Wiedmer: Katrina still haunts a decade later

Floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina fill the streets near downtown New Orleans, La., in this Aug. 30, 2005, file photo.
Floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina fill the streets near downtown New Orleans, La., in this Aug. 30, 2005, file photo.

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Decade after fleeing New Orleans, Chattanooga residents reflect on storm that altered the paths of their lives forever

Ten years ago today, Kevin Spain looked out a window at the New Orleans Times-Picayune's main office. It was a Monday morning, the outer bands of Hurricane Katrina having first unleashed her fury on the Crescent City several hours earlier, in the dangerous darkness of Sunday night.

"We'd lost power," said Spain, who had left this newspaper's sports department three years earlier to become the night sports editor at the Times-Picayune. "But we had a generator, so we had some soft light in the building. We'd made it through the night."

But now the wind was growing stronger and stronger, the hurricane's 100-mph-plus winds at the height of their destruction.

"I looked outside and there was a tree, maybe a foot in diameter, a mature tree, and it was bent over to the ground for maybe 20 seconds. Then it would pop back up," Spain recalled. "Then another gust of wind would bend it to the ground again. I'd never seen anything like that before. I'd ridden out other hurricanes since we'd moved there, but this was different."

It was enough different that his wife Sharon reluctantly had piled their young sons KJ and Cam into their Chrysler minivan at their home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie on Sunday afternoon and driven 483 miles to Kevin's parents' house in Medina, Tenn., near Jackson.

"She wasn't going to go," Kevin said. "But her father called from Nashville and told her, 'This is a category 5 hurricane. You've got to get out of there.' It took her more than 14 hours to get to my folks' and it usually takes about six, but they made it."

Yet by early Monday afternoon, the winds having died down, the rain gone, the danger apparently past, Spain thought New Orleans had made it, too.

"Jeff Duncan and I were sent out to talk to the people who'd stayed behind, who'd ridden out the storm," he said. "We were supposed to stay out from 2 to 5, then report back to the paper. And it was bad. Trees and power lines down. Debris everywhere. But the roads were drying out. There was no water. It didn't look that much worse than hurricane damage we'd seen before."

But then strange stuff started happening that no one had seen before. Water started rushing up through manhole covers and drainage grates. Then slowly onto the once-drying roads. Then faster, the volume soon enough to flood the streets as they never previously had been flooded, or at least not since 1722, when a hurricane had all but erased a four-year-old New Orleans.

"You barely noticed it at first," Spain related. "But the water kept rising. By dusk, it was up past the tires on Jeff's SUV. We decided we needed to get back to the paper as fast as we could. But all the roads were now under water. We barely made it back. And when we did, we were in waist-deep water."

By then, Spain's beloved 1998 Pontiac Sunfire convertible was "completely submerged." The newspaper's publisher ordered everybody out of the building.

"The delivery trucks were high enough to get us out of there," he said. "We went through a fence to get onto the interstate. The interstates are all elevated in New Orleans, just in case something like this happens."

What happened next the whole world knows about. The water flooded everything because the levees that long had protected this magical city built below sea level catastrophically failed. More than 1,400 people eventually died. Ten years later, New Orleans is still rebuilding and recovering, both physically and emotionally.

"People outside New Orleans say it was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history," Spain said. "But not the people in New Orleans. They say it was the worst man-made disaster in history, because there was nothing that couldn't have been fixed until the water came in."

Remembering with head and heart

Because 10 years is an important anniversary for any event, good or bad, every news organization in this country is focused on Katrina and its aftermath this weekend.

It remains so troubling to many who lived through it, especially so many financially disadvantaged blacks who had no way to escape, that when this newspaper reached out to two college-age black athletes from the New Orleans area who were not yet teens at that time, they declined to be interviewed, the pain apparently still too strong to publicly revisit.

"I know people whose lives were ruined," Spain said. "No one at the paper was killed, but a lot of them knew friends or family who were. We had five people in the sports department alone whose houses were destroyed. I never saw a dead body, but our photographers did when they were out in boats where the streets used to be. You just don't see an entire city go under water. There's no way to get your head around that."

Your head or your heart.

This past week, ESPN went to 16 LSU football players from the New Orleans area to get their recollections of that time.

Freshman running back Leonard Fournette: "There weren't people killing each other, but I did see a dead body in the water, right under (the interstate bridge) where we were sleeping. It was a dead body laying there for days. I'd never seen a dead body at that age. That messed my head up."

