land somewhere
between Galveston, Texas, and Alabama. It appeared to be heading
directly
for New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It appeared very
possible that this hurricane could be the dreaded direct hit that
New Orleans residents had been warned about for years (CNN Reports
2005, 9). Mayor Ray Nagin appeared constantly on television strongly
encouraging residents to evacuate. He did not order a mandatory evacuation
at that time to permit residents of the Louisiana parishes (counties)
closer to the coast— Plaquemines, the lower portion of Jefferson,
and St. Bernard—to evacuate first. The Loyola students who
had transportation, most likely with their parents, left town. The
students who did not have immediate transportation were evacuated
by Loyola personnel to a shelter set up at Istrouma Baptist Church
in Baton Rouge.
I spent the day on Saturday preparing for two possibilities. I
bought groceries to stock up my refrigerator (a mistake) in case
Katrina turned east—as
hurricanes approaching New Orleans had done so many times before—and
there would be no need to evacuate. I also packed in preparation for evacuation
while keeping an eye on the news. Like other New Orleans residents who evacuated
for Katrina, I figured that I would be gone for three days at the most. Many
of us had evacuated in 1998 for hurricane Georges and in 2004 for hurricane
Ivan, both of which had turned east, sparing New Orleans. At least since I
moved to New Orleans in the early 1980s, New Orleans residents had been warned
that the worst case scenario would be a hurricane coming up the Mississippi
River and dumping water from the river, Lake Borgne to the east, and Lake Pontchartrain
to the north into the city, which lies below sea level.
My son and his friend left New Orleans at midnight to drive north to
Tennessee where they sat out the storm. When it became obvious that
they could not return
to New Orleans, they drove to my son’s grandparents’ home in South
Carolina. Ken Richards and I left our home in Gretna, Louisiana, in Jefferson
Parish on the Westbank of the river at 4:00 a.m. on Sunday morning to avoid
the congested highways. Driving the back roads to Baton Rouge to stay with
friends, it took us only two and a half hours to get there.
On Sunday, August 28, Katrina was a category 5 hurricane, a thousand-mile-wide
monster in the Gulf with winds up to 175 m.p.h. and a predicted storm surge
of 28 feet (CNN Reports 2005, 9). At 10:00 a.m. Mayor Ray Nagin issued a mandatory
evacuation order and opened shelters, including the Superdome, to New Orleans
residents with no transportation out of the city. Evacuation from the city
was expedited by the opening of the opposing lanes on the highways to contraflow
beginning at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday. An estimated 500,000 vehicles transported
about a million people out of the area. Katrina dropped back down to a category
4 hurricane as it approached the coast (CNN Reports 2005, 11; Gordon and Varney
2006, H-9; Varney 2006, H-10).
We learned later that when Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and New Orleans it was
in fact a category 3 hurricane. Katrina had winds of 127 m.p.h. at 6:10 a.m.
on Monday, August 29, when it crossed the strip of land at Buras, Louisiana,
at the mouth of the Mississippi river, completely flooding Plaquemines Parish.
Katrina then headed north to come ashore at the mouth of the Pearl River at
the Louisiana-Mississippi border with winds of 121 m.p.h (CNN 2005b). New Orleans
would be devastated, but was fortunate that the eye of the storm was to the
east. Experience had demonstrated to New Orleanians that the heaviest rainfall
and winds are on the eastern side of a hurricane or tropical storm.
The eye of Katrina made landfall in Mississippi, and a storm surge
up to 23 feet and winds up to 100 m.p.h. obliterated homes, buildings,
and boats in
Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, and Gulfport (CNN Reports 2005, 21,
120). Wind and water damage stretched at least from Baton Rouge to Alabama.
From 4:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. levees in Orleans Parish (contiguous with the
city limits) gave way in multiple places in a complex sequence of events, which
over the next few days would leave 80 percent of the city under water ranging
from a few inches to over ten feet deep. The flooding from Lake Pontchartrain
stopped only when the water in the city equalized with the level of water in
the lake on September 1 (see the New Orleans Times-Picayune maps on this website,
specifically, “A Chronology of Destruction,” and “Flood Depths
in New Orleans”).
People in New Orleans had to be rescued from their rooftops, the Superdome,
and the Convention Center, where they were left for up to four, five, or six
long hot days without food, water, toilet facilities, and medical care. Surviving
residents on the Gulf Coast were left to fend for themselves for days. The
world knows that federal assistance was very slow in coming to these areas.
