
But mostly Mary Ann Williams, who is 50 and has vibrant red-orange hair, has been reflecting on this place, the Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church. Its New Orleans congregation displaced, it has sprouted up here, and is slowly growing.
“I don't know what people would do without God,” she says.
They were called refugees, evacuees, the diaspora of Katrina -- a million Mary Ann Williamses, rich and poor and white and black and Louisianans and Mississippians, scattered by the storm one year ago.
Their odyssey is a story of almost incomprehensible proportions. By late July, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had doled out more than $4 billion (euro3 billion) in housing assistance to the dispossessed.
They were absorbed by Houston, where their sheer numbers made classrooms bulge and created a sometimes uneasy tension, and by places like Middletown, Rhode Island, where about a dozen of Katrina's kids will report for school in the fall. Evacuees made their way to all 50 states, government records suggest.
Some were greeted with generosity, others with suspicion. Fights broke out at schools where students divided -- New Orleans kids versus locals. Just weeks ago, a man was shot to death at a refugee trailer park in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The refugees tried, at a very basic human level, just to fit in.
Consider the Collins family: Fifteen of them in all, 11 of those grandchildren of the matriarch, Bessie Collins. They got on a plane less than a week after Katrina and thought they were bound for San Antonio.
Not even close: Salt Lake City. Mormon country. Cold winters, mountains rather than the Mississippi, and few other black families.
Seven of the Collins kids are starting another year in the Jordan School District, in the suburb of West Jordan. Last year they were inundated by questions from other kids: Did you sleep on your roof? Why do you talk so fast?
“We had never seen people ride skateboards. What's he doing -- he's jumping in the air!” says Johnny Collins, 17.
But they are, in their own ways, blossoming. Johnny likes the choices -- he can take a cooking class, a drama class. All they had in New Orleans, he said, was gym. His sister, Kristie, 16, made an instructional video about urban dance that turned heads.
Bessie Collins relies on a fixed income, and her 33-year-old daughter Crystal works at a nursing home. The government helps pay rent on two apartments -- but the Collinses know the aid is not permanent.
There is a simple, woodcraft sign hanging in the three-bedroom apartment where Bessie lives. It was a gift to mark her 72nd birthday. It reads, “Bloom where God plants you.”
“It means to survive where I am,” the matriarch said. “I sure found that out.”
They have survived where they are, for the most part, with the help of a prodigious stream of cash from the federal government, states, local entities and charities, which took in billions of dollars in donations in the months after the storm.
Through late July, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had doled out $4.15 billion (euro3.24 billion) in housing assistance to 947,404 applicants -- counted by households, not individuals.
More than 1.7 million households have applied for help, but some have been deemed ineligible -- in many cases because of help they were getting from insurance claims -- or referred to other programs for help, Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman Adam Vogt said.
But it is states, local governments and charities that had the difficult task of helping the evacuees find jobs and schools and sometimes shelter. And their observations tell the story of widespread struggles:
--In Omaha, Nebraska, the housing authority is still helping about 135 evacuees -- some living in apartments with government help for rent, others in public housing. Most still have not found jobs, and many have lingering mental health issues, said Brad Ashford, executive director of the Omaha Housing Authority.
--In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, city officials struggled to help evacuees who were off medications but had no medical records. Few of the 130 evacuees the city was helping at its peak were accustomed to the cold weather, or some were not even used to a structured life.
“Some were homeless where they came from,” said Steve Falek, associate director of Milwaukee's housing authority. “If you live on the street, there are no rules that say you can't smoke in an elevator.”
--In Colorado, school officials have trouble planning for the upcoming school year because they have no idea how many kids to expect.
“So many families have returned. Oftentimes, some of the schools aren't ready for those back in the devastated areas, so they're remaining here,” said Dana Scott, Colorado's coordinator for education of homeless children.
There are rough statistics, but there is no precise way to track exactly how many refugees remain scattered throughout the country, and how many have returned to rebuild in Louisiana and Mississippi.
And in many cases, the evacuees haven't decided themselves -- caught between pining for what they miss and trying to establish a new life in a strange place.
