Hurricane Katrina Chronicles

To commemorate the hurricane that almost destroyed New Orleans, we present a collection of OffBeat ‘s Hurricane Katrina Chronicles articles we’ve run over the years. All of these stories are incredibly traumatic; but the one that is the most heart-wrenching to me is the feature we ran in September 2020, which is my former colleague and friend Lolet Boutte’s account of what happened to her and her family during Katrina.

Once again, it’s the end of August in New Orleans. It used to be that we were all on edge this time of the year because serious hurricanes in New Orleans  tend to roll in from mid-August through the end of September. Of course, now with climate change, melting ice and rising seas, that window of bad hurricanes has been extended out because there are many more storms, and some of them are really bad. No more alphabet-named storms; year before last we were into the Greek alphabet names before the storms stopped for the season. It could happen again. It will happen again, hopefully not in my lifetime. Needless to say New Orleans musicians were severely impacted, many left town, some, sadly, never to return.

It could happen again, in any hurricane season.  Here are some Katrina Chronicles over the years, to commemorate the 16th anniversary of the Federal Flood, and Hurricane Katrina’s almost-destruction of New Orleans:

A good friend, novelist, and opera composer Lawrence David Moon, wrote this personal letter to Jan Ramsey and Joseph Irrera.

“I never realized how strong the umbilical was, in my own regard, to New Orleans, but this disaster has really made its mark on my soul and made me perceive all I did leave by moving here to Los Angeles, which has not been an easy trick.

The only sane way to look at it all is by understanding the flows of history. Great cities have risen and fallen and risen again, and many, many, many of them have been sacked by exactly the same sort of low-lives that pillaged New Orleans last week. What has just happened to New Orleans is nothing new, in the eyes of history and the earth. That does not make it any more palatable, but at least it makes it comprehensible to the senses. All that I can say, with a highly attuned Sixth Sense, is that those who pillaged will suffer and soon. Their day will come, if it hasn’t already.

Too many in this country and ’round the world have been voicing such shock over the whole ghastly situation of New Orleans. What most don’t understand is that the history of the Big Easy has been a constant dance of death since the French founded it in the early 1700s, founded it on a swamp, of all inimical locales.

The city has been victim to constant waves of floods, fires, and plagues. Bodies used to pile up so deep in the French Quarter during the Yellow Fever outbreaks, that carts would haul the dead off in piles, like logs, and the corpses would be dumped at the charnel house of St. Jude’s Chapel, right outside St. Louis Cemetery Number One! Death is really the Major Consort of New Orleans and has always been since its founding. And now, the city is the residual gallant of all the ghosts who are patrolling the rues and allées in its darkened nocturnal strife. What a turnaround: the Queen of the South now prey to spectres, soldiers, and stowaways. All of it is just more fodder for the incessant appetite that the troubled town has for characters that will inevitably spin off into literature and song…

What a lament…

Who in hell knows how long this current debacle and tragedy of New Orleans is going to play out? I have a feeling that, as soon as the waters drain, people will return in droves, to see what’s happened to their houses, etc.  It could be another total scene of chaos, as thousands return to assess the damage. And the cleanup, all the god-awful gunk and black mold and slime left from those toxic waters. Jesus Jesus Jesus! It’s only Act I of some huge Shakespearean tragedy—no—GREEK tragedy. On any level, it is certainly fascinating, and the whole world is watching this, scene by scene, with almost morbid curiosity.

What they NEED to do, what the Army Corps of Engineers NEEDS to do, is build a goddamned huge medieval wall around the whole of both Jefferson and Orleans Parishes, and make the fucker 100 foot high!—Like ancient Babylon or Troy, or some of the impregnable fortresses of Norman France. Just raise one titanic wall—with gates that can be slammed shut when the next bitch of a hurricane approaches. Otherwise, without a HUGE looming wall of protection, thirty foot thick, this same goddamned shit is going to happen over and over and over again. The whole problem of the flooding was caused by a stupidly flimsy foot-thick dinky concrete ridge—a series of slabs that kept pretending to be a restraining wall along that 17th Street Canal—a hedge that wasn’t really even a levee at all! It’s just so ludicrous as to be lamentable, to imagine that a foot-thick sliver of concrete could possibly hold back the rage of the whole of Lake Pontchartrain once the waters rose and surged down the length of that canal. It seems that the massive banks of the higher levees did hold up, but it was that crazy-assed restraining wall of pre-cast concrete plywood that gave way and caused all the massive destruction and drowning and deaths.

