‘Nobody asked if we were okay’: The lost children of Hurricane Katrina-Lauren Crosby Medlicott-Entertainment – Metro

In the early hours of August 29, 2005, an eerie silence stretched across New Orleans, Louisiana, as a cold wind powerfully rolled in.

As daylight broke through, the levees built to protect the city from flooding began to buckle and fall in more than fifty locations. By 11am, around three metres of water covered parts of historic New Orleans, leaving only rooftops peeking out of the dark and dirty water.

Christopher Stewart was there. Now 29, he can still recall how in the days before the tragedy which took nearly 2000 lives, he’d been itching to start middle school, desperate to learn how to play the trumpet for the marching band. 

But then rumours of another hurricane started sweeping across the state of Louisiana. 

Then 12, Christopher asked his mum if they were going to leave the city, but she brushed off his concerns. There were always hurricanes that ripped through New Orleans each summer, she told him. Katrina was no different.

But as he, his mother, and his three younger siblings watched the water rise from the window of their second-story apartment building, moving cars and covering houses, Christopher knew Katrina was not just any other hurricane.

‘I had never swam,’ he tells Metro.co.uk. ‘I was crying because I realised what was going on. I thought I was going to die, and my momma was telling me to calm down – that everything was going to be okay.’

Christopher was 12 when Hurricane Katrina hit (Picture: Supplied)

Six hours after the flooding started, a boat arrived to take Christopher and his family to safety. As they sailed to relative safety, he remembers looking into the water, where he saw ‘dead bodies, snakes, and dead animals’ floating around him.

First, the family was taken to a hospital to sleep on the roof for the night. 

‘There were still patients in the hospital,’ he recalls. ‘I remember they were telling us if we weren’t inpatients in the hospital, then we had to go on the roof. There were just hundreds of us sleeping on the roof.’

Next, the family were taken to a jail where they could stay for a couple of nights. Christopher recalls stories of looting and the uproar it created. ‘People weren’t looting to steal – we had to survive,’ he explains. When his mother went to a store to get food and water for her family, she was reprimanded by a police officer. ‘My mom wasn’t out there stealing Jordans and PlayStations,’ remembers Christopher, ‘we needed water and food.’

Neighbourhoods were flooded beyond recognition during the tragedy, which included sustained winds in excess of 135 mph. (Pictrue: Kyle Niemi/US Coast Guard via Getty Images)

Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi coastline (Picture: Landov/UPPA/Photoshot)

Finally, they were taken to the Convention Centre in Downtown New Orleans. It was there that Christopher and his family experienced a few days of peace. ‘Thank God we were there and not at the Superdome,’ he says. ‘They gave us food and clothes. And there were a whole bunch of other kids there to play with.’

‘What we knew as life was never going to be the same,’ adds Christopher. ‘We had lost everything. Every picture. Every trophy. Birth certificates. It was all gone in a matter of hours.’

At least 1,800 lives were lost in Hurricane Katrina, often considered one of the worst hurricanes in US history.

More than a million people were displaced in the days leading up to and following the storm. Though many returned within days, 600,000 households were still uprooted a month later, including 160,000 children. 

With many of those kids now adults, they can still vividly recall the horror of watching their home get destroyed in minutes while having to sit on the roof of buildings or cars, desperately trying to flag down passing helicopters and rescue boats. Others will never forget what it was like to try and start a new life somewhere new after suffering such unimaginable tragedy.

Many people had to climb on top of their cars in a bid to escape the rising water (Picture: AP Photo/Ben Sklar)

Families also tried to find safety on the roof of their destroyed homes – all they could do was wait to be rescued (Picture: AP Photo/The Palm Beach Post, Gary Coronado)

Christopher recalls how a couple from Arizona had come to New Orleans to volunteer, and after forming a friendship with his mother, said that her family could stay with them in Mesa as their entire neighbourhood had been totally destroyed.

But as kind of their offer was, it wasn’t without difficulties.

‘It was a culture shock,’ admits Christopher. ‘I was just angry. People were calling me a refugee. A lot of kids made fun of me. I would get in fights every single day at school. I got kicked out of three middle schools.’

At a loss of how to deal with her son, his mother phoned his dad in Chicago for help and Christopher ended up moving in with him. The change of location was just what the young boy needed, he remembers. ‘My dad taught me I didn’t need to lash out and get angry to express how I felt. I didn’t need to yell to get my point across.’ 

Now married with five children and working in a hospital in Virginia, Christopher says that in the years since Katrina, he can’t recall a single time someone has asked how he coped going through such trauma at a young age.

‘There is a part of me I’ll never know,’ he says through tears. ‘A part of me I’ve never experienced. I feel like that was taken away from me. We all still live with these memories. Katrina is our “never forget”.’

Buckles’ film looks at how a generation of New Orleans residents coming of age after Hurricane Katrina, are reconciling with the catastrophic storm that transformed their lives (Picture: AP Photo/Chansey Augustine)

17 years on from the disaster, filmmaker Edward Buckles Jr is exploring the impact the hurricane had on the youngsters of New Orleans in his documentary, Katrina Babies. 

‘Since the storm, it seems like everybody just moved on,’ he explains. 

Buckles, making his directorial debut, was 12 when Katrina hit and says that he felt compelled to pick up the camera because no one asked how they were after the storm – and still haven’t since. 

‘In America, especially during disasters, Black children are not even a thought. Hurricane Katrina was no different. After losing so much, why wouldn’t anyone ask if we were okay. Nobody ever asked the children how they were doing.’