For some, there is no true home right now.
Tinisha Speed, 26, believes she may stay in East Lansing, Michigan.
She has two young children -- Anthony Mitchell Jr., 2, and Jakira Mitchell, born five weeks before Katrina came -- and she is filling out paperwork for child-care services and looking for part-time work. But finding work in Michigan is difficult even for permanent residents: It has one of the nation's highest unemployment rates, over 6 percent.
“You're looking at people who have been taken out of everything they know, and they've got to start over,” she says. “I feel blessed. But I'm dealing with it. I'm still dealing with it.”
Rodney Francis knows he will settle in Dallas. There are things he and his wife, Tiffany, miss -- back home in New Orleans, they could walk to most of his family's homes. Bus service in Dallas is far away. Their neighbors have barely acknowledged them.
Life since the storm has felt like a disorienting, unending vacation to him. And yet he is tired of the politics in New Orleans, the crime, the trash thrown into his yard from passing cars.
“I don't want to invest in a city that doesn't invest in itself,” he says. “They give us garbage cans to put our trash in here.”
And as for Mary Ann Williams, back at the church in suburban Atlanta -- she says she just feels stuck. She misses the colorful life of New Orleans -- the city's unique aroma, as she puts it.
But her mother, Mary Green Watson, 85 years old and suffering from congestive heart failure, never wants to go back. She was around for Hurricane Betsy, which devastated New Orleans three decades ago, and this time she had to be carried down five flights of stairs in a wheelchair by a group of strangers to get out of a downtown hotel to safety.
So for now, they will stay. And Williams says she will continue to find comfort in her church.
It seems so long ago to her now -- when the hurricane changed everything, when no one knew quite what to call the scattered victims -- evacuee, refugee, diaspora.
Williams has a different word.
“Victors. We're Katrina victors,” she says. “We survived.”
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Associated Press writers Ed White in Salt Lake City, Greg Risling in Los Angeles, Tim Martin in Lansing, Michigan, and Paul J. Weber in Houston contributed to this report.
Aug 17 09:45
By ERIN TEXEIRA,AP National Writer
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Thousands in New Orleans Gets Preview of Spike Lee Katrina Film |
NEW YORK (AP) -- Several weeks after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, Spike Lee called the HBO cable television company to propose a monumental documentary on the storm, the ensuing flood and its aftermath, focusing on the suffering of black residents of the city.
The first half of Lee's heartbreaking film, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” debuts Monday.
The four-hour documentary marks a career milestone for Lee. Twenty years ago this month, his first feature film, “She's Gotta Have It,” hit theaters to instant praise from critics. Since then, he has released an average of one film every year, including this year's “Inside Man,” his most profitable with $185 million (euro144.6 million) in global sales.
Nearly all of Lee's films have strong African-American themes and characters. Though filmmakers have always dabbled in racial topics, Lee, who is black, has been unique. Steadfastly chipping away at the subject in ever more complex ways, he has helped make race and ethnicity central to American film.
“He's made a tremendous difference in the history of American cinema,” said Jacqueline Stewart, a film professor at Northwestern University in Chicago who teaches a class on Lee's work. “Spike Lee's films get people to talk about what race means and how race continues to function in our society.”
For years, Lee did that with an in-your-face approach -- characters that yelled racial slurs at the screen, on-screen brawls between whites and blacks. Lee himself was often in front of the camera, playing a string of incendiary sidekick characters. He also often wrote, produced and directed his films, enlisting family members to contribute music, writing and acting.
But in recent years, he has stepped back. He did not write or appear on-screen in “Inside Man,” “She Hate Me” in 2004 or 2002's “25th Hour.” Though he remains focused on black America, his approach has become quieter, less self-conscious.
“Levees” reflects that.
Using current and historical footage, music and more than 100 interviews, the film reminds viewers that although Katrina shattered the entire Gulf Coast, New Orleans and its mostly black residents got hit especially hard. Thousands fought to survive deadly floodwaters for days while federal help was slow in coming. Many are left today with a nearly ruined city and broken hearts.
