Survival Stories
by James Dudlicek
Brown’s Dairy team members share details of
living through Hurricane Katrina.
Thousands of
New Orleans residents suffered great personal losses from Hurricane Katrina
and the subsequent flooding. Managers and employees of Brown’s Dairy
were among those affected, and some of them shared their experiences with Dairy Field.
Danny Hembree, maintenance manager
Hembree was lucky enough to be out of town on vacation
when the storm hit. The West Bank resident’s luck continued when he
discovered his house came through without a scratch.
“I tried to come back to town, but they had that
mandatory evacuation, so I couldn’t get back in,” he says.
“I snuck back in the night of the hurricane and saw that everything
was OK. They said if you were still there after a certain hour, you had to
stay. We had no power and no water, so I left again.”
When he finally got back to stay, Hembree was in the
first wave of Brown’s employees to assist in clean-up efforts.
“By the time we got here, everything was hot and spoiled, blown-up
bottles,” he recalls. “We hauled seven or eight Dumpsters a day
of milk out of here. We did that [clean-up] for about two-and-a-half weeks,
10 to 12 hours a day. … We had to wear respirators and suits. We had
a lot of mold. … We had some roof damage and stuff like that. On the
truck shop, it ripped the whole roof off.”
Though Hembree’s home was spared, his family is
still feeling Katrina’s effects. “The company my wife works for
is right on the canal where that levee broke, and she’s been living
about an hour and a half from here since the storm,” he says.
“Her job moved her there. She should be coming back in about two
months.”
Keith Burke, machine operator
The situation was less rosy for Burke, a resident of
the Gentilly area of the hard-hit Ninth Ward. “I lost everything in
my house,” Burke says, recounting the day of the storm.
“It’s my son’s first year in college, and we had to bring
him Saturday, but we didn’t know what the storm was going to be like.
So we waited, and then at the last minute on Sunday morning, he said we
need to go up there to get ready for school. But we didn’t know they
had cancelled everything because of the storm,” he says.
“So we left to go up there, but the traffic was
very heavy. With everybody leaving at last minute like that, it was bumper
to bumper. No matter where you tried to get out, it was like an eight-hour
or 12-hour delay. … But the good part about it was on Friday,
everybody got paid, so that’s why a lot of people had money to leave.
… My wife has a friend she went to high school and college with, she
lives in Lafayette. She had about eight families in her house, and she took
us in. We stayed there a couple of days and then we left and came back [to
New Orleans], but we couldn’t get in. … So we went to Rustin at
Louisiana Tech — Louisiana Tech housed hurricane victims.”
It was several months before Burke has his family could
return to New Orleans and learn the extent of the damage to their home.
“On the weather [reports] they were saying New Orleans was flooded,
and they said the levee had breached. … And they were showing the
area I lived in. The water was over the street signs, and they showed the
street that I lived on. … You could see the water just rolling
in,” he recalls. “When we got back here and went to the house,
you couldn’t even get the key into the iron door because it was all
rusted. The floors were buckled, everything was tumbled over — your
furniture, your refrigerator’s upside down. … You had to take
your air conditioner out or bust the window to get in, take the hinges off
the door. Everything that was in there was ruined — everything.
… Everybody figured it was going to be like a couple of days
you’re out, and you’re back to work. But that didn’t
happen. Whatever you had on, that was it. … We got to Rustin, we
stopped at Wal-Mart and bought some clothes.”
Burke eventually wound up in Shreveport, where he
checked in with Dean’s Foremost Dairy and ran a filler until he was
able to return to New Orleans. “They wanted to keep me, but I said
no, they need me here,” he says. “We needed people here,
because our people were scattered all over. We’ve still got a good
bit of people out that we need, but right now we’re doing pretty good
with the people that we have.”
For the time being, while others in his neighborhood
are returning to rebuild, Burke’s new home is a trailer provided by
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). “A least I have a
place to stay for now, but how long it’s going to last, I don’t
know. They say 18 months,” he says. “After 18 months, what are
we going to do? I don’t know. If we have to leave the trailer,
we’ll probably be outdoors, because right now apartments are like
$1,800, $2,000 a month, and if it’s $1,800, they’re going to
want a $3,000 deposit. We don’t have that kind of money right
now.”
A lifelong New Orleans resident, Burke has seen his
share of storms. “I’ve been through Bessie, Camille, I’ve
been through all of them,” he says. “But this here — this
was the worst one.”
Still, Burke says, New Orleans is his home and he aims
to stay, but plans to take extra care in case there’s a next time.
“If there was a hurricane, I would just have to up and leave. If I
had a chance to get a U-Haul and pack all my stuff up and leave, I’d
do that,” he says. “Other than that, I’m gonna stay.