People in New Orleans who could not get on their roofs drowned in their homes
or in their attics. Others died on the flooded streets. Vulnerable patients
died in sweltering hospitals, which were under siege by people outside shooting
guns.
By May 19, 2006, the number of Louisiana dead, including those who
died after evacuation, was up to 1,577 (see the New Orleans Times-Picayune
map on this
site named “Katrina Victims: Where They Were Found”) and bodies
were continuing to be located, with 237 people listed as missing (DeBerry 2006,
B-7). The death toll in Mississippi was 236 with 67 people missing. 65,380
houses in south Mississippi were destroyed (“Mississippi’s Invisible
Coast” 2005); 90 percent of the buildings between the beach and the railroad
tracks were destroyed in Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, and Biloxi (CNN
Reports 2005, 38).
One of the most dramatic sights of the damage was one side of the I-10 twin-span
bridge between New Orleans and Slidell, Louisiana, separated into broken bits.
Evacuated residents of Jefferson Parish were permitted to return to
their homes one week later to “look and leave.” We inspected our homes, repaired
what we could, cleaned out our refrigerators, got extra clothes and supplies
before returning to the places where we had found refuge. Many homes in Jefferson
Parish on the Eastbank, in the towns of Metairie and Kenner, had flooded because
the parish administration had evacuated the pump personnel before Katrina’s
landfall and there was no one present to turn on the pumps. Many homes in Jefferson
and Orleans Parishes suffered water damage due to the destruction of their
roofs. After two more weeks, Jefferson Parish residents were permitted to return,
if their homes were habitable.
Neighborhoods in Orleans Parish remained off limits to residents for
another month or more (“Hobbled City” 2005), while the water was pumped
out of the areas that flooded and city services were gradually restored. National
Guard units prevented unauthorized personnel from entering Orleans Parish.
The Orleans Parish neighborhoods that were not flooded were the ones on the
higher ground along the Mississippi River: parts of Carrollton, Uptown, the
Garden District, the Central Business District (CBD), the French Quarter, the
Faubourg Marigny, and Bywater, and all of Algiers on the Westbank. The neighborhoods
of Lakeview, City Park, Gentilly, New Orleans East, and across the Industrial
Canal, the neighborhoods of Holy Cross and the Lower Ninth Ward, got the worst
flooding with the water reaching eight to ten feet in some areas. There was
also significant flooding in the more central areas of the city with the water
ranging from a few inches to eight feet. To the east of New Orleans, Chalmette,
Arabi, and other towns in St. Bernard Parish suffered flooding that reached
over ten feet in the worst-hit areas (see “Flood Depths Map in New Orleans” on
this website).
Parts of the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish got three to four feet of flooding
again on September 23-24, 2005, through levees that had not yet been fully
repaired as hurricane Rita made landfall in southwestern Louisiana and southeastern
Texas (CNN 2005a; Connolly and Grunwald 2005; see the photo on the front page
of this website). Those of us in the unflooded areas of Jefferson Parish were
able to sit out Rita in our homes.
THE
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
The
university students displaced from New Orleans were generously welcomed
by other universities across the nation for the Fall 2005 semester
that the city was closed. Loyola University New Orleans reopened
for classes on January 9, 2006, and welcomed 92 percent of its students
back for the first Spring 2006 semester. A second Spring 2006 semester
was offered from May through July to make up for the missed Fall
semester.
The students and faculty had returned to an obviously battered city. Many faculty
and staff were living in lodgings located quickly after their homes were destroyed,
or they were repairing damaged homes while living in them. Some faculty and
staff and some students were living in FEMA trailers. All who had experienced
damage or loss of their homes were dealing with insurance adjusters, contractors,
and all the concerns related to gutting a flooded house and deciding what to
do with it.
The environment around Loyola looked relatively normal if a student stayed
in the Uptown area where the university is located, except for the several
stop lights that were still not working and the absence of the streetcars on
St. Charles Avenue. But one did not have to venture far to see homes that were
dusty and moldy from the receded floodwaters, or the charred remains of some
houses that had burned down. The water line was visible on many buildings and
trees indicating exactly how high the flood reached. Many students volunteered
to help gut houses that had flooded and to work on other service projects sponsored
by Loyola.
