Maj. Mary Satterlee doesn’t plan to watch any of the 10th anniversary coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the nation’s most costly natural disaster that broke the levees of New Orleans and flooded the storied city.
She and her husband, Maj. Mark Satterlee, were in charge of the Salvation Army in Baton Rouge, about an hour north of the city in 2005. After the hurricane hit, their work just began and didn’t stop for another year. The Satterlees were at the eye of the storm heading the Salvation Army’s largest disaster relief operation in its history.
“I still get tears when I think about it,” she said.
Photojournalist Matt Rose was stranded for five days in New Orleans’ Memorial Hospital with his wife, daughter and two Chihuahuas, waiting in line behind the desperately ill patients before they could be evacuated.
The power went out, and the heat was stifling. Rose remembers snatches of news from the radio and the doctors. “We really didn’t know how bad it was.”
But he mostly remembers the terrifying feeling of having no control. “Just talking about it brings up some real anxiety. We were stuck in this situation we couldn’t get out of.”
Katrina’s scars
Ten years after the storm, the hard figures have been tallied with estimates as high as $125 billion in damage and 300,000 homes lost in New Orleans alone. But the human toll was even more costlier — 1,836 dead and up to 700 people still unaccounted for.
The storm and the subsequent flooding displaced some 770,000 people, more Americans who moved during the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression.
More than a few of those refugees made their way to Asheville.
The Internal Revenue Service showed an increase in the number of people from the New Orleans area claiming permanent residence in Buncombe County on their tax returns. In 2003-04, there were 18 New Orleans transplants in Asheville. In 2005-06, that number surged to 130. Many more found refuge in counties throughout Western North Carolina and across the Southeast.
The monster storm that had been a Category 5 in the Gulf made landfall on Aug. 29, seemingly with little damage.
But Mark Satterlee knew they were in trouble when he heard the news about the levees failing in New Orleans.
“Oh crud,” he said to himself.
“My heart just sank. I knew New Orleans was in trouble.”
Overnight, the population of Baton Rouge, about an hour up the interstate from New Orleans, doubled from 400,000 to 800,000, the Satterlees said.
The Salvation Army, like most relief agencies, governments and others, was quickly overwhelmed with its local resources.
The international Christian ministry declared Katrina a national emergency and started sending more officers, aid and volunteers.
Hotel rooms were in short supply. The Salvation Army had only two rooms at a local Motel 6 to rotate its relief workers through. Another 60 volunteers were sleeping at the Salvation Army church with only one bathroom and no shower. They used a garden house outside to bathe themselves.
Panicked refugees weren’t always easy to deal with. The Salvation Army had to call in the police on occasion to restore order when volunteers ran out of relief supplies.
“We saw the best of people, and we saw the worst of human nature. Granted that the people were stressed beyond their limits, but it was hard to deal with some of them.”
Mary Satterlee was hexed by a self-proclaimed voodoo priestess evacuated from New Orleans, but there seemed to be no ill effects other than the exhausting, seemingly unending work.
“The storm was just the beginning. The relief operation was still going on a year later when we left for Hattiesburg, Mississippi,” she said.
Making it back home
Rose’s family was finally evacuated by bus to Houston. He returned soon after to try to check on the cats still in their flooded house. Rose stopped to buy a small inflatable raft from Walmart. Parking on high ground, he was able to paddle to the house.
Inside there was about three feet of water, with the furniture floating around the first floor. He rescued the cats upstairs, and also a Celtic harp for his 10-year-old daughter, Amanda. The harp took up most of the raft on the return voyage.
Rose’s family quickly found a home with his brother-in-law in Asheville, and he was able to put Amanda in school at Carolina Day.
Rose went back to his work as a photojournalist for the Times-Picayune. “I was used to being a photojournalist, running around with my camera, doing my job, but always knowing I could get out.”
But during the storm, stranded in Memorial Hospital, there was no getting out for days. “I put my camera away because I was with my family,” he said.
He remembers the strange feeling when Dallas photographers took pictures of him and his family. “We were the evacuees. It gave me a good insight on how it feels when you’re on the other side in a tragic circumstances.”
Ten years after, Rose has a hard time reliving those memories. “I see a lot of my friends on Facebook posting photographs. It’s really difficult to look at them. You don’t think about it. It was hard, but you just did what you had to.”
Lesley and Jack Groetsch left New Orleans in 2001, involved in the early start to The Orange Peel, one of Asheville’s premier music venues.
Her home was around the corner from the Convention Center, where thousands flocked for shelter. She watched the news in disbelief as they waited in vain for food, water, medical aid and rescue. “People were dying from lack of water.”
As people flooded north, Asheville opened its arms, Groetsch recalled. “At The Orange Peel, we were home base for a lot of people.”
The Groetsches made another go of the Crescent City about two years after the storm. “We lived there about a year, but it was too hard with three children,” she said. “I don’t know what London was like after the Blitz or what modern day war zones are like for civilians. In New Orleans, it felt like everybody you met had PTSD.”
Even today, watching TV coverage of the Katrina anniversary, Groetsch admits “I start tearing up. I never imagined the failures we saw with Katrina could happen in this country. I was appalled at the resources and wealth in this country, we couldn’t help those people.”
The Satterlees have been to New Orleans since the storm passed, but they still see signs of the devastation. “The 9th Ward, the heavily African-American neighborhood, will have one brand new house and another next door that’s still damaged,” Mark Satterlee said.
On the interstate, drivers can see the remnants of Six Flags New Orleans, where abandoned roller coasters rust away. “Here’s where families used to enjoy themselves. Now, it looks like something out of the ‘Walking Dead,’ covered with rust and mold and grass,” Mark Satterlee said. “It’s like the end of the world.”
New Orleans has bounced back economically in some quarters with more tourism and business, but the recovery has not been uniform.
“For the middle and upper middle class, things are doing wonderfully with more restaurants and attractions,” Groetsch said. “But if you are poor and you were struggling before the storm, you’re still struggling,”
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