I’m gonna die in New Orleans. Believe it or not, a lot of people lost
their lives because they didn’t want to leave.”
Iola Graves, controller
With her New Orleans East home almost completely
rebuilt, Graves nearly lost something more important in the wake of
Katrina, when she lost track of her husband for about three weeks.
Graves headed to Baton Rouge to stay with her daughter.
“When I left, I only took two or three pieces of clothing. I left at
6 a.m. that Sunday morning prior to the storm, and I thought I’d be
coming back home in a couple of days,” she says. “But then
Monday, the storm hit, and it seemed that everything was going to be OK.
Then that Tuesday, when it actually flooded, the breach of the levee
happened and the water came into the city, and I’m watching it on TV.
They’re saying Kenner is under water, St. Bernard is under water, New
Orleans East is under water. … I had 4 feet of water in my home, and
I lost everything.”
It was about two months before Graves was able to
return. “Since New Orleans East where I live was one of the hardest
hit, we were longer getting back into the city than, say, Kenner or
Metairie or Uptown, because we were just like the Lower Ninth Ward and St.
Bernard,” she says.
Graves and her husband John, who works at a New Orleans
hotel, did not evacuate together. “They asked him to work. They had a
room for us at the hotel; I could have stayed with him but I chose not
to,” she says. “He went to work and I didn’t hear from
him for about a week, and I didn’t know where he was or what had
happened to him. But Tuesday, when the water was coming in … he had
to evacuate, and he had to go across the river because that was the only
way out of the city. He went all the way down the interstate the back way
to Baton Rouge, and then back to his mom’s house in Franklinton,
Louisiana. But because there were no phones, he couldn’t communicate.
They had downed power lines, and my phone wasn’t working, and I could
not get in touch with him.”
Eventually, through a series of phone calls between
relatives in Louisiana, Texas and Ohio, Graves learned her husband was
safe. Meanwhile, she checked in with the Baton Rouge office and started
helping to resume business operations.
“I just called out of the blue that Tuesday, just
to see what was going on … and I spoke to [plant superintendent] John
Broussard, and John told me how he evacuated and he was in Baton Rouge. I
asked him if he needed me to come in, and he said, ‘No, we’re
not doing anything right at this moment, but if we should need you,
we’ll call you.’ About three hours later, he called me,”
she says.
“We have some great employees. Some of them came
and stuck it out. Some of them slept in trucks or whatever. But eventually
Kennon ordered trailers equipped with computers … At first we were
just helping answer the telephone and taking orders … it’s hard
to run this business without a computer … We went to Dallas to close
out for the month. They were very nice at corporate … Everyone was
wonderful. We appreciated all the help, and without them we wouldn’t
have been able to get through this. But without the work, I don’t
think I would have been able to get through this, because I had something
to keep me busy, to keep my mind off of what was going on.
“All this time, I did not know what my house was
like. People were telling me the water was over the roof and my house was
just gone. But I’m kind of like my mother. My mother was a strong
woman, and she was my hero. I can handle a lot of stuff, I can
endure.”
Unlike many others faced with storm damage, Graves was
fully ensured, and expected to be back in her home by press time.
“I’m very fortunate, and I’m just thankful for
that,” she says, noting that about a third of her neighbors have
returned to rebuild. “I belong to my neighborhood association, and
they’re telling me that 90 percent of the residents have committed to
coming back to the area. You now see trailers in yards, roofs are being
changed throughout the neighborhood. The people have cleaned out their
homes. They’ve gutted them and sprayed them down for mold. See,
that’s what got us was the mold. It’s not the water —
it’s what the water does. It was hot at that particular time, and the
houses were shut up. So if you got four feet of water, your mold was up
about six feet.”
Graves has hopped around a bit while waiting for
repairs to be finished. After staying with her daughter for four months,
she moved in with her husband when his hotel provided rooms for their
employees and families. But when the hotel needed the space for Mardi Gras
crowds, they relocated to a FEMA trailer. “We can go back [to the
hotel] after Mardi Gras if we choose to, but I choose not. I’m tired
of moving,” she says. “The company was very nice in getting out
FEMA numbers and setting up trailers for employees, giving them a place to
live so they can continue to work. … I have a really nice trailer.
It’s small, but it’s comfortable. It has all the conveniences,
except for a washer and dryer.”
Graves is a little nervous as the 2006 hurricane
season approaches. “I’m relying on it being another 50 years
before this happens again, because I couldn’t rebuild again —
not in the city. I’d have to look elsewhere.
“A lot of people are still out of the city.
They’re trying to get people to come back, but where will they live?