Buckles’s aunt, Tina, also appears in the documentary. Recalling the moment the storm hit, she says, ‘Everybody was still asleep or just waking up. All of a sudden we felt the house shaking wildly. My husband told me to look out the window. The water was at the windows. We were surrounded by water.’

Desperate emergency phone calls feature in Buckles’s film too, where one frantic father can be heard saying: ‘We’re under nine feet of water here… we’re just trying to get out. We’ve got a baby. We’ve punched a hole in the attic, but the helicopter keeps passing us.’

As the water retracted in the days following the hurricane, thousands of houses were left ruined and hundreds of thousands of residents became homeless. 

While 80% of Katrina evacuees temporarily relocated to surrounding states, 30,000 people didn’t have the resources to do so, and instead were forced to huddle inside the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. 

One family arrives for shelter at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Picture: AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Melissa Phillip)

For five days the Superdome became a desperate makeshift home for 30,000 people (Picture: JAMES NIELSEN/AFP/Getty Images)

However, chaos quickly ensued as it became clear that the building wasn’t prepared for such a catastrophe. With limited power and supplies, along with a lack of air conditioning or plumbing, the evacuees soon realised they’d swapped one desperate situation for another. 

‘We got babies up in here,’ says one woman in archive footage used in the documentary. ‘It’s unsanitised up in here. It is bad up in here. Children burning up and everything. Get us out of here.’

Even children begged for help as they waited for support in the Superdome.

‘We have several people died out here and I don’t want to become one of them,’ nine-year-old Arianna told one reporter. ‘They say what they gonna do but they not doing anything for us to try to help us survive and live. We just need some help out here. It is so pitiful. Pitiful.’

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the government were accused of racism, with many people feeling they had been far too slow to react and respond, because New Orleans was home to largely Black populations.

Kanye West and Mike Myers during the Hurricane Katrina TV fundraiser (Picture: Wenn.com)

In a live televised fundraiser, Kanye West bluntly declared: ‘George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,’ which was quickly turned into a political song of the same name. 

The mass displacement and upheaval of Katrina also meant that countless Black children, whose whole lives had already been turned upside down, missed out on vital education and support. 

‘You don’t know where you are going,’ recounts Buckles in his film. ‘You don’t know what’s next. Kids were separated from their families. Families were sent to random places.’

Like Christopher, several of the film’s interviewees recall being maltreated when they were forced to evacuate New Orleans. ‘I’m from America – this is my land, but I’m being called a refugee,” says Anthony, who was 12 at the time. 

When people were allowed back into New Orleans a month following the hurricane, it quickly became clear that their city would never again look like it once did.

One woman, who was a child at the time, tells Buckles that when she and her family returned to the city once it had opened up, they were placed in a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer. 

When people were allowed back into New Orleans a month following the hurricane, it quickly became clear that their city would never again look like it once did. (Picture: AP)

‘I later found out it was filled with formaldehyde,’ she recalls. ‘Because they were cheap, so they brought all these trailers that weren’t in use because they were filled with formaldehyde.’

Two years later, she goes on, she felt a ‘ball sticking out’ of her stomach and when she eventually got it checked out, discovered it was a cancerous tumour resulting from her poisonous stay in the trailer.

Meanwhile, Chase N. Cashe, who was 17 at the time of the storm, recalls that when it began to open its door to tourists again, New Orleans was a far cry from the culture-rich city it once was. ‘You could smell death,’ he says. ‘You had bodies laying on the side of the road still. We were lifting up dead trees, and dead dogs, and dead birds, maggots everywhere. It was a smell I will never forget.’

One young woman remembers her family going back to their old house to see if they could salvage any belongings after the storm. They could only find one half-full rubbish bag.

‘Everything you have considered as part of who you are was reduced to a trash bag,’ she explains. ‘The magnitude of that just became so much worse when you came to realise it wasn’t just the house, but the whole neighbourhood. And when so much of your identity is where you’re from, specifically what neighbourhood you’re from, and that isn’t the same anymore, what does that do to your identity?’

‘Even though we are resilient, we can never get back what was lost.,’ says Buckles in his documentary (Picture: AP Photo/Chansey Augustine)

‘You had people from different neighbourhoods just all combined together, which means you got new people there trying to make a name for themselves and trying to claim territory,’ adds Buckles. ‘But then you got the people that already had that territory. There was a lot of gunplay and a lot of violence.’

When Buckles started teaching at a local high school years later, he quickly discovered how his students, who would have only been three or four at the time of the storm, were impacted by the trauma of Katrina. There was an increase of violence among young people, and adults wondered how they could ‘fix’ the kids. 

‘There is not something wrong with them,’ Carolyn Waiters Carter, of Disaster Recovery and Rebuilding, says in the film. ‘They’re doing what their bodies are telling them to do because that is what trauma does to people.’

When Buckles hears people say that New Orleans is rebuilt, he disagrees. ‘It’s not,’ he says at the end of his film. ‘Even though we are resilient, we can never get back what was lost.’

‘Resilience is when you will still find a way to have your head up and help yourself,’ adds Buckles. ‘But sometimes I feel like resilience is used as a tool because they want people to think everything is okay. These people are good – they’re strong – look at how much they’ve overcome. 

‘I feel like it’s for me to say when I’m resilient. It’s not for you.’

Katrina’s Babies will be available to stream on Sky Documentaries from 26 August

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Claie.Wilson@metro.co.uk 

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