HURRICANE KATRINA: 10 YEARS LATER

HARVIE SYKES WOKE WITH A START. Her bed was floating. She ran down the hall, crawled out the window and stepped in bare feet onto the roof. She sat for hours in darkness and could hardly comprehend the horror she saw in the breaking dawn — her neighborhood immersed in water, people she recognized floating face down.

She had just started the tenth grade at West Jefferson High. She attended a school dance the previous Friday. Now her school, her home, everything she owned was gone.

“Life from that night spiraled out of control,” the New Orleans native says.

Sykes’ mom, a nurse, had been summoned the previous day to help evacuate the retirement home where she worked; she kept Sykes’ 4-year-old brother in tow. Sykes spent the night with family.

An evacuation of the city was in effect, but, like thousands of lower-income New Orleans residents, Sykes and her relatives had no transportation, no place to go. Also, they were used to hurricane warnings and hoped this would be no worse than the last one — maybe some downed power lines.

She, her aunt and cousins managed to escape the flooded-out house, but they got separated in the pandemonium.

“Everything happened so fast,” Sykes says. “I remember the total darkness, because the electricity went out, and so much water. It was raining. Once I got to where I could walk, it was like standing in a tub of water up your legs.”

She recalls a fetid, frenzied post-apocalyptic atmosphere where “you did not know who to trust.”

The police, for example. “One cop might be helpful and telling you where to go to get safe, and the next might pull a gun on you. It was just chaotic and crazy.”

She remembers boarding a crowded bus, which she rode to a shelter. Various rescue groups met her basic needs, and she was able to telephone her family, but it would be more than two months before she would see any of them again.

Her grandmother had found refuge with a relative in Dallas who also took in Sykes, her mother and brother.

They all reunited a week before Sykes’ 15th birthday, Nov. 23. Her grandmother enrolled her in Lake Highlands High School. Bob Iden, who was principal at the time, recalls that more than 120 displaced students from Louisiana and Mississippi entered the high school that September and November.

“It was a challenging time,” he says.

He recalls that student groups, the Parent Teacher Association, neighborhood churches and nonprofits rallied to help the Katrina transplants.

A group of Boy Scouts launched a supply drive for Katrina evacuees. The LHHS National Honor Society organized a similar campaign. Spring Valley Athletic Association offered free registrations. The PTA Angels Program, a group of Lake Highlands parents, worked with school counselors to collect and distribute backpacks and school supplies.

But tension mounted.

HURRICANE KATRINA: 10 YEARS LATER

“It was Texas versus New Orleans. We were always fighting,” Sykes recalls. “I tried to stay out of it, keep to myself. Some would try to start something, but I was like: ‘I just lost my house! I don’t know you. Leave me alone.’”

She blames herself in some ways. “I was so angry. I did a lot of bad stuff.”

One day, she says, the fighting was so out of control that several students were sent home. The way Sykes remembers it, only New Orleans kids were suspended.

Iden doesn’t remember the exact incident, but he says there “absolutely” were fights and even brawls.

Sykes overall found it difficult to adapt to Dallas culture. “I was born and raised in this small community where everyone knows each other, and then I get to Dallas and it was very different.”

Social problems were just the start. The academics were far more challenging at LHHS, Sykes says. Add to that the fact that she had missed some three months of her sophomore year, and it was impossible to catch up. She had to repeat a few classes.

By her junior and senior year, things had settled at school, and Skyes “got in a groove,” she says.

Back in New Orleans, she says, she had friends, but life was hard. She experienced childhood abuse and economic troubles. As traumatic as it was, she thinks Katrina ultimately put her in a good place.

“The storm and the aftermath ripped my heart out, ruined everything I had planned for my future but moving to Texas broadened my horizons in so many ways. I saw new opportunities.”

Today she works for a communications company and is intensely involved in her church.

“Katrina shook me up. But she dropped me in a spot that, I think, is a better place than where I would be.”

EVACUATION IS MANDATORY, the New Orleans mayor announced the morning of Aug. 28, 2005.

But Kristie Jemison’s family, like most in its socioeconomic bracket, did not consider leaving Tremé, an old neighborhood flanking the French Quarter.

“I grew up in the projects,” Jemison says. “Every year we have hurricane warnings, and they are never that bad, and we have no way to get out anyway. No car. Nowhere to go.”

Jemison’s statements echo findings in a 2007 Journal of Public Health study that showed poor and African-American residents disproportionately disregarded the Hurricane Katrina evacuation mandate for a few reasons: optimism based on riding out previous hurricanes, inconsistent evacuation orders, finan- cial constraints and neighborhood crime.

The Jemisons had just moved from public housing to a duplex. They still had access to their former third-floor unit. When the storm hit, they went there for the higher ground.

The hurricane itself was tolerable, Jemison recalls.

“But the next day when we woke up, there was water flooding the streets. And it was rising.”

Their home was destroyed, and inside this hot, powerless apartment they had nothing to eat or drink.