Safe But Still Lost

By LINDSAY PETERSON lpeterson@tampatrib.com

Published: Oct 30, 2005

For two days, Denise Phelps listened to her father's warnings of Hurricane Katrina. And on that Sunday, Aug. 28, about 18 hours before the storm hit, she and her husband agreed to leave their Waveland, Miss., home.

What should they take? she wondered. They would be right back after the hurricane passed, wouldn't they?

Pack some clothes, Denise told her family - and grab two things you value. Her daughter, Alicia, 18, got her painting supplies; her son, Tim, 14, packed his Sony PlayStation. The five family members and a friend then loaded into two vehicles and pulled away slowly from the apartment they loved near the beach.

Forty miles west, in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, Nicole Fontenot fussed with her mother. Fontenot, born and raised in New Orleans, had been called to her job collecting evidence for the police crime lab. Her mother, Evelyn Williams, said she wouldn't leave as long as Fontenot remained in town, which meant Fontenot's two children couldn't leave either.

Williams insisted they would be fine in her raised house near Fontenot's, both on relatively high ground. But early Sunday evening, with Katrina about 12 hours away, she agreed to gather up some clothes, food and other provisions and take her grandchildren to the Superdome.

A few miles away, Mauricio Sierra felt a surge of fear when he heard the radio news that Sunday morning. He had never worried about hurricane warnings before, but the announcer said Katrina looked mean and was headed straight toward the city, the place where Sierra had grown up, graduated from high school and now went to college.

He lived with relatives in the Lakeview area, at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. A family friend, who owned the house, offered them refuge in his 10th-floor law office. So they gathered a few DVDs, some canned goods, four apples and 2 gallons of water and headed downtown in four cars.

In the Lower 9th Ward, people already were heading for the Superdome, but Dwan Landry's neighbors had convinced her that she and her four children, three boys, 6, 8 and 10, and a girl, 13, would be safe at home. They had heard the warnings so many times before.

Just in case, Landry packed a change of clothes for her and her children.

A Long Walk To Safety Through Flooded Streets

Landry, 29, listened to the wind pick up through the evening. By midnight, she had pulled her four children into bed with her. They curled around one another in their two-bedroom, wood-frame house.

Her memories are fragmented, but she recalls being snapped awake by the sound of her front window shattering.

Neighbors began yelling for everyone to get out. She remembers wading through her house and into the streets, carrying 6-year-old Tyrone. The storm already had begun sending water into her low-lying neighborhood at the edge of the Mississippi River.

Go to the elementary school down the street, she heard. In the darkness, she could see the shapes of other people, all straining forward through the wind and water, finally staggering into the school's dry hallways.

The hurricane's crashing eventually stopped, but the wind still blew as she ventured into the gray Monday morning. Grab what you can from your house and get out, a neighbor told her. Wading back across the flooded streets with her children, Landry found the suitcase of clothes in knee-deep water. "But my mind was blown," she says later. "I couldn't think of where nothing was."

She headed toward higher ground, finding a dry street corner where a group of people lined up behind two pay phones. She reached her sister collect, in Tampa, who set up a three-way call with their brother in New Orleans. He had made it to the hospice where his wife worked, about five miles away.

By this time, about 9 a.m. Monday, the levees in the Lower 9th Ward had begun to fail. Get away from the 9th Ward, he said, there's more water coming. Landry told him she was headed to the Superdome. "No!" he yelled. "You come here. You get to me."

"Start walking now," he ordered. And she did, with her children in tow.

Some blocks were dry, others were covered with water. At first, the children whimpered and whined. Then they fell silent, dragging themselves through the thick-aired afternoon.

"We'll be there soon," Dwan kept saying. She'd carry Tyrone for a while, then hand him over to his sister, 13-year-old Arion.

They trudged on as the sun fell, slowing down, studying the street signs.

Finally. Straight ahead. The Memorial Hospice and Palliative Care building. Her children pounded on the glass doors. Someone came, shook her head and yelled: "Can't let you in."

Dwan wailed and pounded. "Let us in. We have nowhere else to go." The head shook "no."

Finally, the door opened. She saw her brother Davin, and they all collapsed inside. Then she heard Davin on the phone with their mother, in Tampa. He was yelling, crying, "She made it. She made it."

It had been seven hours since he had commanded her to "start walking."

The next day, Tuesday, Aug. 30, she helped Davin, his wife and the other hospice staff as they evacuated the patients. One of the last vans made room for the Landrys and drove them to Beaux Bridge, about 110 miles outside New Orleans, where they had relatives.

Dwan's sister Tiffany was already making plans to rent a van and drive to Louisiana to bring her family to Tampa.

Shielded From Worry In A Downtown Refuge

After a long night listening to the sledgehammer sounds of Hurricane Katrina, Mauricio Sierra stepped out Monday, Aug. 29, into what looked like a bomb site. Shattered windows, smashed cars, poles strewn across littered streets.

Six friends and family members had survived Hurricane Katrina on the 10th floor of a sturdy office building. Among them was Sierra's father, Edgar, who jumped on his bicycle Monday morning to go check on his house a few miles away. Aside from his shock, Sierra, 21, recalls sweltering heat and hunger.

