Tales of death, survival in Hurricane Katrina 10 years ago: "The lady on the corner, they never found her body'

Hurricane Katrina was blowing through New Orleans when Harry Simms learned the Industrial Canal had been breached, nine blocks from his home on Flood Street in the Lower Ninth Ward.

A failure in the same canal during Hurricane Betsy had wiped out his childhood neighborhood. On Aug. 29, 2005, Simms saw water from Katrina’s breach rising quickly around the house he had bought two years earlier. He had two choices: leave or die.

Flooding is common enough in the Lower Ninth Ward that boats are considered emergency survival tools. Simms, then a longshoreman, powered his boat south to higher ground at Jackson Barracks.

Federal levees and shipping canals were overwhelmed and failed during Hurricane Katrina, putting 80 percent of New Orleans underwater and killing nearly 1,500 people. Images from that day of residents of the Lower Ninth Ward stranded on their rooftops praying to be rescued from the rising waters became early symbols of the devastation across New Orleans.

Rooftop rescue during Katrina flooding

 First-responders borrowed Simms’ boat for several days to check houses for survivors and bodies. They marked each building with another enduring symbol, the “Katrina X.” It was short-hand code to other rescue groups, with the date the building was checked on the top of the X, the rescue-unit number to the left and existing hazards or conditions to the right. The mark at the bottom tallied the number inside who died.

“After they had checked all the houses, we all had to go to the Super Dome,” Simms says, referring to the domed stadium turned makeshift emergency shelter that would become a hellishly lawless scene.

Earlier this year, POLITICO Magazine sent me to New Orleans to write about the city’s recent success in efforts to fix or remove abandoned buildings and clear overgrown properties after Katrina turned an already decaying city into the most blighted in the nation.

I talked to several people living in New Orleans when Katrina hit. They shared stories of survival, renewal and love for one of the most special cities in the United States. In a series of blog posts between now and Katrina’s 10^th anniversary, I will tell their tales, as well as the story of the new New Orleans.

August and September storms seem to be as common in New Orleans as parades before Mardi Gras. Hurricanes flooded the city five times before Katrina, most recently in 1965 and 1969. Some people in the Big Easy developed a reputation for bravado, partying on behind plywood-covered windows while storms raged outside.

Other residents routinely marched out of town whenever New Orleans was threatened by major late-summer storms swirling through the Gulf of Mexico. “We referred to them as ‘hurrications,’” said Michael Casey, who was starting his senior year at Tulane University in August 2005. “Every year we evacuated – twice when I was a sophomore. You’d come for school and go somewhere with your friends for a week. Then you’d come back, get your syllabus and start classes.”

Geographically, New Orleans forms a bowl between the mighty Mississippi River and huge Lake Pontchartrain (a 30-mile-long bridge spans its shores). Levees and shipping-friendly canals link the waterways.




New Orleans: Lower Ninth Ward is the darker yellow portion near the center; East New Orleans (E) is above it on this map. Lakeview (A) is the yellow portion in northwest New Orleans. 

Much of New Orleans lies below sea level. Counterintuitively, high ground is closest to the Mississippi River, which forms the signature crescent shape that gives the city one of its nicknames.

With Katrina, a top-level Category 5 storm, steamrolling directly toward New Orleans, more than a quarter-million of the city’s 437,000 residents fled when the evacuation order was issued on Aug. 28. But roughly one-fourth of residents had no access to cars. Thousands of people – mostly poor and black – were trapped.

Katrina veered slightly east and weakened when it made landfall near the Mississippi border. “That’s the power of prayer,” said Bruce Johnson, who rode out the storm as his Uptown neighborhood was inundated. “It was a Category 3 when it hit us. If it had still been a 5, we wouldn’t be talking.”

Johnson recalled sitting on his porch, about six feet above street level, when he noticed water lapping a few steps below. “I’d never seen it get that high,” he said. Johnson grabbed his mother and moved to higher ground, upstairs in this case. Water eventually reached the springs on a main-floor bed.

In addition to the death and displacement roughly 70 percent of the city’s housing stock – had major-to severe damage or was destroyed. The flood did not discriminate between black and white, rich and poor, residential and commercial.



More than 105,000 houses and apartments in New Orleans had major-to severe damage or were destroyed

In the upscale Lakeview neighborhood by Lake Pontchartrain, scores of its predominantly white residents died and 72 percent of its homes were damaged by flooding up to 10-feet-deep in some areas. High-water levels still are marked on the walls of some Lakeview businesses.

Some of the worst damage was in East New Orleans, low-lying land between Lake Pontchartrain and the Intracoastal Waterway, where roughly 90 percent of the housing stock received major damage or worse. Its residents were predominately black, mostly families with workers earning low- to moderate wages.

Jean (she declined to give her last name) was born, grew up and raised her children and grandchildren in a house on America Street in East New Orleans. Like many houses in New Orleans, it is built substantially above street level. Before Katrina she owned it outright.

“I’ve got 10-foot ceilings and the water went eight feet up the walls,” Jean said. She lost everything and now pays a mortgage to cover the rebuilding costs. But she counts herself among the fortunate. “The lady on the corner, they never found her body.”

Before he was transported to the Super Dome, Simms left his boat tied to a canal bridge. It was gone when he returned a week after Katrina. But bigger problems waited on Flood Street.

His two-story elevated home was severely damaged from water that reached the rooftop. Three other houses had been swept into his yard. Others blocked the street.

“Then (Hurricane) Rita hit a week later,” Simms said. “The water blew through the same hole in the canal. It went right back up and we had to evacuate again.”

(Next, recovery and a new beginning.)