They have no place to stay. It’s just a bad situation all
around.”
Graves says Mardi Gras should give the city a needed
lift. “It shows the other parts of the country that New Orleans is
not down and out, that we’re up and coming, and we’re not going
to let this disaster take away what New Orleans is all about. Mardi Gras is
a big thing for New Orleans,” she says. “I think we need this
to show people that we’re all willing to come back, we’re all
willing to rebuild this city, and that we will do whatever is necessary to
get that done. … The people are going to have to come back and show
they want this city to thrive and be great. I hope it’s greater than
it was before. I hope we get all the parks and nice income for people so
they can afford to live on their own and not be on welfare and depend on
the federal government.
“I’d like to see people own their own
homes. … The income level just needs to come up. It’s going to
take people like us to help with that. I guess we’ve been doing our
own little thing our whole lives and didn’t pay attention to what was
going on around us. We need to be more aware of that, be more vigilant and
help people that are less fortunate. I should be one of the first because I
belong to a public service sorority. We work with a non-profit
organization, we make donations to colleges and give scholarships, and we
take kids on Saturdays and teach them etiquette and take them to visit
college campuses. I am involved in that, and that’s a nice thing. But
we need to be more vigilant with this city to make it a great
city.”
Calvin Rodriguez, CIP operator
Rodriguez, who lives in Kenner near the airport, at
first planned to ride out the storm. “It wasn’t too bad at
first, but then the wind started blowing. We have a big tree in our front
yard and it fell over on top of the neighbor’s car. Then the windows
started busting,” he says.
“The roof was vibrating; the wind was trying to
pull the roof off. It cracked all the ceilings but it didn’t pull the
roof off. Then the water started rising. It came up about 21¼2 feet inside and it stopped.
… We were stuck upstairs. The water stayed until about noontime
Wednesday, and that’s when we loaded up and got out of
there.”
But after a while on the road, Rodriguez’s truck
caught fire. “I finally got in touch with my dad, and he came and got
us, and we went to Texas for a couple weeks. After two weeks, we came
home,” he says. “We had to gut out the whole house. We were
living upstairs; we got a hot water heater so we could take baths. We just
recently got in the walls and the floors, so just now it’s getting
where it’s livable. Luckily, we got to come back to work, and they
paid us for all the time we were out. It helped to still get your paycheck,
because it’s a long time before you’ll see any insurance money.
We got some of the money and we’re waiting on the rest of it. We had
enough insurance to take care of getting the house fixed. Everybody got
about three feet of water. I mean, it’s not destroyed like the ones
you see in the Ninth Ward. But everybody’s in the same
boat.”
The rest of the area is also starting to come back to
life. “Things are starting to open back up. At first, there
weren’t too many restaurants open, but now more than half of them are
open. Hours are starting to expand a little bit as they’re getting
more employees,” Rodriguez says. “Not too many things got
destroyed down to the ground, so most of the places are coming
back.”
Other members of his family were similarly impacted,
including his father, also a Brown’s employee. “My dad lived on
the other side of the airport. It wiped out his trailer, so he moved in
with us,” he says.
His grandmother lives in an older part of town that
stayed dry. “Her house, a tree hit the corner of it, but didn’t
get any water, so the house itself was fairly fine. But it was the stuff
that went with it — no going to the grocery store, no getting her
medicines and stuff like that,” he says. “You know, every
year, hurricanes come. … It was always just two, three days and back
to normal. But I remember when I was a kid, that’s when Camille hit.
And we drove to Mississippi. And it was bad over there, but nothing like it
is now. The other day I talked to a friend of mine, he lives in Bay St.
Louis [in Mississippi], and he said there’s just nothing there. In
Mississippi, where they have three casinos — he worked at one of them
— they’re all just gone. So we’re lucky where we live.
Nobody lost their houses.”
Rodriguez says he wouldn’t try to stick out
another storm. “We’re going to leave if another hurricane
comes. I didn’t feel like we were going to die or anything …
but it was the after effects — nothing being open, no electricity, no
water,” he says, “and you knew it wasn’t going to change
for a while.”
Rodriguez is less enthusiastic about the future of New
Orleans. “I don’t think it will be better than before.
It’s going to take a long time. New Orleans itself, it’s hard
to do a lot of things because there’s so much politics
involved,” he says.
“We don’t have that in Jefferson Parish in
Kenner. That’s why everything’s just pretty much coming back to
normal there. … Most people are coming back, but it’s going to
take a few years because there’s so much devastation. In Kenner and
Metairie and all, it’ll probably be rebuilt by the end of this year,
because the houses weren’t destroyed. That’s what we’re
hoping for, by the end of this year we’ll be pretty much back to
normal.”
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