I don’t know, as nobody knows, what’s to be the Fate of the NEW New Orleans. Something drastic has to be done, though, or all of this tremendous loss of life and property is going to be wholly in vain, and the same dismally terrible situation will be repeated time and time again. There exists right now a tremendous opportunity to correct all the evils of the past for the city, if only somebody can get a grip and do the right thing, which is to wall that city in with a gigantic solid thick impregnable bastion that even a tsunami can’t topple. Otherwise, prey to the waters; the city truly is doomed…—Lawrence David Moon, Los Angeles, CA

 Joseph Irrera

OffBeat Magazine came to a sudden and violent (but thank goodness, temporary) end with Hurricane Katrina. We lost our entire staff and couldn’t publish two issues, October and November 2005. The September issue came out the same day the storm hit and it remained at the printer’s warehouse. After about two weeks, I loaded up our SUV and started distributing in the French Quarter since many places had started to open. I’ll never forget what happened when I walked into Molly’s on Decatur. As I put OffBeat magazines down on the bar, I got a standing ovation. I remember Rio Hackford from One Eyed Jacks was standing outside on the curb and thought it was terrific. The same thing happened when I went to Johnny White’s Bar in the French Quarter: a standing ovation.

Here are some of the musicians’ stories (interviews by John Swenson):

Irma Thomas

“I went back to the house and found my OffBeat Clock [Best Of The Beat Award] that I received some years ago. It was still ticking—go figure.” [Irma and her husband Emile Jackson rebuilt and returned to their home in New Orleans East].

George Porter, Jr.

“We left the city on Sunday. That Thursday night I played at the Maple Leaf. Then Friday night I played at Cobalt’s. And then Saturday night I played at the Maple Leaf again with an all-star band with Theresa Andersson, Simon Dodds, had two of my horn section, Tracy Griffin and Clarence Johnson and Mike Lemmler on keyboards. And Theresa Andersson was a guest artist. We played there until five o’clock in the morning. This was Saturday night, so Sunday morning I left there and went to bed about six, and slept for three or four hours, woke up about ten, ten-thirty, and was sitting outside on the gazebo in front of the house. I love the smell when the marsh is coming, you know? I wasn’t planning on leaving. I was sitting on a swing in the gazebo when my granddaughter came up to me and sat down next to me. And she had that look on her face, and she just looked up and said, ‘Grandpa, when are we leaving?’ And I said, ‘Go tell your mama to go pack her bags.’ And before she could even get to the door, she just kind of high signed everybody and they all went walking out the door with their bags.

They were just waiting for me to say, ‘We’re going, you know?’ We left and went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama that Sunday night and Monday, it hit the area. We went in three different vehicles—my van, my wife’s car and my son-in-law’s pickup. My daughter Katrina drove her mama’s car. Katrina was so upset she wanted to change her name and I’m constantly telling her don’t change her name, I love her name. She was freaked out.

Late Monday evening, the hurricane got to Tuscaloosa and shut down Tuscaloosa. On Tuesday morning, we got up, packed our stuff to move out of the hotel and were headed to North Carolina. And my mom called up on the telephone and asked me where was I? And I told her that we were headed for my little cousin’s house in Charlotte, North Carolina. She said, ‘No, come back.’ My other little cousin was down in the land of my grandfather, which is Donaldsonville, Louisiana and she said, ‘there is plenty of room down here, come back home.’ We made a U-Turn on Interstate 20, came back on 61 through the back ways and we have been down in Donaldsonville.

We’re resettled now in Darrow, Louisiana, 19 1/2 miles from Baton Rouge, 52 miles from New Orleans.” [George Porter, Jr. returned to New Orleans].

John Gros

“We were en route back home from a tour…We played Japan for a month, then we went from Tokyo to Boston and did four nights in the Boston area. Our scheduled day to get home was August 29th. I never made it. We all knew watching it on TV it was bad. Some of the guys had flights scheduled and switched their flights. Jellybean rearranged his to Dallas where his wife was heading. Donald Ramsey and June Yamagishi flew into New Orleans earlier, Sunday morning. Donald’s sister picked him

up at the airport and they went straight to Memphis. June made it back to his apartment, where he stayed until Wednesday afternoon. Jason Mingledorff couldn’t change his flight so Jason drove with us to Birmingham, where his dad picked him up and brought him to his home in Montgomery. Myself and my roadie Rick drove around the outer wall of the hurricane to Lake Charles. I stayed at a friend’s house who I grew up with. I got through to June Wednesday afternoon on his home phone and he said ‘I’ve got a ride. Can I stay with you at Lake Charles?’ So June and his roommate and Hiro the guitar player in Kirk Joseph’s band, so you had three Japanese guitar players and six cats in a small little car evacuating from the City of New Orleans. They stayed with us for a week, then June, myself and Rick took off for San Francisco for the next Papa Grows Funk tour, which was already scheduled.” [John Gros returned to and still lives in New Orleans]

James Andrews

“The biggest thing I hate to see is that the second lines—the social aid and pleasure clubs and the Indians—are going to lose their population. The poorer the people, the less likely they’re coming back. They can’t afford to come back. You can’t even find a black motherfucker nowhere in town. All the black neighborhoods are like—‘No one home baby.’ The black community is getting the short end of the deal because half the population was renters. Some people are in better shape where they’re at now and they’re going to stay. They’re getting jobs. They were stuck. They couldn’t find good work or even get enough money to get a bus ticket out of this motherfucker [before the storm]. Everybody got out of here to

find their destiny.”