Lee conducted each of the interviews, and viewers occasionally hear him asking questions, but he never steps in front of the camera. There is no narrator telling viewers that New Orleans was abandoned, or that this may have happened because most residents are black. There is no need.
“Let the people tell it, the witnesses,” said Lee, 49, during an interview this week. “People are giving testimonial, sharing all the rage and anger. What they're doing is sharing their humanity with us.”
Nevins said the film is “a surrender of the ego of the maker to the people.”
Despite heavy media coverage of Katrina, the film pulls together the before, during and after of the storm in a way that manages to be agonizingly fresh.
One man tells of being forced to abandon his dead mother's body in the city's Superdome. He pinned a note with his phone number on her shroud. Some spew rage as they insist that the city's protective levees, which gave way and flooded most of the city, were bombed.
Cameras follow trumpeter Terence Blanchard, the longtime composer for Lee's films and a New Orleans native, as he and his mother visit the family home in the Gentilly Woods section of the city for the first time since the flood. “Oh Lord have mercy,” weeps Wilhelmina Blanchard, nearly hysterical. “You can rebuild this stuff,” Terence murmurs, clutching her shoulders. “That's easier said than done,” she says. “I knew it was devastation but I didn't think it was this bad.”
Blanchard reflects later that day: “When we went into the house, that was really hard because, you know, it's like I can't go home.” He stops, choked up. An ominous drumbeat finishes his thoughts.
The film, Lee said, is ultimately a plea to renew the city, where most of those forced out have not yet returned, tons of debris remains and there is no comprehensive rebuilding plan. “We want this film to spur action,” he said. “Things still aren't right. People are still suffering.”
This is partly why HBO gave it four hours, making it the channel's longest documentary. Two-hour segments air Monday and Tuesday.
“You never could tell the whole story because the story's still being told, but you sure couldn't tell it in two hours,” Nevins said. “I don't know any other filmmaker who could have been a better match. I just don't know anyone with that kind of talent.”
It's a long way from 1986. Lee, four years out of New York University's film school, was selling T-shirts outside a midtown Manhattan theater urging people to see “She's Gotta Have It,” about a black woman and her three boyfriends. He was living in a rented basement apartment in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, where he grew up and still has offices for his production studio, 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks.
Three years later came “Do the Right Thing.” It weaves a sentimental gaze at brownstone Brooklyn with the explosive tensions among blacks, Italian-Americans and police on a scorching summer day. After the police kill a black man, a fiery riot erupts and the neighborhood is ripped apart. It firmly planted Lee on the culture map, winning him staunch critics and supporters.
Lee is “the epitome of the independent auteur of the '90s and the 21st century,” said William J. Palmer, a film professor at Purdue University who has included Lee's films in his classes for 14 years.
Stewart, the Northwestern professor, said it's hard to imagine a film like last year's “Crash,” which explored ethnic clashes in Los Angeles, being made without Lee's influence. It won the Oscar for best picture.
Lee himself says he's most proud that he helped the careers of some of the nation's most celebrated actors and filmmakers. Halle Berry's first film role was a crack addict in 1991's “Jungle Fever.” Rosie Perez and Martin Lawrence were first seen on film in “Do the Right Thing.” Filmmaker John Singleton -- who wrote and directed “Boyz n the Hood” in 1991 and directed “Four Brothers” last year -- was in high school when he sought out Lee and declared that he, too, would become a filmmaker.
Lee says he's considering a follow-up documentary to “Levees,” perhaps focusing on how New Orleans' black middle class has been gutted, and what that may mean to the city.
For now, he's spending little time pondering his 20-year milestone. “What I'm trying to do is just get better,” he said. “Become a better storyteller. That's what I do.”
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On the Net: HBO: http://www.hbo.com
Aug 19 11:13
By ALLEN G. BREED and VICKI SMITH, Associated Press Writers
They were strangers to us, just stories to be told.
They had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina -- shelter and shoes, electricity and air conditioning, running water and working toilets. And there we were, asking for something more.
