Hurricane Katrina 10 years later
Storm’s effects still linger in Hot Springs
Ten years ago today, Hurricane Katrina came raging out of the Gulf of Mexico, sweeping through Louisiana, killing more than 1,800 people and leaving $ 140 billion in damages in its wake.
More than 400,000 people were forced to flee, with an estimated 60,000 making their way to Arkansas.
A year later, it was estimated that more than 100,000 of those evacuees never returned, except maybe for a nostalgic visit, and relocated in Arkansas and throughout the country in the months and years that followed the devastation. Janie Smith, executive director of Jackson House, a local
crisis center, recalls that when she started work at the center 15 years ago there were four filing cabinets to hold the case files for families in need. After Katrina hit, followed in September by hurricane Rita and in October by hurricane Wilma, they completely filled seven cabinets.
She said she developed a color coding system, with blue files for Katrina victims, a red file for Rita victims and a yellow file for Wilma victims to keep them straight. Even 10 years later, as she opens the file drawers one by one, there is a patchwork of blue, red and yellow tabs scattered through each drawer, the remnants of Mother Nature’s fury.
“It all changed with Katrina and has never come back and only continues to worsen, I believe,” Smith said. “They can say the economy is doing better, but I’m not seeing it down here.”
She said there was a major shift that can be traced directly back to Katrina. “It was just too much of a major catastrophe and we’re still feeling the ripple effects today. It wasn’t just New Orleans. It was the entire coast.”
After the storm first hit, she said she and the other volunteers came to man the center and were open six days a week from 8 a. m. to 6 p. m. each day, and “the line outside just never quit. It went from our front door, down the street toward ( the Hot Springs Convention Center) and just never stopped. It was a really bizarre time.”
She said there were people who came with ice chests and walked up and down the line giving water and cold drinks to the people. “It was just so hot and miserable. There was no shade. Just concrete and black top. It was an awful, terrible time.” She said they had so many people with major needs they had to call to other areas for help.
“It inundated such a large portion of the South that everything had to come from the North and that took time. I’ve never seen such a disaster. I have threatened that if it ever happens again, I’m going to retire.”
She said they provided food, medicine and clothing because “many only had one outfit on their body. No one expected their homes to flood. No one was prepared. Everyone thought they would just get to a safe place and then go home, but that didn’t happen.”
She estimated the population of Hot Springs increased by 5,000, and while some moved on, many ended up staying. She said of the evacuees from Texas after Rita, most went home, but “the Katrina people came and never went back.”
She said every local hotel and church and other agencies worked to provide shelter for the victims. “I had people offering to open up their homes, but I discouraged that. A lot of the volunteers offering were elderly females living alone and you just don’t know. It was chaos.”
Smith said they had some people coming in from Little Rock and other places with fake IDs posing as refugees to get money and other relief. The state authorities “realized what was going on and stopped all that. Now it’s harder to get an ID than it’s ever been. It changed a lot of policies in our state forever.”
She said people were so generous, donating food and money and “their time and energy” to help. “Everybody had so much compassion.” The Garland County Chapter of the American Red Cross and other agencies stepped up and “were all working together.” She compared it to when an apartment building burns down and dozens are displaced, noting, “That’s hard to deal with, but this was thousands of people.”
Smith said the evacuees were “so desperate and depressed. You could see the vacant look in their eyes. The fear.”
She said many were seniors and retirees that had been living in government housing. “They had lots of medical conditions. You also had single mothers with lots of children. It was a total mix of people. People just having to start over completely. How do you do that? Their lives were changed forever by the things they saw and had to live through.
“They all had to pick up the pieces and make a new life for themselves and I’m glad we were able to help,” Smith said.
Betty Rogers, one of the displaced New Orleans residents, came to Hot Springs with her husband, Joseph, and her disabled son, Michael, because she was from here originally and still had a brother and sister living here.
Rogers, who had retired from Bell South in New Orleans after 23 years and was working as a licensed addiction counselor at the New Orleans Center for Addictive Disorders, said they had initially evacuated to Columbus, Ga., to wait out the storm. “I left work that Thursday for the weekend and ended up never going back,” she said.
She said they had visited her family in Hot Springs a month earlier and she remembered having seen the Arkansas Rehabilitation Center downtown. Knowing that it was here, along with her family, led to their decision to come here. She said they were able to transfer her son from a rehab in Louisiana to Hot Springs.
She said the people at the rehabilitation center later helped her son get into public housing, and he now lives at Levi Towers.
Another deciding factor was “our age,” she said, noting she is 72 and her husband is 77. “If we had been younger with jobs that forced us to return it might have been different.” She said they were both familiar with Hot Springs, since she grew up here, and he had visited with her “many times.”
Her brother provided shelter for them until they were able to get an apartment and later bought a house. “We knew we wouldn’t have to start completely from scratch,” she said. “We’ve been a lot more fortunate than many people.”
Part of that fortune came from the fact she had bought flood insurance shortly before the disaster. “I bet we hadn’t made more than three premium payments,” she said. “God really blessed us.”
Rogers said they have since gone back to visit their home, which they had lived in for 30 years, and while it wasn’t “washed off its foundations or anything,” it sat in water “up to the door locks” for eight to 10 days. “It was a wood- frame house,” she said, so it was uninhabitable afterward.
Among the photos she has kept is one that showed markings left on her house by the searchers who were looking for dead bodies. The marker indicated no one was found in her house.
“I have never grieved the house,” she said. “It was more the people and the church family we lost.” She said the New Orleans she once knew “isn’t there anymore. It’s a different city now. The people we knew are all scattered. The things we knew and loved are gone. I’ll never stop missing the food.”
She said she does get sad thinking about the people they knew who perished in the flood. “This has been a hard week. I’ve been watching too much C- Span,” she said, noting all the anniversary memorials. “The sadness comes back.”
While Rogers and her family didn’t have to seek assistance from Jackson House because she had family to help, Rogers now volunteers at the center weekly. “Where I worked before had a homeless medical center and a traveler’s aid center so this place is very near to the kind of work I used to do. I needed something to do so I volunteered.”
She said Jackson House was “a great place to work” and she has met many people from New Orleans since she started there, including one of the other volunteers. “We reminisce about po’boy sandwiches,” she said, laughing.