Davis Rogan

“The day before the hurricane hit I got the final artwork from the designer and I went to FedEx to send it off but there was a long line so I went to Express Mail it through the U.S. Postal Service. I dropped it off and went to Liuzza’s By the Track and had an Oyster Rockefeller soup and watched the people watching the TVs, one of which was tuned to a baseball game and the other to the approaching hurricane. Sunday morning it was evident that we were gonna be hit with a category five hurricane so I went to Baton Rouge but my disc was stranded in New Orleans. My disc was six feet underwater in the outgoing Express Mail.

The guy who mastered and mixed my disc had evacuated to somewhere in Bumfuck, Texas with his hard drive and managed to burn another copy of it for me. Disc Makers shipped the disc to Baton Rouge while I was in New York, couch surfing. I had sent them a pleading letter and a dozen e-mails but they still fucked it up. Disc Makers wins the Michael Brown Award. I’ll never work with them again.” [Davis Rogan noew lives in the Treme].

Johnny Sansone

“I was in Toronto working with a Cuban group from Santiago, Cuba, yeah, I was up there recording with them. All we had was the car radio. So I wasn’t sure what was going on. When I found out how bad it was going to be, there was a little hotel bar in town and I went there and the guy just kind of let me hang out. They had Fox in the bar. So I just started watching that until we had to leave Toronto.

I drove back to New Orleans and got in kind of a slippery way. It was harder to get out than it was to get in. Jefferson Parish wouldn’t let you out of Orleans Parish. So I drove right in at 6 a.m. in the morning but I tried leaving at 7 a.m. the next morning and it took me four hours to get out. This was right at a good time because it was right when the water was down and before the people started coming, so it wasn’t real long lines, they started saying you came back if you had a pass or something. They still didn’t know what was happening. I was able to kind of sneak through.

The guard guys were coming by every couple of hours, checking on the house, checking on me, make sure I wasn’t looting. A big helicopter went down right by my house on the Bayou St. John. It was pretty scary. And then got back, went back to Toronto and did some more stuff there. My van and all my equipment got lost in the flood. So I just cancelled everything I had. And I have been driving around in my sister’s Mercedes, using borrowed equipment and it has been great. Everybody has been really good to add me onto their bands and stuff.” [Sansone now lives back in New Orleans].

Mike West

“We were in Pensacola and at that point we knew that our home was taking in a huge amount of water. We presumed our dogs had died. And someone calls us and said, “Hey, we saw Terry on TV. He had your dogs.” Terry had kept our dogs’ heads above water in the flood when the water was chest high. And he had taken broken doors, used them as rafts and put the dogs on them.

He kept the dogs from drowning for about eight hours. What happened was the National Guard rescue workers were not allowed to take pets to the Superdome. Terry was one of those folks who just refused to go. He was like, ‘if you are not taking the dogs, you are not taking me.’ Eventually the sergeant in the National Guard was like ‘I’m going to get you out of here.’ When the last truck left our neighborhood, the sergeant took Terry and our three dogs to the Hilton in the French Quarter and that’s where he holed up. An ABC reporter found him and did an interview. And that’s how we knew he was alive. Eventually, Chris [Maxwell] from our record company said, ‘I’ll go pick him up.’

We were going to go back to New Orleans but we couldn’t go back there. So we drove across I-10 to Baton Rouge. Trees were all black; everything was chewed up but the interstate was open. By the time we got there, Terry had got out of New Orleans and was at Chris’ house with our three dogs. So we all holed up with Chris and Liz [Chris’ wife], Terry, me, Katie, three dogs and two children. Bless their hearts. They put us up for days before our Arkansas tour and Terry stayed there for almost three weeks. And we got another month and a half of touring. We can’t go back home. They are not letting us in. So we were just trying to make a few dollars because we don’t have anything than what is in our vehicle. So we hit the road and Chris said he would look after our dogs.” [Mike West now lives in Kansas].

Jimmy Messa

“I think New Orleans will rebuild and people will come back. But some won’t. I ran into Henry Butler at the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival and he said ‘I ain’t going back to New Orleans. I seen enough.’” [Jimmy Messa moved to Atlanta; Henry Butler moved to New York. Butler passed away from cancer in 2018].

 

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