Katrina hits home for Cabrini students

ASHLEY WEYLER LAURA VAN DE PETTE NEWS EDITORS ARW723@CABRINI EDU LCV722@CABRINI EDU

Next time you are standing outside of your house, stand back and take a good look. Next time you lie in your warm bed at night, close your eyes, and appreciate the lifetime of memories you and your family have made. When Kristen Catalanotto, a senior English and communications major, left her home in New Orleans in August to start her duties as a resident advisor in the Cabrini Apartment Complex, she never thought to look at her house one last time.

Catalanotto said her neighborhood was one of the hardest hit in Katrina’s destructive path. She lives in a small neighborhood eight minutes from New Orleans called Lake View, which is a half mile from the 17th Street Canal and one of the levees that broke. The levee is the same one she played on as a child. “When I was little, we had cardboard boxes and skate boards and we used to slide down the levee on Saturdays and Sundays,” she

“I still do! I still have boxes in my garage!” Kelsie LaBauve, a freshman education major from Algiers, La., said. Her neighborhood is a suburb of New Orleans. LaBauve was able to escape the storm because of freshman orientation.

LaBauve lives on the opposite side of the levee than Catalanotto. She said that if the levees hadn’t broke, if need be they would have broken the levee on the other side to prevent the city from flooding. LaBauve said, “The whole time I was thinking they were going to break the levee and I am not going to have a house.” She explained that New Orleans is like a soup bowl because it is below sea level. If ever there was a flood, the water would just keep coming in until it levels. This is why the city must pump the water out, instead of letting it recede.

LaBauve didn’t even know that there was a storm at first. For LaBauve, this was the farthest she had ever been from home. Her high school religion teacher informed her of the storm when she called to tell her teacher about orientation. “She was like, ‘Oh there’s a storm,’ but the way she said it, it didn’t sound like it was that big of a deal. But by the weekend it was a category four and then by Sunday it was a category five, and we were watching the TV all day in Jazzman’s watching the Weather Channel,” she said.

“I cried on Sunday, before the storm hit, and I never really cried after that. I tried to convince myself that I was okay about it. But on the Sept. 11 memorial mass in the chapel, they played ‘City of Ruins’and I was listening to the words and it all started to hit me, and I started hysterically crying,” LaBauve said.

LaBauve wasn’t able to get in touch with her family. She said none of the phones were working and the only person she could get in touch with was her high school religion teacher. Finally, on the Tuesday after the storm had hit, her sister e-mailed her, saying that she and her fiancé were in Houston. The rest of her family relocated to PonchaToola, La., with LaBauve’s aunt.

LaBauve’s home suffered from severe wind damage, which was minor compared to some of her friends who lost everything.

“My family wants to move away so they don’t have to deal with this anymore, this is the last straw,” Allison Superneau, a junior Spanish major from Kenner, La., said. Superneau’s home will be livable soon, as it suffered minimal damage compared to other homes. “There’s about six inches of water in my house, with roof damage and some fallen trees but my father has been going home on the weekends to fix what he can.” Superneau’s family is safe, with her parents in Baton Rouge and her brother in Miami, Fla. “My sister stayed in Kenner thinking the storm would not be that bad and once we all realized just how bad it would be I got really worried about her,” Superneau said. She said she knew nothing at first and little by little, day by day, she heard from friends and family that had stayed. “I was able to get in touch with my sister by way of miracle on Monday, when the storm first hit. And then I didn’t speak to my sister until Friday I was worried about her but on the same hand I was mad that she chose to stay in Kenner and risk her life,” said Superneau.

Luckily Katrina’s wrath did not affect Superneau’s parents’ jobs and eventually she will have a house to go home to. Unfortunately, some of her closest friends suffered incredible damage, from physical damage to the emotional damage that comes with such extreme devastation. “One of my friends is a teacher’s assistant at Tulane University and was working closely with the professor during scientific research that would earn them a $500,000 grant and now all of their research is gone. Her entire career path is altered because of this and she has no where to go,” Superneau said.

Superneau painted a picturesque scene of the ancient oak trees that grow in Louisiana and explained that although they were beautiful they destroyed houses, ripped through the ground destroying sidewalks and anything in its path. “There are these huge holes that are 10 feet deep from where oak trees blew over from the high winds, wiping out half a block at a time,” she said.

Considering her family is alive and her house is standing, many think Superneau is lucky, but she feels very differently. “Everybody from home keeps telling me how lucky I am to be safe at school. I am thankful that I am here and school was not affected for me as it was for so many kids. I have friends who are seniors in high school and will never be able to finish high school the way they planned,” she said.

Despite the images we see on television, Superneau said, “I don’t care how bad it is, I would rather be home in Kenner to see the damage physically and to be with my family through this time. Seeing pictures on the news is

Katrinia, page 3