This week I was going to begin posting some of my short stories here on Katrina Reverb. However, as Peanut and I took our morning stroll on this slightly dreary Sunday in Austin, I had my Walkman tuned to the National Public Radio program “On the Media” and heard an interview with reporter Sheri Fink about her Pulitzer Prize winning, Katrina disaster-related article “The Deadly Choices at Memorial.”
Fink’s story concerns events at Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans during the days following the levee breaks, events that included charges that patients deemed too frail to airlift from the devastation may have been euthanized. If you’d like to read Fink’s troubling account, visit www.propublica.org I think you’ll also be drawn to the site’s “Ongoing Investigations” section where unexplained deaths that occurred in the city during the chaos are chronicled. Thank you propublica.org for sticking with these difficult stories.
I’m not going to attempt to comment on the legality or morality of the actions of others during the disaster. I feel loath to pass judgment on decisions victims make in life threatening circumstances. Nonetheless, the Propublica articles took me back to the difficulties I’ve experienced as a writer and educator trying to convey the desperation we in the city felt and the other-worldliness of being trapped in a disaster that, for many days, no one on the outside seemed, at least from our vantage point, to notice. What I’d like to do in this entry is describe the mental state created in individuals who are left to face disaster on their own.
When big things you trust fail, you realize that anything can fail and you start looking around wondering where the next failure will occur. After all, you want to be ready so the next strike doesn’t knock you off your feet.
Before the disaster, if someone had asked me whether New Orleans could be destroyed by a hurricane, I would have answered, “Unfortunately yes.” However, if someone had asked me if the levees that protected our city could fail, I would have answered something along the lines of, “Good God, I hope not!” or “Dear Lord, I never thought of that!” Further, if someone had asked me if I thought the U.S. government might fail to respond if a U.S. city were caught in a web of destruction, I would have answered with a resounding “NO.” No matter what problems I had with our federal government prior to the disaster, I did trust that the appropriate officials and departments would respond to citizens’ imminent, life and death needs.
As I like to say to people in my adopted city, “Fellow Austinites, do you ever stare toward west Austin and think about what would happen if the Mansfield Damn collapsed, the city lost essential services, we had no news from the outside, and government officials at every level failed to provide relief?” They tend to look at me in stunned silence. Unfortunately, many also avoid conversation with me after that. No one likes to be reminded of vulnerabilities.
As the levees failed, even we who were safe in the dry French Quarter, began to wonder where the next collapse would occur and when the water would reach us. This concern was not unrealistic as flooding was then spreading across the city from the original 53 levee breaks as water levels equalized between Lake Pontchartrain and the streets. We watched fires burn in the distance. We heard rumors that fire departments and police had run out of supplies and fuel. We knew that most of the city was inaccessible without a boat. Every day of the disaster, I awoke expecting the National Guard to drive triumphantly into the city and offer relief. Every day, I was disappointed.
I remember scanning the horizon from the roof of the Royal Street building where I sheltered, wondering what might have happened in the outside world to cause the disaster to be ignored. “Do you think terrorists attacked Atlanta, Los Angeles, or New York while Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast? That could throw our nation into total chaos,” I commented to Frank who stood beside me. At that point, I honestly believed our government may have fallen while our city faced destruction! That was the only explanation I could find for the fact that we were suffering alone.
I also remember stepping out of my car in Houston, Texas, after we fled the city, and being completely taken aback by the fact that, although New Orleanians were then fighting for their lives, life in Houston—less than a day’s drive away—was completely normal. People were jogging and walking their dogs! Finding myself on a normal Houston Street while my city struggled for survival was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that no matter what an individual experienced in the city during the disaster, she or he also experienced mind-numbing fear in a context in which little help was offered. In a situation like this, you have to be the agent of your own survival. You fear everything and you fear nothing. You know you may make mistakes in your efforts to survive, but all you can do is your best because there is no help for you. This experience of being alone and endangered is in and of itself incredibly traumatizing.
