Stories

The Boston Globe
September 3, 2005

By Keith O'Brien
Globe Correspondent

NEW ORLEANS -- The ragged evacuees were still coming yesterday, walking past the shattered storefronts of French Quarter daiquiri shops and T-shirt stores, bound for the convention center downtown in search of food, water, and help.

It has been for many an epic journey of loss and pain. Ameka Dabon, 26, said she lost her sister on the way. Tyrone Hill, 21, said he swam for hours in the dark in flooded eastern New Orleans until he finally reached high ground. And then there was the story of Walter Duncan, a 51-year-old car salesman who walked alone for miles with his dog Missy until someone in a U-Haul truck picked him up and took him to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Here, he was told, he could get help.

But what the evacuees found here in recent days was worse at times than the ruined homes they had left behind. There were promises of food and water, but there was none to be had. There were buses coming to get them, they were told, again and again. But those buses never showed. And, in time, chaos took hold.

Yesterday morning, four long, sweltering days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there were still only a handful of police officers watching over thousands of tired, and increasingly angry, evacuees. Bodies were wrapped in sheets, including one just outside a kitchen, where sweaty men cooked rotting meat. There was trash everywhere, babies screaming. Several women said they were afraid for their lives, afraid of being raped. The desperation was palpable.

''There is feces running over the toilet. No water. The stench itself is unbearable," said Felix Lewis, who sought shelter at the convention center four days ago after the hurricane flooded his 9th Ward home. ''I think we'd do better surviving in the jungle."

But by day's end, for the first time in almost a week, there were cheers in New Orleans, and also, tears. The US National Guard had finally, though belatedly, arrived in large numbers. There was a show of force. There was food and water, too. New Orleans, residents said, was not dead yet.

''New Orleans is going to be New Orleans even if it has one building standing," said Cathy Royal outside the convention center yesterday afternoon. ''It's never going to die."

Earlier yesterday morning, few people felt so confident. Many were going into their fourth day of sitting on the pavement outside the convention center in the punishing heat. And as they cursed Mayor Ray Nagin, Governor Kathleen Blanco, and President Bush for not being better prepared to deal with them, they began to honestly wonder if they had been forgotten.

''This is a freaking setup," said Lela Mosgrove, a nurse who was sent to wait at the center after the nursing home where she worked was evacuated. ''I don't know if they are trying to kill us or what."

Mosgrove, 54, said she had not eaten in 24 hours. Others admitted that the only way they could eat was to steal, to loot. By yesterday, the looting had become something of a morning tradition: After sunrise each day, people -- mostly men -- leave the center in search of whatever they can find. Pepsi. Beer. Water. And if they're lucky: ice.

But, for the most part, these are not the armed thugs who have received so much media attention this week and who, according to the evacuees, come out at night to terrorize them. These people are working-class New Orleanians: waiters and carpenters, sheetrock finishers and small-business owners, truck drivers and city employees. And each has a harrowing story of a journey across the city by boat, truck, foot, and sometimes helicopter.

''This was 9/11," New Orleans resident Vanessa Lavigne said yesterday, sitting with her husband on a downtown street corner. ''The only difference between New York's 9/11 and this 9/11 is that the people in New York died fast. The people here are dying slow."

Lavigne said that she and her husband, Shawn, spent two nights sitting on the roof of their flooded house before authorities moved them to an interstate overpass and then, late Thursday night, to the plaza outside Harrah's casino in downtown New Orleans. They did not leave before Katrina hit, she said, because they had to work. Others said they did not leave because they had nowhere to go or no money to get there. And then there was Wayne Galle, a Wal-Mart manager, who said he stayed in New Orleans to help.

Galle estimated that he and others saved hundreds of people after the storm, plucking them off buckling rooftops in the dark. Now it was he who was waiting to be rescued as he stood yesterday among the teeming crowd on the pavement. Many were dreading another long night, the return of armed teenagers, of fear. But they were also growing closer to each other. Yesterday morning, two men began sweeping the dirty sidewalks outside the convention center. ''We've got to come together, bro," said Patrick Stevenson as he swept and people shared what food they had. One woman, Debbie Hamilton, even offered her most precious commodity to a reporter. ''Do you want a cup of ice water?" she asked.

By afternoon, it was getting hotter. A few blocks over, a house was on fire. There was smoke in the air, desperation on the ground, and almost total silence only a few blocks away. The city was eerily quiet. No hum of air conditioners. Very little traffic. Just choppers in the sky every now and then and families wandering across the city, dragging their belongings and their children behind them.

But when the National Guard arrived in large numbers yesterday afternoon, the atmosphere around the convention center changed almost immediately. Evacuees cheered the sight of water and food, and Walter Duncan, the salesman who made it to the center with his dog and nothing else, could not believe it.

''Water," he said, his voice a whisper. He stopped talking and began to cry.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company