Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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HURRICANE KATRINA ; , p*ie2_AFTE RMATH_7,2005 STUDENT FLEES NEW ORLEANS - IN 2-DAY TRIP Mikt Talerico awoke to find water streaming into his UNO apartment Jess Dauis STAFF WRITER BATON ROUGE, LA. — Just days after living through hell on Earth, a former University of New Orleans student sat in the living room of his friend’s apartment at LSU on Sunday, telling his story yet again. Painfully sunburned, with heavily blistered feet, Mike Talerico, a second year general business administration student, still wore a look of exhaustion and shock. He, along with three of his friends and one friend’s parents, stayed in Gentilly, La. during the hurricane and were forced to evacuate once the flooding got out of control. we aiant tninK it would De tnat bad,” Talerico said of the hurricane. He and his friends figured that staying in a two-story apartment with plenty of food and water, they would be safe. What they didn’t foresee was the massive flooding that occurred after the levees broke. On Tuesday, Talerico awoke to find water streaming in the doors and windows of the apartment’s first story. Five feet of water filled the bottom floor. One of Talerico’s friends sails, so he was able to take a boat out onto the streets of Gentilly, just miles from Lake Ponchartrain. Floating down Elysian Fields Street, the students found a man in the water, and gave him a ride to his house. After they returned to the apartment, police on boats came by and told the group that the water was supposed to rise another nine feet, which would have entered the second story of the apartment. Grabbing just a few articles of clothing, Talerico joined his friends in the police boat. The police told Talerico they would take the group to Interstate 10 on the East Bank of the Mississippi River, where buses would be ready to pick up evacuees. Along the way, Talerico said, they heard gunshots. The group was dropped off, but no buses came. The heat reached near unbearable temperatures and the wind that had cooled them at the apartment died down. Dripping with sweat and growing more dehydrated by the minute, Talerico and his group continued to wait for the buses they were promised. They had left most of their water at the apartment, never expecting to be stranded on the side of the road. Attempts to sleep proved fruitless for the group, as they watched car after car pass them on the interstate. “No one would give you any help,” Talerico said. Eventually, they decided to walk. Not knowing where they were going, they walked 10 miles from the East Bank to the West Bank. “I hadn’t eaten in two days, there were fires everywhere, gunshots, people looting,” he said. “I was more odvsscv • n i Jess Egan /THE (JAMECOCK Floodwaters nearly reach rooftops in Biloxi, Miss., one of the Gulf towns hit hardest by the Category 4 storm. Far-reaching disaster affecting life for all Eye-witness account of‘surreal’ aftermath puts^devastation into perspective StephenFastenau NEWS EDITOR NEW ORLEANS — The first thing you notice are the road signs — bent, mangled and stripped by unforgiving winds. Trees lie along the roadside and a cranes sits immobile, damaged by the billboard that has smothered it. It becomes clear that the small group of newspaper staffers making this trip is about to have its eyes opened. This was still in Alabama. Our destination was Baton Rouge. Surreal is a word that was thrown out often by our group as we traveled closer to Katrina’s primary impact zones. Motorists fleeing New Orleans, many of whom become stranded after failing to make it to an exit for ever more precious gasoline, stopped traffic with requests for water and food. We continued down Interstate 55, well aware the situation would get worse, not aware of how those impacted must be feeling. All of us would know soon enough. Through images witnessed by each of the four in our team, we captured the story of this terrible tragedy with our notepads and a camera lens. Our goal seemed simple. Twenty five hundred students ha'd been evacuated to Louisiana State University from colleges and universities ravaged by the storm. The Pete Maravich Assembly Center was turned from the home of the Tigers’ basketball team into a makeshift hospital. The LSU Field House served to house the special needs evacuees brought into Baton Rouge. The Baton Rouge River Center housed the remainder of the homeless brought into the area. Katie Kirkland, ' . U.S. National Guardsmen from Kentucky travel west on 1-20 to the Gulf Coast. As college journalists, we wanted to cover all aspects of the campus, localizing it for the purpose of helping our readership better understand Katrina’s impact. I sat in the newsroom of The Daily Reveille for three hours, observing how a newspaper in the thick of the recent chaos went about covering the tragedy. I came to realize that while these students were expected to remain cool and unbiased in their coverage, the majority of the paper’s staffers were directly affected by the disaster. Few on campus escaped the long reaching finger of Katrina. Rachel Schott, executive assistant to LSU’s media relations director, lost all she had in the storm. LSU’s Director of Student Services Dorothy Kemp lost all she had too. Events on campus played out like scenes from one of many awful, overdone, natural disaster flicks. Evacuees roamed the sidewalks of the large campus, easily identifiable by their hollow stares and helpless demeanors. “I just bummed my first cigarette in five days,” one