KATRINA TRIANGLE
Three alumni recall how the hurricane affected them
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When Hurricane Katrina assaulted the Central Gulf Coast in August, the media beamed glimpses of an oak-snapping, edifice-gutting monster in action. Then came the inevitable post-apocalyptic postcards from the cities it ravaged. Nearly a year removed from the most destructive storm in U.S. history, memories aren’t fading easily.
Finding a home in Gainesville
found her way back: The College hosted Loyola Prof. Sherry Alexander, PhD 1990, after Hurricane Katrina. (Photo by Boaz Dvir)
After seeing her share of storms during her decades in Florida, Loyola University Prof. Sherry Alexander, PhD 1990, prefers not to stick around when a hurricane threatens. Upon hearing news that Katrina was whirling its way toward New Orleans, she dropped off her cocker spaniel, Casey Jones, at the vet’s and fled to Tuscaloosa, Ala., with a couple of her journalist friends whom she’d convinced to evacuate.
“Then the levees broke,” said the first graduate of the College’s doctoral program, “and we realized that we couldn’t go home for quite a while.”
With the city flooded and residents barred from returning, Alexander saw nowhere else to turn but UF. She taught undergraduate Mass Communication Law at the College in the early 1990s. After moving to New Orleans to work at Loyola (largely because the Jesuit-affiliated university suited her religious beliefs), she’d stayed in touch with several colleagues, including Prof. Emerita Jean Chance, Prof. Sandra Chance, JM 1975, MAJC 1985, and Department of Journalism Chair William McKeen. Chance offered her a temporary office – a “nice warm place to sit” – at the Brechner Center.
She arrived in Gainesville in September and moved in with her married son, Christopher Davidson, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s in computer engineering from UF and teaches creative computing at the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History.
Although evacuees weren’t allowed back into the city until Oct. 5, Alexander sneaked in Sept. 16 to retrieve her dog. The vet’s office was a disheartening sight – the building was boarded up and appeared to have flooded; she neither saw nor heard signs of life within.
Her house’s windows had blown out and its roof, which had collapsed, needed to be completely replaced. Alexander moved back into her “barely habitable” home on Dec. 30 and got the rebuilding process under way.
Alexander was back teaching at Loyola the day it reopened, Jan. 9. Because the university had lost about 10 percent of its employees to firings or other circumstances, all professors were required to teach an overload this spring semester, and a “special 10-week summer semester with an overload again – only for no pay,” she said. Despite these pressures, the media law professor insists that she’s more fortunate than the roughly one-fifth of her neighbors who’ve lost their jobs.
Alexander also realized her students suddenly had more pressing issues than grades to worry about. “I teach a hard subject, and I’m one of the few teachers that ends up giving some Fs and Ds,” she said. “I can tell just talking to the students that I’m going to cut them a lot more slack. [Those] that do come back are going to need a lot of counseling and understanding. We’re going to have to be understanding for the next several years.”
In November, she received a telephone call from Colorado. Casey Jones had survived the storm and was living with a young couple in Aspen. The couple told her that he’d been rescued by boat when a mysterious party broke into the vet’s office and saved the trapped pets.
The animals were shuttled to a rescue shelter in Baton Rouge, where, Alexander said, “some wealthy people with a plane” flew 10 dogs, including Casey Jones, to Aspen.
Alexander decided to let the Colorado couple keep her dog.
“These people take him to work with them, he’s been on three ski trips, sleeps in their bed,” she said. “He has a whole new life now.”
‘The human element’
water world: Tracy Wilcox, JM 1995, took this post-Katrina photo for The Gainesville Sun.
When the assistant photo editor at The Gainesville Sun asked her if she’d like to cover Katrina, Tracy Wilcox, JM 1995, answered yes “without hesitation.” The staff photographer is no stranger to disaster areas, having covered hurricanes such as Dennis and war zones such as Kuwait.
“It gets me out there and I meet some amazing people who want to help,” she said. “Unfortunately, I see some sad things, but the human element is just incredible.”
She and her assistant Briana Brough rode out the storm in Pensacola. Once the heavens calmed, they explored the city’s downtown, which “looked like an ocean.” They encountered a storm chaser from Milton who was wading into the flood. A Palm Beach Post picture of Wilcox photographing him appeared on the AP wire.