Monday evening, beginning to think New Orleans had been spared catastrophic damage, he ran into a police officer who said levees had broken and the city was flooding badly. Sierra didn't believe him. How could that be? Downtown was dry.

His father still wasn't back.

The next morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, Sierra looked down from the 10th-floor office to see the downtown streets full of water. And they were filling with people, some breaking into stores.

Then he heard gunfire.

He had a .22-caliber rifle in his car, parked in the garage of the law office building. A friend told him to get it and load it. Where was his father?

Someone found a battery-operated radio and the group on the 10th floor heard that water was pouring across two levees, covering the city - and surely filling the house they shared in Lakeview.

Late Tuesday, Edgar Sierra finally returned, so shaken by what he had seen - "madness," he later told his son - he stood motionless as Mauricio hugged him.

On Wednesday, Aug. 31, the group listened in disbelief to more news that thousands of desperate people were trapped in the drowning, lawless city.

But late on Thursday, Sierra saw the flickerings of normal life as his cell phone blinked into service and poured out pent-up text messages from friends and family members who'd been trying to reach him since early Monday. "U alive?"

"Where are you?"

"Text me asap! Everybody worried about yall."

"I read them all at once," Sierra says, "and I broke down. ... All this emotion came out at once."

Suddenly, he saw that while he and his family had been fighting to stay safe and sane, friends on the outside had been desperate to help them.

He made up his mind to go as soon as he could drive his car out.

Separated From Family In Worst Of Circumstances

Hours after Katrina hit, Nicole Fontenot was thanking God. She had reached her fiancé, Craig Ordogne, a cook and construction worker in New Orleans, and he told her their house and yard in Gentilly was covered with debris but dry. She also had been in touch, by text message, with her mother and children. They were hot and miserable at the Superdome, but safe.

Then her cell phone battery died.

The police headquarters where Fontenot, 36, stayed during the storm began to flood on Tuesday, and she became part of a shuffle of officers and employees from the main office to a downtown Marriott hotel. Assigned to help guard the hotel and gather food and water for its occupants, she watched the water rise. By Wednesday afternoon, two days had passed since she had talked to her family, and she couldn't stand it anymore.

About 4 p.m., she and a co-worker left for the Superdome. They waded through the oily water, on fire in places and reflecting an unearthly color. She carried a stick to find the curbs and push away debris.

It took about an hour to arrive and 30 minutes to find her mother and the children, Dymond, 9, and Troy, 14. The normally nonchalant Troy practically leapt into her arms. She would hear later that the day before, Tuesday, as evacuees in the dome learned their homes across the city were flooding, a man had leapt to his death from the Superdome stands. And Troy had seen it.

Ordogne had walked to the dome from their house and told Fontenot that as he left, the house was filling with water. Everyone said they were all right, but to Fontenot they looked exhausted. Trying not to alarm them with her own tears, she gave them some snacks, water and clean T-shirts. She felt a touch of relief for a few minutes before she had to return to the Marriott. Then she turned to leave and saw her daughter's eyes pleading "please don't go."

Fontenot's supervisors told her on Thursday they no longer needed her at the Marriott and offered to transport her to Baton Rouge. But she couldn't fathom leaving until she knew her family was safe, she says.

One of her aunts lives in Tampa, and Fontenot was able to reach her through a working land-line phone at the Marriott. First, Fontenot heard that buses were at the dome. Then she heard there was a problem. Then on Friday her supervisors assured her the buses were running and everyone was getting out.

But her mother, Evelyn Williams, and children were a long way from out.

The three lined up to board on Friday afternoon, part of a jostling mass of thousands of angry, exhausted people. They spent all night inching forward. On Saturday morning as they neared the front, where the buses were, the seething crowd squeezed tighter, and Dymond, weak from hunger and lack of water, began to vomit.

She and her brother were led to a first aid station for food. But their grandmother was told to keep her place. She reached the front and looked for the children. They were nowhere in sight. Frantic, she went searching.

It took Williams more than an hour to learn that as soon as the children had finished eating, National Guard officers had hustled them onto a bus.

Ordogne had managed on Friday to board a bus for San Antonio.

Fontenot by now was on her way to Baton Rouge. On a charged cell phone, she called her aunt's house in Tampa and was told the news: Her mother and children had been separated.

"It was like the whole world had ended," Fontenot says. "It's like my head exploded. Like a highway going every which way."

Hours passed. Finally, Troy called. He and Dymond were fine. They had ended up on a bus to Dallas with a family friend. A few hours later, Fontenot learned her mother was also on a bus to Dallas. And early Sunday, Troy called.

"Emmi made it here," he said, using his grandmother's nickname.

Soon, they were all on planes headed for Tampa and the home of Fontenot's aunt in a subdivision in Riverview.

Desperate For News And Comforts Of Home

Denise Phelps holds onto things, 20-year-old stuffed animals, grocery store receipts, a set of crutches from an old injury. Her family's home in Waveland was full of mementos of their five years there.