We had been dispatched -- Allen to New Orleans, Vicki to Mississippi -- to collect the stories of people as they waited in line for food and rooted through piles of cast-off clothing for something that would fit, trying not to feel ashamed.
Many of Katrina's victims had been too poor or too stubborn to flee when the monster storm closed in. Most had no idea how they would start over. Some wanted to die, and some we feared might.
They've haunted us -- because brief as our time together was, it was enough for a real exchange.
They gave us much more than quotes to fill a story. What did we give? Not much, it seemed. Pop-Tarts for children running barefoot in the Mississippi mud, the chance to make a cell phone call from the hell of the New Orleans convention center to tell a loved one they were still alive.
We wondered what became of them. Did they give up? Or, when tested, did they discover in themselves something they didn't know they had?
We went back to find out.
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Allen:
In 18 years as a journalist, I'd never felt so helpless.
“Tell someone to come get me, please,” the man begged over the crackling phone connection as the wind howled outside. “I want to live.”
And then he added: “Pray for me.”
From the darkened hallway of my French Quarter hotel, Katrina had seemed until then just another near-miss hurricane, like Ivan had the year before. Then I heard Chris Robinson's panicked voice.
The water in the ranch-style house Robinson's parents had built in the Lower Ninth Ward was almost to the ceiling. He grabbed some bottled water, canned sausage, an ax, hammer and crowbar, and climbed into the cramped attic.
I felt like a vulture, using up this man's precious cell phone battery to get a few quotes. But as far as I knew, Robinson's anguished pleas were the first confirmation that Katrina wasn't just another glancing blow -- that it might be “the big one” we'd all been fearing.
After Robinson hung up, I called 911. The dispatcher said there was nothing she could do.
He'd asked me to pray for him. But if the police and fire departments couldn't help, I thought, what good were my prayers?
Recently, I dug out my wrinkled, water-stained notebook and called that same New Orleans cell phone number. I was a little surprised when Robinson answered.
“Alive and breathing!” he said in a voice that seemed too jolly for someone who'd been through what he'd suffered. No longer worried about using up his battery, I asked Robinson about his ordeal.
The 47-year-old father of two told how he'd watched through a louvered opening in the eaves as water pouring from a gap in the Industrial Canal levee snapped the spine of his neighbor's house. He talked of fish swimming around the attic with him, and how he finally punched a hole in the roof and climbed out.
Sitting on his roof, Robinson talked on his cell phone until the circuits got overloaded and the battery ran out.
Then he talked to God.
On July 30, he moved his family back to New Orleans from Houston.
He has used the tools that were his salvation to gut his parents' home, which was battered but intact, in preparation for rebuilding.
Answered prayers, he's sure.
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Vicki:
Margaret Pertuit could see the sunshine from her bare mattress in the flooded-out motel room in Bay St. Louis, Miss. The elderly widow could hear the National Guard offering food and water. But all she could smell was mud and mold.
All she wanted, she told me, was to die.
“My mind is OK, but my body won't let me do anything,” she said. “I get so depressed.”
I recognized the deep purple bruises on her arms, the kind caused by blood-thinning drugs. I'd seen them before, on the arms of someone I'd loved and lost.
I asked her if she had her medicines, and she said she'd stopped taking them. She was hoping for a clot that would kill her quickly.
She had survived Katrina's flood, thanks to younger, stronger people. But the days passed slowly after the water receded. She had grown weary of the desperate life she was barely living, trapped in a room with no running water, no working toilets, no air conditioning.
I told her she wouldn't be stuck here much longer -- hoping it was true.
“Keep taking your medicine,” I said. “You've got more living to do.”
I kept wondering about her. Worrying. But a week later, when I returned to the motel to check on her, she had vanished. People who'd noticed the ambulance thought maybe she'd had a heart attack, but no one knew for sure.
It turns out she ended up at a hospital in Pascagoula, where she slept in a chair until one of her daughters found her through a Red Cross registry. Her heart was fine. It was anxiety that had overcome her.
