After Katrina. Hey guys. It’s ten years already since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and tore New Orleans apart. I’d never been there before but I travelled there in the summer of 2015. Plenty of aspects haunted me, which I’ve written about below. But you need to read the whole piece. Thanks for understanding – and thinking. Abi.

I remember where I was when I heard about Hurricane Katrina. I suspect many people do.

For me, it was the coffee room of the University Hospital of Wales Intensive Care Unit. I say room and I say coffee but to set the scene more accurately, the space was smaller than a garden shed and the coffee came from crushed granules whose appearance gave the medical world its description for predigested blood.

We were days into the disaster, but then days and nights passed in another world within the realm of ICU. Working nights with patients who can’t talk and watching machines gives a surreal perspective to the usual passage of time.

Refugees

So, too, does working with refugees. For those of you who don’t know, the National Health Service of the UK recruits heavily from overseas – and accepts many refugees. The two situations are not the same, of course, but it wasn’t until I travelled abroad that I realised how unusual it was to live and work in such a multicultural and multi-disaster-affected environment.

From Eton’s playfields to the genocide-scarred camps of Rwanda, NHS doctors cover it all. Virgin billionaire Branson’s daughter trained and works in the NHS, along with refugees from the ethnic cleansing of the former Yugoslavia.

And lest you think this is too gushingly heroic, the failed terrorist attack on Glasgow International Airport also hailed from an NHS doctor.

All of which is just to say that it’s a diverse working environment, ripe with different perspectives.

As images of flood-filled America swam across the screen, we heard reports of citizens shooting at the aid workers.

After day two or three, a former refugee doctor got up and said he’d had enough.

“I can’t listen to anyone else say that ‘they’ve lost everything,’” he said.

“They have no idea what that means.”

---

Most Destructive Storm

Hurricane Katrina was the most destructive storm to hit the United States, causing over $100 billion in damage, displacing over 1 million people and claiming nearly 2000 lives.

And despite the natural trigger, experts agree it was a largely man-made catastrophe.

As it turns out, most of the damage to New Orleans and the surrounding area resulted less from the natural hurricane and more from the incompetence, if not downright corruption, of the officials entrusted with protecting the city.

There were faults with the flood protection system.

In the words of Lawrence H. Roth, Deputy Executive Director of The American Society of Civil Engineers it was “the worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history.”

The legal wrangling over compensation continues today.

Today in New Orleans

For outsiders, like me, it’s hard to believe that ten years have gone. For insiders, those from New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, I suspect it feels like one hundred years have passed.

Ten years since I heard those words from that former refugee. A lifetime (of thirty plus years) during which I’d set foot in America many times but never yet in the south or in New Orleans itself.

Nawlins, the city that lets the good times roll, welcomed me there for a festival.

The sun shone, the music flowed and so did the flavours, ripe with Cajun and Creole influences, allowing me to learn the difference between the two (and more about all that juicy goodness much later in another post.)

I was there to cover the brilliant SatchmoFest, a tribute to Louis Armstrong (who, incidentally, pronounced his name Loo-iss to my embarrassment and shame,) to explore the French Quarter and to voyage into alligator-infested swamps and raccoon populated waterways.

But for all the progress there’s been in the last decade, it’s near impossible to avoid the aftermath of Katrina.

Sometimes it’s out loud but more often it’s subdued.

There’s the flared skull and crossbones painted on the sides of buildings where rescue workers sprayed the dead or alive count in their boat-led triage expeditions.

There’s the lectures and museum exhibits that feature interviews and photographs from the rescue efforts not only for life and limb but also to rebuild intangible treasures like a vibrant arts and music community.

Listening to the Satchmo SummerFest keynote speech – 10yrs after Katrina #mustlovefestivals #nolalab #followyourNOLA pic.twitter.com/2DvRNje2l7

— Abigail King (@insidetravellab) July 31, 2015

And then there’s the question from Americans from afar. Are they really doing OK? Really? Now? After all, how many people have really moved back home?

(There’s a fascinating piece from Michael Turtle on this, that covers the worst affected areas that I didn’t have time this time to see.)

But most powerfully of all, the impact of Katrina comes from unrelated questions from the enterprising, inspirational characters I meet along the way.

“After Katrina, I had to move to New York…”

“After Katrina, I had to start over…”

“After Katrina, I felt I wanted to make a difference. So I did. And that felt good.”

Different voices, all asked different questions. All added the A-K in without really noticing, as routinely as you or I would say “well, after I left home.”

But the AK affect indirectly led to each of the following

Whipping up Gumbo and Jambalaya at the Langlois Culinary Crossroads.

Wearing white and swarmed around art on Julia Street for the artsy White Linen Night.

And silver and deep blue gleamed at the headquarters of local jewellery designer and icon Mignon Faget.

And many, many times, I heard the phrase “people who lost everything” and it reminded me of my friend.

Losing Everything

No, the people here didn’t lose their homeland. They didn’t lose their identity, forced to start again with no record of their birth, their education, no record of anything of them at all. They didn’t lose hope, as the government and charities across the world pledged to rebuild, to refinance, to remember and to stand by their side or to “ make it right ” (after an admittedly disastrous first response. And, yes, the following responses have their well documented problems too.)

But imperfect as the response has been, there has at least been a response. The headlines are not calling for NOLA residents to be deported and shipped to a land where they will face near certain death.

But they did lose more than the much reported billions in damages and those heartbreaking 2000 lives.

People lost their innocence and their faith in a system designed to support them. And that is no trivial thing.

The Future

“I can just about talk about it now without tears,” one woman tells me, who would rather I didn’t use her name. “But I’m ready, ready to move on. I think the whole city is. This 10 year anniversary will come and go. But then it’s time to look toward the future – and to leave Katrina in the past.”

It’s a future that looks bright, if not certain, which perhaps in life is the best you can say. While many elderly residents have stayed away after moving in with adult children who live in other states, there’s been an influx of ideas, energy and youth to the city from people wanting to make things right.

It seems crazy to hear it as a newcomer to the place but apparently good old Nola was on a stagnant slide beforehand. It wasn’t cool to stay here, with students preferring, for example, to escape to Baton Rouge.

That’s not the case any more.

A City to Fall in Love With. Before Katrina. After Katrina.

It feels strange to write so much about this city I fell in love with and yet write so little about the lovable things I found there. I’ll have to return, in my writing and also, I hope in my life.

In the meantime, I leave you with this little exchange which I think sums up the Katrina confusion.

Mignon Faget has created a necklace to mark the 10^th year anniversary of hurricane Katrina. Proceeds go to charity.

I didn’t quite catch the name the first time around. It sounded like “ingratitude.”

A member of staff caught my eye.

“In. Space. Gratitude.”

It’s to thank all the people who helped to build up this city again.

Disclosure – I visited New Orleans as part of the #MustLoveFestivals project in partnership with Expedia and the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. As ever, as always, I keep the right to write what I like. Otherwise, you know the drill. What’s the point?

Some further reading

• on the numbers surrounding Hurricane Katrina .
• on travel to the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the areas worst hit
• The Make It Right project
• Independent Levee Investigation Final Report