Survivors of Katrina in Bay Area recall pain
Harvey stirs memories of loss, displacement
The day Diane Evans escaped the Hurricane Katrina flood zone, she boarded an overcrowded evacuation bus at the edge of Interstate 10 in Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish, “praying it would go to Houston.”
Evans, now a 71-year-old San Francisco resident, is one of several Katrina refugees who resettled in the Bay Area. This time, she said, Houston is on the other end of her prayers.
“Right now, I’m reliving everything. Reliving the entire experience,” she said. “I know what those people are going through. I know what they’re dealing with. I just pray. I just pray that they don’t do to them what they did to us.”
Evans was among the tens of thousands of people who left New Orleans and never moved back after Katrina devastated the city 12 years ago. About 1,000 of them came to the Bay Area. It’s an exodus that could be repeated in Houston and across southeastern Texas, as the floodwaters from what was once Hurricane Harvey recede and people discover how much they’ve lost.
There’s no predicting how their futures will unfold. Evans landed here with almost
nothing in her pocket and is still angry that “we were treated so poorly by this country.” Her adult daughter was better able to make a new start, and now has a job indirectly helping flood victims in Texas.
Some people who were younger when they relocated to the Bay Area have thrived. One is running a startup. Another found an avocation pushing for the rights of others in the Katrina diaspora.
And a few returned. It took years of part-time separation from her husband, his hard work and her financial creativity from 2,000 miles away, but eventually, one woman was able to move back into her once-devastated home in New Orleans.
Harvey has killed at least 44 people and left thousands displaced in Houston and elsewhere since Aug. 25, when it made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane. But 12 years back, Houston was a safe haven for Diane Evans, her then 40-yearold daughter, Carmen, and her 6-year-old grandson.
Their journey began by swamp boat when the “Cajun Navy” rescued them from a neighbor’s home in the Gert Town neighborhood of New Orleans, four blocks from the 14th Street canal. The way Carmen Evans remembered it, there were eight adults in the house, her young son, three dogs, one cat and enough food for a week.
They were stranded for two days before the boat took them — but not their pets — to higher ground six blocks south. From there, they splashed 2 miles down Jefferson Highway through ankle-deep water before a pickup truck driver gave them a lift to the freeway. There they caught the bus bound for the Houston Astrodome, which had been turned into a shelter.
As they got off the bus outside the covered stadium, Diane Evans recalled, they saw people waiting for missing family members. One woman had a sign reading, “Lil Mikey Jones, 3 years old,” she said, “and everybody started crying.”
They weren’t at the Astrodome for long. Carmen Evans worked at Continental Airlines, and she was quickly able to arrange a free flight to San Francisco for the whole family.
But Bay Area housing in 2005 wasn’t any more affordable than it is today, especially for Diane Evans, a newcomer then pushing 60 years old who had previously worked as a hotel maid. The nonprofit that helped Katrina refugees gave everyone who came to the Bay Area a debit card with $349 on it, Diane Evans said. “And that was it.”
She ended up living with her daughter in Burlingame for several years. When Carmen Evans found a job with United Airlines in Chicago in 2012, Diane refused to leave the Bay Area. She said she was homeless for about four months until a vacancy opened at the Curry Senior Center in the Tenderloin. She didn’t tell her daughter until she had a roof again.
“I was determined to stay in San Francisco . ... I wanted my daughter and son to live independent of me,” she said. “I knew that whatever I had to go through, I could go through it. And I did.”
She loved New Orleans. But she doesn’t want to go back.
“There were no jobs in New Orleans, no housing in New Orleans, no schools in New Orleans,” Evans said. “My last job was as a night maid in a hotel. San Francisco is a better place for me, a senior. My favorite city in the world is New Orleans. But in terms of services for seniors, San Francisco is far better.”
Carmen Evans is settled in Chicago with her now-19-yearold son and is a load planner for United. One of her tasks is arranging for the delivery of flood-relief supplies to Houston.
For two days after Harvey hit, she had to call in sick. Evans said she spent those days crying.
“It’s been a long road. I honestly didn’t believe it was going to hit me this hard,” she said. “I feel so badly for the people in Houston. All I can say is they’re going to need psychological counseling more than anything.
“I just really feel bad that this country wasn’t prepared better” for Harvey, she said. “I mean, come on.”
One of the people the Evans family got to know in the Bay Area was a fellow Katrina evacuee, C.C. Campbell-Rock. Her home in the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans was elevated 4 feet above the surrounding ground, but was still inundated with 12 feet of water when the hurricane hit. A painting of her late mother, her own birth certificate and her prized portfolio of published articles that predated the “digital stuff ” were destroyed.