She rented a room in Gonzales, La., then used half her life's savings to buy a three-bedroom house in an older subdivision.
She's been back to Bay St. Louis twice but will never live there again. Her garden washed away, and her house broke apart. About all she could recover was her grandmother's century-old crystal punch bowl.
Now 86, Pertuit tires easily. She thinks about going out to eat, then wonders if it's worth it.
But to her, depression is weakness. She'd rather not remember that day at the motel, and she tries not to think about the things she's lost.
She's learning to start over.
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Allen:
With New Orleans descending into chaos, we were hearing reports of carjackings -- even boatjackings of rescue workers. In fear that we would lose our car, our food stores or the precious cans of gasoline we'd hoarded since before the storm, photographer Eric Gay and I zigzagged around refugees. We avoided some neighborhoods altogether.
But something in Evelyn Turner's face made us stop.
She had been waiting hours for someone to take away the body of the man she loved, her companion of 15 years, who had died when his oxygen ran out. She needed a ride to the police station.
Gay and I watched as she pleaded in vain with the police. “Oh Lordy!” she cried when they told her they were too busy with the living to worry about the dead.
We offered her a ride back. When we arrived at the spot on St. Claude Avenue, we came upon a scene that stunned us.
There on the median was the body of 57-year-old truck driver Xavier Bowie -- wrapped in bedsheets, lying on the improvised raft of two-by-fours and plywood that Turner had used to float him out of their flooded neighborhood.
It was the first time I'd seen a corpse outside of a funeral home.
Turner went to the raft, weeping into a dirty rag -- and Gay's photo of her captured the extent to which civilization had collapsed.
When we last saw Turner, she was sitting beside Bowie's body in the back of a flatbed truck on her way to the morgue at Charity Hospital. But her ordeal was just beginning, I learned when I contacted her recently.
Turned away from the flooded hospital, she asked the driver to take her to city hall, where she lay Bowie's body on a grassy median. She stayed with him another eight hours before National Guard troops loaded the Navy veteran's body into a military dump truck.
It wasn't until October that she learned his body had been claimed by his wife and children.
He was buried in Florida. The death notice said they were unable to track Turner down.
Turner, 55, welcomed me into the three-bedroom rental home she now shares with four relatives in Shreveport, La. In the living room sits the overstuffed chair in which Bowie died. She keeps it, not for sentimental reasons, but because she cannot afford a new one.
At the kitchen table, Turner pulls a piece of paper from her wallet and unfolds it. It's a copy of Gay's photo.
For months, it was the only picture she had of Bowie.
Hurricane Katrina was the first time I felt I had to make a choice between doing my job and being human. I can't forget the people we passed by.
Evelyn Turner reminded me that you have to be human to do the job.
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Vicki:
I could tell from looking at him that Gary Turner was the kind of man who had moved through the world without attracting much attention. Skinny and shy, with weathered skin and downcast eyes, the 52-year-old carpenter had sometimes silently wondered what good he could possibly be to anyone in a crisis.
After Hurricane Katrina, he found out.
In the storm's aftermath, he was one of hundreds who sought refuge in an unofficial shelter at a high school in Bay St. Louis, Miss.
Like everyone else, Turner could smell the stench of human waste wafting from the school's auditorium. He could hear the pitiful moans of elderly people lying alone and in misery, unable to walk.
Unlike almost everyone else, he decided to help.
He followed a woman's sobs into the darkness, where an arthritic hand latched onto his with all the strength the swollen knuckles could muster. Darlene Casanova had been asking God to send her someone.
“I think you're my guardian angel,” she told Turner.
He and several strangers formed a rescue team, helping the frail and forgotten onto potty chairs, then into fresh air. They gathered food and water. They talked and they listened.
By the time I found him, his work was done. Hours earlier, ambulances had carried Darlene and the others away -- where, he never learned.
Turner was exhausted and angry, but he shared the story. The suffering was horrific, the scrap of cardboard bearing Darlene's shakily scrawled name heartbreaking.
But what Turner and a handful of others had done gave me hope that someday, Mississippi would recover.