“The winds were still strong at this point,” Wilcox said. “I held onto a big light pole as he climbed up the side of an old theater and began talking on a cell phone.”
Wilcox and Brough headed west through Mississippi to survey the Gulf Coast. This was the worst disaster she’d ever covered, she said. Survivors wandered Biloxi’s ruined streets “dazed and covered in mud.” One night, as the light began to fade, she snapped pictures of 30 to 40 people looting a Family Dollar store. The Sun never ran these photos.
“The people were just too far away,” she said. “I had a 300 millimeter [telephoto lens], and I needed something [stronger] – unless I wanted to get right in the area with the looters. We didn’t feel safe, just two females by ourselves.”
Wilcox continued west along U.S. Highway 90, stopping to document people’s struggles. One published picture shows John Travis and his young family sifting through the debris of their home. He had just returned from naval service in Iraq in April. Another photo shows his neighbors taking a break from cleanup – the husband wearily rubbing his forehead and the wife sitting on the devastated home’s front stoop with her head down.
“They lived a couple of blocks away from the ocean, so water went right through their house,” Wilcox said. “They clung to their refrigerator while the water was going over their heads.”
The Sun featured 10 of Wilcox’s Katrina photos, which illustrate her subjects’ predicaments.
“It was hard, but hopefully the pictures touched some people out there and encouraged them to help or volunteer,” she said. “That’s truly what I hope most of my pictures will do.”
From Jax to Biloxi
Grayson Kamm, TEL 2002, describes himself as the archetypal “reporter in the green rain jacket trying to dodge tree branches.” He’s covered several major storm systems, including Hurricane Charlie from Jacksonville in 2004. Getting rocked by the gale-force winds of Hurricane Jeanne in his news van even inspired him to pop the big question to his now-wife, Cathy.
“It’s thrilling at first, and then you wake up,” he said. “You start thinking about your family.” He proposed to Cathy on Florida Field’s 50-yard-line during 2004’s Gator Growl.
On the Monday Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, Kamm – a reporter for First Coast News, the combined news operation for both the NBC and ABC affiliates in Jacksonville – followed a search-and-rescue team of Jacksonville firefighters to Pensacola, where they waited out the storm. He then set out to cover the firefighters’ relief efforts along the central and eastern coasts of Mississippi, whose sheriff offices lacked the resources to take on rescue duties.
Entering Biloxi, Kamm was astounded by the damage.
“It was on a scale you couldn’t believe,” he said. “I felt like I had parachuted into a foreign country where water was scarce and destruction was everywhere.”
Bricks, washing machines and debris lay strewn in every direction; front steps led to bare, slab foundations where homes used to rest; there was a Waffle House sign but no restaurant.
“As you got closer to the water, the destruction was just wholesale and complete,” he said. “I stood next to casino barges that were on the wrong side of the highway. These things were towering four stories above [us], their guts all hanging out, slot machines all over the ground.”
More appalling to Kamm was the paucity of aid Mississippi survivors were receiving from the state and federal governments. Thirsty and hungry people got little relief for days, he said, noting that big agencies such as the Red Cross were kept out for several days due to safety concerns.
“Not everything was going smoothly and people were suffering because of it,” he said. “The story that needed to be told right then and there was that people who needed help to survive were not getting it. I wanted to ask Mississippi officials why their disaster-response system was essentially nonexistent, but there was nobody to talk to, nobody available.”
Over the course of his four days and 10 news reports in Mississippi, Kamm documented Jacksonville firemen as they went door to door in search of survivors; he met a Jacksonville minister who planned to summon a group of volunteers to help rebuild the worst-hit churches; he visited a command post set up in a Biloxi arena that directed search-and-rescue efforts and distributed water. Kamm said that he was struck by the selflessness of these individuals, and of Katrina’s Mississippi survivors.
“People stayed like neighbors and maintained their civility,” he said. “Everybody was sitting around talking to each other. They weren’t sitting in the corner dealing with their own problems. But the positive stories were hard to find. Bricks and destruction are the images that will stick with me.”