“You know what, it’s not the things you lost,” CampbellRock said of being displaced. “It’s the intangibles. It’s the camaraderie of friends — your circle of friends. And being transplanted to another place where people are lovely, people are nice, but it wasn’t the same.”
In the Bay Area, CampbellRock said, “I always felt like an invisible person. “I was there but not there. I was physically present, but mentally gone.”
For a year, she was the beneficiary of a local resident who was moved by the plight of uprooted evacuees. He never wanted his name made public, but when Campbell-Rock’s adult son — who was already living here — talked at a Pleasanton city meeting about the problems she and her two teenage children were having, the man found them a twobedroom apartment in the city and paid a year of rent.
“People were really lovely. They really, really were,” Campbell-Rock said. “They were lovely and the environment was lovely. But it wasn’t home.”
Her husband initially stayed behind in New Orleans, trying to salvage their home. He would come out for visits as the family moved from Pleasanton to federally subsidized housing in Dublin, then an apartment in Concord.
To help support the family, Campbell-Rock worked as a journalist, ran a Katrina recovery ministry program with Lutheran Social Services of Northern California, and headed an aid program for foster youth. But the family never lost the hope of returning to their New Orleans home.
Damage to it was estimated at $126,000. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave them $20,000 to replace furniture and cover some other expenses. Louisiana’s Road Home program gave her $38,000 for physical damage and $15,000 to elevate their home.
Campbell-Rock’s husband is a carpenter and contractor, so he did most of the work himself and hired neighborhood people to help reinstall everything from plumbing to electricity. In 2014, she finally moved back.
But it’s not the same. The city still has overgrown vegetation, big empty lots and boarded-up houses. Like CampbellRock herself, New Orleans hasn’t quite recovered.
“I’m not over it yet, and it’s 12 years,” she said, now 68. “We lost everything.”
Dan Smolkin did not have a school to return to after Katrina hit.
Smolkin was two weeks into his junior year at Ben Franklin High School in New Orleans when the flood came. When the evacuation order was given, he piled into a Lincoln Continental with his father and grandparents and headed for Alexandria, La. After a couple of days in a hotel that served as a refugee center, he boarded a flight to the Bay Area.
For the next year, he lived with an aunt and uncle in Palo Alto, and eventually graduated from Gunn High School there. After college at James Madison University in Virginia, he came back to work at a startup in Mountain View. After four years there, he formed his own startup, Integraph, and moved to San Francisco.
Smolkin, 29, said he’s “focused on living in the Bay Area” but makes a point to show his New Orleans roots. He celebrates Mardi Gras every year with all the king cakes and beads he can get ahold of.
“It’s a city that I absolutely love, and there’s no place I’ve been that comes close to it,” he said. “I know it sounds cheesy. I carry the mentality of being a New Orleanian with me wherever I go.”
Amber McZeal doesn’t like to talk about what she lost in the flood, or her journey to California.
“As one might guess, losing everything isn’t that fun,” said McZeal, 35. “The transition was very rocky. My heart goes out to the folks in Texas right now.
“But the major piece about Katrina and about the transition was how the storm exposed centuries of institutional and systemic racism,” she said. “Losing everything isn’t necessarily a problem if you have equitable access.”
McZeal was in her early 20s studying jazz at the Southern University of New Orleans when Katrina flooded her college. FEMA provided her housing in New Orleans until January 2006, when an official gave her two weeks’ notice and told her the agency wouldn’t pay for housing unless she left the state, McZeal said.
She decided to move to the Bay Area, where she met up with a musician friend. FEMA paid for a room for two months at a hotel in Emeryville. After that, she scrounged up enough money to live in Berkeley and set out to get involved with activists.
She began working with nonprofit organizations focused on the “right to return” for the thousands of the Katrina refugees who were in limbo. She was hired as a caseworker to help fellow evacuees get re-established — a responsibility she said the government shirked for poorer African Americans who had been renters in New Orleans.
She’s particularly scathing about the Road Home program, which she said directed the bulk of recovery funds at homeowners.
“The systems of power that go back to before America was America really got revealed and exaggerated by the storm,” McZeal said.
Now she lives in Oakland, but says she wants to go home someday. And “Louisiana will always be home,” McZeal said. “My roots aren’t here. My roots are there. My entire family’s from there.”
But, she said, “one can make peace with where they are.”