As I walked back to my car, I saw that debris on the road had punched a hole in a tire. I turned back to the school, where Turner was already on his feet.
He and another man removed the flat and mounted the spare. I offered money or food, something to feel I wasn't just taking.
Turner said I'd already given him something. I'd made him feel useful again.
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Allen:
In the steaming mass of humanity at the New Orleans convention center, she stood out. Sitting in the rain on a hard folding chair, her tiny face poking forlornly from the folds of an American flag blanket, Milvirtha Hendricks seemed to say it all without uttering a word.
I looked at the frail 85-year-old woman and saw my own mother-in-law. They were the same age.
I wondered what I would do to get her out of this hell hole. I wondered if she could have survived out here in the searing sun and the filth.
Seeing Hendricks, wrapped in that star-spangled coverlet, also made me wonder about my country. How could this be happening in one of America's great cities? Angry young men raged around her that they were being treated like Third World citizens, but there sat Hendricks, wrapped in the flag, as if to say: This is happening right here.
Blessedly, the now 86-year-old widow remembers almost none of this.
“Everybody tells me it's better that I couldn't remember the water or nothing,” she said recently from the apartment she and her eldest daughter share in Houston.
Hendricks lived with her daughter on Tennessee Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward, just a few blocks from the Industrial Canal levee. As Katrina approached, she packed a suitcase and left the home she and her late husband bought in 1970 -- the only one she had ever owned.
When water forced her to evacuate to her son's home in New Orleans East, she boarded a rescue boat and lost the few belongings she'd managed to take with her.
The next days and weeks are a fog.
“They tell me I went to Arkansas and stayed there two or three days,” says the woman who bore 10 children and fed them on her laborer husband's salary.
Hendricks is surprised to learn that director Spike Lee wanted to use the convention center photo in documentary. She had no idea it had been used in newspaper ad campaigns to raise money for storm victims.
A framed copy of the photograph sits on the dresser in her bedroom.
She often stares at it, trying to remember what many of us wish we could forget.
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Vicki:
After a week on the Mississippi coast, the sheer number of stories around me came crashing down. Feeling overwhelmed, I called my best friend. How could I see this, day after day, and do nothing to help?
Just do what you're doing, she told me. “You're doing God's work now.”
I'm not exactly the churchgoing type. So for me to believe that seemed arrogant.
Then, a week later, I got an e-mail from a woman in Georgia. She had read one of my stories and decided she would open her home to a family of strangers. She used almost the same words my friend had.
A week later, I heard the message again.
It came from the Rev. Thomas Ruffin Jr. in a church in Biloxi. During a eulogy for a family member, Ruffin asked God to bless and watch over me in my work.
But not just me or photographer Darron Cummings. It was a prayer for all the journalists who had converged on the Gulf. He thanked us for coming, for doing what we were paid to do, for sharing their stories with the world.
I'd covered many funerals. At some, I'd even wept. But never in 18 years had I been thanked.
Main Street Baptist Church, where Ruffin is assistant pastor, has changed since then. During a recent trip, I visited the new sanctuary, built by strangers from another city with more than $100,000 in donations.
Half the original congregation has left, their homes gutted or gone. But the pews are nearly full every week, mainly with volunteers who are helping rebuild. They come month after month.
“God is showing us through others this is the way it should be -- everyone helping each other,” Ruffin says.
His godmother had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized over the summer. Ruffin himself listens to the public service announcements on the radio offering counseling and wonders if he should call.
Instead, he keeps busy.
As a contractor, he rebuilds. As comforter-in-chief to a congregation, he soothes frazzled nerves with a gold-toothed smile and the words of Scripture.
It's hard to imagine Ruffin's heart wasn't always as big as the man around it. But he insists that by sending Katrina, God gave him more compassion.
I still don't go to church. I don't read a Bible. But my heart feels somehow bigger, too. And more than once, I have given thanks for being sent to Mississippi.
Allen G. Breed is a national writer, based in Raleigh, N.C.; Vicki Smith is the AP's correspondent in Morgantown, W.Va.
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