In Spring I 2006 I taught two sections of Honors World Religions and one section
of Religions of Asia. The courses had their own content, certainly, but we
could not tune out the disaster we had just experienced and in which we were
living. Therefore, I made an oral history assignment in which the Honors students
would write their term papers on the religious responses to Katrina and Rita
in a chosen congregation. One student in Religions of Asia elected to carry
out a similar assignment for his term paper, choosing to research religious
responses to Katrina at a mosque in Metairie.
The assignment was to visit the congregation several times and ascertain the
effects of Katrina, and possibly Rita, on the congregation and the congregation’s
collective responses to the disaster. Many houses of worship were wiped out
or damaged to varying degrees. Almost all the congregations, even those whose
buildings had suffered severe damage, were providing social services to the
wider community. As part of the assignment, the student was to interview at
least three people including one of the leaders of the congregation. As these
students make final revisions to their papers, they will be posted on this
website. Their audiotapes and transcripts will be placed in Loyola University’s
Katrina archive.
A graduate student is researching three congregations during Summer 2006 as
an independent study project. This Katrina and Rita oral history project will
continue in a course I will offer in Spring 2007.
Ultimately, the reports on this website will cover congregations from Chauvin,
Louisiana, west of New Orleans, where the encroaching Gulf waters will one
day compel the residents to move from their beloved town, to Gulfport, Mississippi,
east of New Orleans, where the eye of Katrina hit the coast. Given the location
of the university, the majority of the reports focus on congregations in the
New Orleans metropolitan area. The reports on this website do not attempt to
address the situation in southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas, which
bore the brunt of Rita.
CONCLUSIONS
The
students’ reports demonstrate that people interpret their experiences
of disaster through the lens of their particular religious worldview.
For instance the Hare Krishnas tended to downplay events in the material
world, even while coping with the disaster, and stressed that ultimate
importance resided in being aligned with the spiritual world so that
one could go to God (Krishna) at death (Goodrich 2006). The Seventh-day
Adventists, with their emphasis on the New Testament book of Revelation
and belief in coming apocalyptic events, interpreted the disaster
as a sign of the imminent Second Coming of Christ, while they rebuilt
their church and tended to the needs of the congregation’s
members; they maintained their Adventist stance of not getting very
involved in “the world” and its politics (Parchim 2006).
Members of the Lotus Lake Drikung Dharma Center, a Buddhist group
oriented toward Tibetan (Vajrayana) Buddhism, regarded the experience
as a major lesson in impermanence and their evacuation time as an
opportunity to practice flexibility and non-grasping (Hoover 2006).
Many people in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian congregations, including
the nondenominational, evangelical Celebration Church in Metairie
(Fienman 2006), got involved in providing social services of various
types. Many of these congregations served as distribution centers
for aid, and hosted volunteers from out-of-town congregations who
came to gut and repair houses and build new ones. The members of
these New Orleans congregations eschewed an interpretation that the
disaster was an expression of God’s wrath, and instead saw
it as a call from God to help others, even while they were rebuilding
their houses of worship and helping their congregation’s members.
Very few of the people interviewed saw the disaster as punishment
from God, suggesting that such an interpretation makes the most sense
to persons who at that particular time were spared the adverse effects
of a disaster. A sense of shared community within the congregations
and their connection to New Orleans and its rebirth were important
to everyone interviewed.
Some congregations have had their places of worship so damaged that they have
been provided temporary places to gather by other congregations. When Beth
Israel, an Orthodox Jewish congregation, lost its synagogue to the flood, Gates
of Prayer, a Reform Jewish congregation in Metairie, provided Beth Israel members
a place to meet even while Gates of Prayer was repairing flood damage to its
own building (Buras 2006). Other congregations, due to the reduced number of
members, have combined their services, members, and resources, at least for
a time. Community Church Unitarian Universalist and First Unitarian Universalist
Church, both of which experienced severe flooding, began holding joint services
on Sundays at the Jefferson Presbyterian Church (Thomas 2006; Samms 2006).
The loss of members due to the reduction of the population in New Orleans may
compel some congregations to merge eventually.
