At A Shelter Of Last Resort, Decency Prevailed Over Depravity

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

All this month, we are marking the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. And this morning, we're returning to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. This is where storm evacuees were told by police to go, but that convention center quickly became overwhelmed. NPR's John Burnett was there three days after the storm hit.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: There are 2,000 people living like animals inside the city convention center and around it. They've been there since the hurricane. There's no food. There's absolutely no water. There's no medical treatment. There's no police and no security. And there are two dead bodies lying on the ground and in a wheelchair beside...

GREENE: And John had underestimated. There were actually 25,000 people huddled inside that building. The fiasco at the convention center came to epitomize the response by local, state and federal officials to the disaster. This summer, John Burnett returned to New Orleans and met up with two of the people he encountered there.

BURNETT: There's a thing that radio reporters do when we finish an interview - we record the ambient sound of the place.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

ANNE HAWKE, BYLINE: Ambience.

BURNETT: That was producer Anne Hawke. There was never an ambient scene like the one we found at the Morial Convention Center - thousands of people thirsty, hungry, hot, filthy, desperate, crying babies and soiled diapers, old people slumped in wheelchairs. Inside the handsome building, which a few days before had hosted "The Wheel Of Fortune" game show, was a refugee camp from hell. Families were camped out, trying to maintain their dignity, gagging from the stench of raw sewage that had soaked into the carpet. That's where we met Johnny Jackson Jr., a former city councilman, state rep and then-president of the local music station, WWOZ.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

JOHNNY JACKSON JR.: You know, and this is craziness, you know? Not one public official has come here, even though we hear them on the radio talking they [expletive]. Not one person from the convention center, not one person from the Red Cross. Peoples' bodies are here. I mean, you've heard the story. This is craziness.

Yeah, that bring back memories, bring back real memories. Probably one of the most depressing moments.

BURNETT: It's been a rough decade for Johnny Jackson. Now 71, he suffered a stroke, diabetes and cancer. But he still meets his brothers at the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club and still volunteers for community improvement projects. After the storm, he moved to McKinney, Texas, though he comes back to New Orleans all the time. I asked Jackson what he learned from his experience at the convention center.

JACKSON: Normally, one would think that that kind of situation would bring out the worst in people. But in this case, it was completely the reverse. I think everybody recognized they were in the same boat. And I saw more of a looking out for each other rather than preying on each other.

BURNETT: I witnessed it, too. Hotel employees across the street from the teeming masses came out every day to grill hot dogs and hamburgers and pass them out. Jackson says young men who found water bottles took what they needed and distributed the rest. When people broke into the Riverwalk Marketplace mall next door, they took one pair of sneakers and gave away two more. Several evacuees described to me personal encounters with marauding gangs of young men who terrorized people. But the widely circulated reports of the rape and throat-slashing of a young girl in a bathroom and of bodies stacked in a walk-in refrigerator simply never happened. Authorities later called them, emotional hallucinations.

JACKSON: The other thing I learned was simply that sometimes you can't believe all you hear.

BURNETT: The microphone was magnetic that afternoon of September 1, 2005 on the sidewalk in front of the convention center. People pressed in to tell the world they were stranded, waiting for buses that never came day after day. This was not supposed to happen in the world's richest country. We met this man with gold caps on his teeth, a baby in his arms and wildness in his eyes.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

KEVIN GOODMAN: I'm about to fall out. My family about to fall out. We haven't ate in three or four days. My kids - these babies, they sick. Everybody around here - everybody need water. We don't have no cold water. We don't have water to wash our kids.

BURNETT: He's Kevin Goodman, a house painter and Mardi Gras Indian chief. Goodman is now 55, still paints houses, still masks with the Flaming Arrows. He lives most of the time in Austin, Texas, where he was evacuated after Katrina. What does he remember about that experience? Sleeping with his family on a piece of carpet outside the convention center for five days.

GOODMAN: You know, everybody there just felt like trash, you know, like part of the garbage that was there because that's the way -that's the kind of impact that they left on us. You know, it was like we was left for dead.

BURNETT: Goodman agrees with Johnny Jackson - decency prevailed over depravity. Most folk helped one another. He says things were never the same for him after that experience.

GOODMAN: You know, it really, like, changed my life 'cause it really let me know, like, how important life was. You can't take life for granted. Life, every day, you have to value it. And I don't value material stuff as much as I did before the hurricane.

BURNETT: New Orleans has a new hurricane protocol. In the event of a mandatory evacuation, citizens who cannot get out of town on their own should gather at one of 17 evacuation pickup points. There, the city will move them to a staging area where buses are supposed to take them to shelters out of town. No longer are there official shelters-of-last-resort, like the Superdome, or unofficial ones, like the convention center. John Burnett, NPR News, New Orleans. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.