For anyone who has lived through a situation like this, the memories are haunting. For anyone who has not, the reality of this experience is hard to fathom. It is, after all, difficult to imagine a world in which all the infrastructural support that constantly surrounds a person suddenly disappears. To do this is to picture a world unhinged. As soldiers say, you don’t really know how you’ll react in extreme circumstances until you are on the inside, so please do not judge we who have been there too harshly.
But, in truth, some times we survivors are harder on ourselves than anyone else is. Survival is a glorious thing and those who come through difficulties should be honored. But survival can also be an ugly business leaving one with survivors’ guilt. My own survivors’ guilt centers on the fact that I escaped the city while others still suffered in the streets. In reality, I was not set up to help the thousands who suffered more than I did. But, nonetheless, having a taste of what they experienced let me know how badly they needed help and how little anyone did.
Maybe, I think as I toss and turn in my bed at night, I could have opened the doors of the Royal Street building for use by the displaced. Maybe I should have thrown people into the hatchback of my car as I drove out of the city. But I didn’t. Instead, I thought about my own survival and that of those nearest me.
I wish I could talk about this with other people but I believe there’s been a sort of societal-level denial about what happened in New Orleans. The experience was too terrible, too beyond the scope of things that are supposed to happen in an industrialized, wealthy nation like the U.S. For non-New Orleanians to discuss the disaster is on some level to open themselves up to the realization that their communities may also be vulnerable. For New Orleanians who evacuated for the disaster, especially those who have returned to live in the city, the discussion provokes the memory of the terrible and needless suffering that occurred on their streets. And for those of us who were there, fear, anger, and guilt surround our experiences and we have been offered little societal or professional help to guide us through our grief and trauma.
The disaster was the site of much in the way of heroic action. Fishermen from southwest Louisiana snuck into the city to rescue individuals when the government failed to respond. People around the nation took in those of us made homeless by the floods. New Orleanians helped New Orleanians. But on some level, for our entire nation, the disaster was a failure. We as a nation, and I include myself in this, failed to keep our government accountable for its citizens’ safety. Perhaps because we have been so ashamed of this failure, we’ve also as a society swept the disaster under the rug, as if to say, “Hey, don’t look at that. That’s not how we usually act.”
This has been a convoluted blog entry and I realize that, even here, I may have failed to convey my ideas. To be honest, this is stuff I’m still working on in therapy to give myself some kind of understanding of the tragedy, what it has done to me, and how I might proceed to find healing. Nonetheless, what I think I’m trying to say here is that everything that happened in the city during the disaster needs to be understood as occurring in extremis—in situations most people have little context to understand. In order to think about life during a disaster, you need to be able to think outside of the box of the blessed normality that defines most of our days! Then, maybe, you will have some idea of what it felt like to be there and, maybe, if there is more empathy and understanding, we and our nation can better heal. All My Best, Donna
PS: As many of you know or may have realized, I am new to blogging. I’m trying to figure out how to access various features. I’m particularly interested in learning how to make the blog appear to searches engines, how to make it easier for folks to follow the blog, and in general, how to make Katrina Reverb more accessible. I’m doing the research but if anyone can offer any tips, please email them to katrinareverb@gmail.com
Also, I beg of you kind readers to please leave comments on the blog! I can’t tell you how encouraging your remarks are to me! And to all who have already left comments on these pages, I thank you for making a connection and hope you’ll do so again.
Finally, The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center just came out with Facts for Features: Hurricane Katrina Impact -- an easy-to-read 1-pager of basic statistics on the immediate impact of Katrina and the floods. Follow the link (if I've done this correctly and the link works!) or cut and paste the following address:
http://www.gnocdc.org/Factsforfeatures/HurricaneKatrinaImpact/index.html
Even for those of us who know the situation, reading these stats can be mind-blowing.
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