I now know from firsthand experience that people who have experienced disasters
find it important to reestablish their customs and revive their traditional
celebrations. In New Orleans in 2006 we experienced this with our first post-Katrina
Mardi Gras in February and the return of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage
Festival in April-May. We also celebrated New Orleans food, music, and art
during the French Quarter Festival in April. For the members of Holy Trinity
Greek Orthodox Cathedral located in a flooded neighborhood on Bayou St. John
close to Lake Pontchartrain, it was important to repair their church and Hellenic
Cultural Center quickly, not only to reestablish a sense of normalcy, but to
welcome Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople when he visited
on January 8, 2006, and to be able to hold the annual Greek Festival on the
Memorial Day weekend in May (Hoffman 2006; Macom 2006). The 2006 Greek Festival
with its Greek music, dancing, food and drink, was indeed a joyous celebration
of an important component of New Orleans culture.
A new religious tradition was added to New Orleans culture on Memorial Day,
May 29, 2006, when former and current residents gathered in the Lower Ninth
Ward and in Lakeview to remember the Katrina dead and pray for the strength
of the repaired levees (Filosa 2006, B-1). No doubt August 29, 2006, will mark
a major religious commemoration of those who died due to Katrina. New Orleans
will remember its dead in the cultural expressions unique to this city. I recall
that early on Mardi Gras morning as we were driving on I-10 I saw several Mardi
Gras Indians—African American men dressed in their hand-sewn costumes
decorated with sequins and brightly colored feathers—performing a ritual
on an I-10 ramp next to the Superdome. New Orleans police officers shielded
them from traffic on that part of the highway, so they could dance and sing
to remember the dead and bless the city.
FUTURE
RESEARCH
This
oral history project will continue for a little longer to increase
the diversity of the congregations researched and to document further
the religious responses to the disaster caused by Katrina and Rita
in the south Louisiana-New Orleans-Mississippi Gulf Coast areas.
The students report that they benefit in one or more several possible ways
from this assignment, which requires them to move beyond their personal comfort
zones: by putting their own losses and suffering in perspective when compared
to the losses and suffering of others; by exploring in-depth the responses
to the disaster in their own religious communities; or by gaining first-hand
experiences of people in religious communities other than their own and appreciating
their shared humanity. The students have met a number of inspiring individuals
in the course of their research, and they have benefited from the empathy cultivated
by entering into the religious and social worlds of others. It is a privilege
to learn so much from the students. Enjoy exploring their reports. I also recommend
examining the very helpful maps compiled by Brad Petitfils for this site.
Catherine
Wessinger
Professor of History of Religions
Loyola University New Orleans
May
30, 2006
WORKS
CITED
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Punishment.” KATC.com. <http://www.katc.com/global/story.asp?s=3914810&ClientType=Printable>.
Accessed 29 May 2006.
Buras, Justice.
2006. “Gates of Prayer Congregation’s Response to Katrina.” Term
paper for Honors World Religions, Loyola University New Orleans.
Caldwell, Deborah.
N.d. “Did God Send the Hurricane?” Beliefnet. <http://www.beliefnet.com/story/173/story_17395_1.html>.
Accessed 29 May 2006.
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CNN. 2005b. “Katrina
Was Category 3, not 4.” CNN.com. 21 December. <http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/12/21/katrina/index.html>.
CNN Reports. 2005.
Katrina: State of Emergency. Atlanta: CNN.
Connolly, Ceci,
and Michael Grunwald. 2005. “New Surge Spills over Repaired
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Crowe, David. N.d. “Katrina:
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from Restore America, <http://restoreamerica.org/>.
Accessed 29 May 2006.
DeBerry, Jarvis.
2006. “City of the Dead: We’re Still Finding Katrina’s
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2006. “Full Speed Ahead: Celebration Church’s Response
to Disaster.” Term paper for Honors World Religions, Loyola
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Filosa, Gwen. 2006. “A
Separate Grief: Memorial Day Takes on New Meaning: Remembering the
Victims of Hurricane Katrina.” New Orleans Times-Picayune.
30 May: B-1.
Goodrich, Andrew.
2006. “The ISKCON Response to Hurricane Katrina.” Term
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Hoffman, Jonathan.
2006. “The Response to Hurricane Katrina by the Holy Trinity
Greek Orthodox Cathedral, New Orleans, Louisiana.” Term paper
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Hoover, Rob. 2006. “Lotus
Lake Drikung Dharma Center.” Term paper for Honors World Religions,
Loyola University New Orleans.
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Parchim, Nicholas.
2006. “The Seventh-day Adventists: Diverse People, One Faith.” Term
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Samms, Wesley.
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Thomas, Laura.
2006. “An Active Response in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina:
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