Junior running back Duke Riley from Buras (where the eye of Katrina passed): "You'd drive back in (to their neighborhood) and all you see is pieces of clothes in the trees. There's no leaves in the trees. All the trees are dead from the salt water. And when you walked into the house, you had to watch out for snakes and everything because you never knew what was in there. It was just bad."

It stayed bad for a long time, for more than a year, thousands fleeing to as far away as Atlanta and Houston, never to return.

Then came Sept. 26, 2006, the first New Orleans Saints game inside the refurbished Superdome in nearly 21 months. Early in the first quarter of the Monday Night Football telecast, the Saints' Steve Gleason blocked an Atlanta Falcons punt that teammate Curtis Deloatch fell on in the end zone for a New Orleans touchdown. The Saints won in a rout. Three seasons later they won the franchise's only Super Bowl.

"I've been to a lot of big sporting events, but I've never been to anything like that," Spain said. "U2 and Green Day performed before the game. Then came the blocked punt. I've never heard anything as loud as the Superdome was at that moment. It was like that one play signaled that the city was back."

All the sadness should have ended that night. N'Awlins should have returned to its previous life as the Big Easy. All the philanthropic good done by actor Brad Pitt and media giant Oprah Winfrey by providing big money to build sturdy, attractive homes in the impoverished, crime-ridden Lower Ninth Ward should have been embraced by so many others kissed by fame and fortune. Music should have flowed freely again from every street corner.

And to some extent, for some folks, it has.

As Spain noted, "The city's younger than it has been in years - lots of young entrepreneurs. There's probably 400 new restaurants, which means the food scene has gotten better, if that's possible. The levee system is much, much better, with locks and gates. The city's much better protected from a hurricane than before."

But for far too many the renaissance is yet to arrive. A New York Times story this past week wrote that for all the public and private money flowing into its disadvantaged areas, "The child poverty rate (about 40 percent) and the overall poverty rate (close to 30 percent) are almost unchanged from 2000."

It also stated: "The ability of many residents to afford housing - in a city of escalating rents and low wages - is more compromised than before. According to the Data Center, a New Orleans-based think tank focusing on Southern Louisiana, the median income of black households here is 54 percent lower than that of white households."

Said Janie Blackmon, who lives in New Orleans East, once the haven of the city's black middle class, in the NYT article: "They want to push us to the side like we don't matter."

Added Spain, who came across an East resident in Nashville nearly a month after the storm: "He'd lost everything. A helicopter rescued him from a rooftop. I couldn't do anything but hug him. There really weren't any words that could help him."

Living is in the fighting

Ten years later, the Saints' Gleason is arguably the saddest reminder of Katrina. A 9-foot statue of his blocked punt stands outside the Superdome, but he is confined to a wheelchair, most likely in the final stages of a four-year battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). Though he retired before the Super Bowl season, the team awarded him a Super Bowl ring in 2011.

Wrote Wright Thompson this past week in a brilliant piece for ESPN.com: "Steve Gleason's home is the breathing machine that keeps him alive. That's as good a place as any to start a Katrina story, with the wires and plugs and tubes strapped to the back of his wheelchair. It's an ugly thing to watch someone fight a battle he cannot win. Living, then, is in the fighting."

In a way, that's all of New Orleans. Maybe it always has been. Living is in the fighting, the struggle, the refusal to surrender and relocate.

The Spains refused for eight years. They returned to their Metairie home in late October of 2005, nearly two months after the hurricane hit. They had $15,000 worth of damage. They lost five trees.

"And we were the lucky ones," Kevin Spain said. "So many people had it so much worse. What happened to us you didn't even want to talk about it, because it was so small compared to what most people went through."

Yet even they left the Big Easy behind when Kevin was named the senior NBA editor at USA Today. The family moved to Falls Church, Va., in 2013. Kevin bought his son Cam a 1997 Pontiac Sunfire convertible, "which I borrow and drive all the time."

Life isn't fair far beyond New Orleans. Spain worked with a woman whose entire family - parents, brothers and sisters, cousins - was displaced by Katrina. He got a phone call from her a couple of years ago. One of the cousins who lost his home to Katrina had moved to Tuscaloosa, Ala. When the tornadoes blew apart that town in April of 2011, his home there was destroyed, too.

But the horror of Katrina is singular in its ability to haunt and hurt.

"It's really unlike anything I've ever been through in my life," Spain said. "And I didn't go through anything all that bad compared to most folks. I just hope and pray every day that no one ever has to go through something like that again."

Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com

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