They had been good years. At 39, she had settled into a decent job at a seafood restaurant, Jimmy, 41, worked at a lumber company, and they had gotten ahead enough on their bills to start thinking of buying a house.

But the Sunday before, with Hurricane Katrina pounding straight toward them, her family had loaded into a GMC pickup and Lincoln Continental and driven away from the home and the community they loved.

Now on Tuesday, Aug. 30, they were crowded into her parents' living room in Sun City Center, south of Tampa - Denise and Jimmy, their 14-year-old son, Tim; 18-year-old daughter, Alicia; her 20-year-old boyfriend, Mitchell Herrin; and the young couple's 5-month-old girl.

They were more than 500 miles from home, with no idea whether they had any place to go back to.

They should be grateful, Denise told herself. They were safe, dry, cool.

But they were desperate for news. Her parents didn't have cable or satellite programming, so on Tuesday they sat in the Wooden Nickel grill at the edge of town, watching CNN.

They didn't see any pictures of Waveland. But they got their fill of other wrenching stories. They saw smashed Gulfport and Biloxi. They heard that hundreds of people were dead. They saw the desperate, angry people in flooding New Orleans. The more they watched, the more helpless and homeless they felt.

Denise had tried to keep them back, but that night the thoughts pushed their way to the surface.

Everything they owned was now spread across her grandparents' living room floor or packed in their two vehicles.

They'd brought a few days worth of clothes, plus a PlayStation, Zelda video games, Pokémon cards. Everything else was probably gone.

Everything they had tucked into a corner of the apartment for safekeeping or tossed aside to fix later; every check stub, comic cut from the newspaper and envelope scrawled with telephone numbers. Her daughter's stuffed Tigger collection, her son's chess set, their comfortable living room couch. All smashed, shredded, blown away.

She felt empty, vulnerable, and that Tuesday night, for the first time since pulling away from her Mississippi home three days earlier, Denise broke down and cried.

"Why did I limit what we could pack?" she thought. "Why didn't I cram everything that could be crammed into the car and truck."

She didn't, she says later, because she couldn't imagine a storm like Katrina. They knew it would be bad, but they couldn't grasp that it would take everything. Everything.

Everything's New But Uncomfortable

A week after the storm hit, on Monday night, Nicole Fontenot arrived at her aunt's house and got her arms around her children for the first time in days.

She got a round of weary-armed hugs and a hot shower. But as she lay down to rest, she still felt the filthy New Orleans floodwater on her skin.

Landry and her family spent that day at the local Red Cross office, waiting to tell their stories and receive a few hundred dollars to get through the coming days. They still were drained from their seven-hour trek a week before. The Phelpses were at the Red Cross on Monday, too.

Still in Louisiana, Sierra was putting together a plan. He had family in Tampa, and on Wednesday, one of his cousins here confirmed he could enroll in the University of South Florida - if he arrived by Friday.

Driving all day and night Thursday, he made it in time to join 100 other evacuee students at a welcome luncheon. Other family members, including his father, arrived over the next few days.

All of them - Sierra, the Phelpses, the Landrys and Fontenot and her family - arrived with only what they'd thrown together earlier as Hurricane Katrina churned toward their homes.

Over the next several weeks, some of them would find apartments, with the help of local social service agencies. Others would remain with their families. All the children would start school.

Day by day, most of the grown-ups would begin to see the value of something they never had thought much about before - the thin but steady threads they'd built their lives around in their old communities.

It's the loss of the familiar that Fontenot mourns. "I can't say, 'I'm going home now' or 'Let me stop off at home,' " she says, sitting in her aunt's spacious living room with her arms folded tightly across her stomach and her feet tucked under her legs. The floodwaters ruined her house, soaking the walls and warping the wood floors.

"That was my comfort zone, and it's gone."

Like all the other evacuees who have been scattered across the Tampa area, "We really don't know what our future is," she says.

"We're just feeling our way through."

HURRICANE KATRINA TIMELINE

MONDAY, AUG. 29

6:10 a.m. - Hurricane Katrina becomes Category 4 storm, strikes the Gulf Coast near New Orleans. 9 a.m. - Lower 9th Ward levee reportedly breaches. Floodwaters run 6 to 8 feet.

TUESDAY, AUG. 30

Other levees break, and water covers 80 percent of the city. An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 remain in New Orleans on roofs, at the Superdome and at the convention center.

WEDNESDAY, AUG. 31

10 a.m. - Buses begin arriving to evacuate the Superdome. 12:30 a.m. - Refugees begin arriving in Houston at the Astrodome. Looting grows in New Orleans.

THURSDAY, SEPT. 1

Superdome and convention center house up to 45,000 refugees. Sandbags arrive for levees. Military increases National Guard deployment to 30,000. Military helicopters are shot at while evacuating residents.

FRIDAY, SEPT. 2

President Bush tour Gulf Coast. He acknowledges failures of government in recovery effort.

Source: The Brookings Institution

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834. Keyword: Home, for extensive photo galleries on the four families in this report.