woman told me. “Do you have a match?” In search of stories, we found a myriad of them. One PMAC volunteer, an LSU student named Xander Stewart, had a mother in the French Quarter, a sister at water ravaged Tulane University and a father in Baton Rouge. Stewarts mother was forced to flee to Saint Francisville, Miss., and his sister to Pensacola. Stewart said his sisters car was left submerged in water on New Orleans’ east side. Of all the tales of tragedy, with residents being trapped and drowned in their attics in some circumstances, Stewart could be considered nearly lucky. On the side of town in which his family lived, there was no flooding. IDITI1CSS«6 Such mammoth disaster calls for swifter response Driving into Biloxi, Miss., the smell of garbage, natural gas and decay simmered in what two weeks ago would be a perfect late summer day for the casino town. The glimmer of Biloxi’s shore is replaced now with debris floating about the city, much of it hanging from wind stripped trees. Strips of “uSlin tin roofing were ChdpUPd wrapped around Fourth-year telephone poles like Pnnt , ,, . journalism paper, and all-around Jstucknt power lines dipped to the ground and snaked along sidewalks. i he eeriest things were the personal effects that dominated everything. Plates, stuffed animals and trophies. Oxygen tanks, bibles and shoes. Washing machine tubs, irons and desks, situng upright with the chairs still tucked underneath. in less eloquent terms, a volunteer in a Hattiesburg, Miss., shelter echoed the bald metaphor Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour invoked to describe the disaster. “This was America’s Hiroshima.” Those who didn’t evacuate had unbelievable stories and nearly as unbelievable enthusiasm to share them. Moloton Telemaque was stopping at a food distribution center when he insisted his story get told. “My friend, Alvin Carter, he had to jump in a tree during the storm! There was a damn dove and two bullfrogs in there widi him just holding on,” he exclaimed. Telemaque rode out Katrina in his home, like so many inner-city Biloxi residents. “From D’Iberville, the Back Bay, and the IP (Imperial Palace casino) to the beach front, there was water,” he said. “From Highway 90 to 110, from Back Bay to the beach, all of those homes are gone. At least 20 square miles.” Telemaque said that at this point, medical supplies are just as important as food and water. “They need people during curfew, not just police, but people driving around saying they have medical supplies and where to get them.” The stories would last as long as there were people to tell them. The blow to Biloxi was all but fatal. So where is our national government to help out? Where is FEMA? The agency consolidated from centuries-old federal disaster services was designed to comfort our nation’s cities when they had nothing. Biloxi, as of Saturday, from the people scraping by there and from personal observation, still has nothing. Food and water was being delivered on a daily basis, but Army National Guard troops said they were disappointed in the FEMA presence. Private companies were doing debris clean-up, and one administrator mentioned FEMA would pick up CHflPUBR • 6 Wind, flooding leaves Catholic churches reeling in Southern city But priests, members of congregation remain confident that they can repair damage Tom Benning FOR THE GAMECOCK BILOXI, MISS. — During better times, St. Michael’s Catholic Church would have seemed out of place to visitors. Located across the street from the beach, the church was adjacent to three of the casinos that dominated the Biloxi landscape. However, in this predominantly Catholic town, the casinos are essential to the economy, and the locals describe the relationship between the church and casinos as friendly. Rhonda Robertson, a parishioner at St. Michael’s for much of her life, said, “There are no problems between the church and the casinos. About 16,000 to 20,000 people work at the casinos in the area and a majority of those people are Catholic. The casinos are very generous toward charities. They try and give back to the community. It is a great relationship.” After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the casinos moved a little closer to St. Michael’s, and the situation seemed out of place to everyone, locals included. The incredible storm surge of the hurricane tossed one of the floating casinos upside down onto the parking lot next to the church. While St. Michael’s was damaged, the church stood defiantly against the ruined landscape six days after the storm. Debris surrounded its exterior, and the bottom half of the walls and windows were destroyed. The nearby convent and nursery also succumbed to Katrina’s winds. The grounds of the church were desolate, and at the church where masses were routinely packed to the brim, only one remained - a kneeling statue of the Virgin Mary placed in front of the hanging crucifix in the church. The praying statue stood in contrast to the surrounding chaos. Everything else in the church was a mess. The pews and the altar were gone, the floor was a mixture of boards, papers and glass, and only three of the Stations of the Cross remained. The presence of Mary, a symbol of compassion and support for Catholics, seemed real in front of the crucifix. When Hurricane Camille hit in 1969, the church suffered similar damage. Robertson received her first communion at St. Michael’s in the ST. miCHKEL'S • n Justin Chapura/TIIK (JAMECOCK A statue of the Virgin Mary kneels alone amid debris and rubble in St. Michael’s 'hurch in Biloxi, Miss.