Oxford students give eyewitness accounts of Hurricane Katrina hell
“There was a never-ending stream of people on the interstate trying to get out of New Orleans and apparently only us trying to get in. We turned on the radio: Hurricane Katrina was headed this way; due to arrive Sunday night or Monday morning. It was Saturday. The local radio moaned about the congestion nightmare and observed how regularly these hurricane warnings are given and how rarely they’re as bad as the scientists make out.
This was a city we wanted to see, and time appeared to be on our side • we would reassess the situation in the morning. We set about a Saturday night on the town • the infamous sin of Bourbon Street on full display. Bars had chalked above their doors “Katrina Shmeena” and street-wide there were promotions on Hurricane cocktails. “Let’s party like it’s the last night of New Orleans” declared one banner. Tragically, it almost was.
We woke up the next morning to the sound of Mayor Nagin blaring over the radio. “This is not a drill! It is my grave duty to order the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans and its surrounding parishes. The storm we are expecting to hit the city this afternoon is without precedent. Please get out of the city!” Our car was in bad shape, starting 3rd or 4th time, smoking lots, and low on petrol.
The streets were empty as we crossed the city and the radio spewed a depressing stream of worstcase scenarios. This category 5 hurricane was headed for us with winds of 160mph. Our car rattled at 52mph and had a speedo that only went as far as 80. We passed families sat on their doorsteps, stranded without vehicles; perhaps waiting for a ride, perhaps waiting in despair, but our car was full. The streets were empty, but the freeway, one of only three routes out of the city, was rammed.
We were in a very bad place, the car in a very bad way. On the whole people were remarkably calm, but there was desperation on the faces of those by the overheated and broken-down cars at the road’s side. We saw an old woman half falling out the driver’s seat of her car, held in place only by her seat belt. She was vomiting over and over again. Hundreds of people, including us, were watching as we edged past, and nobody was stopping to help.
Everyone was looking out only for themselves and those dearest to them. Petrol became our major concern. The car was running on fumes by this point, sputtering and belching bluish smoke. On the whole, the people around us were keeping their composure. We saw a couple of blazing rows, one resulting in an incensed husband leaving his wife by the roadside, while their young child looked on from the backseat.
More ominously we saw a couple of boys in their pickup trucks nursing their shotguns, clearly eager to exercise their constitutional rights. When we realised we had been on the road for nearly 28 hours non-stop, the fatigue began to kick in. The car came to its final resting place outside a gas station, a few miles from our destination.
An hour later, after some coolingoff time, our car spluttered back to life, and we were able to cruise slowly to the house of Douglas Dupree, the Balliol chaplain. In the sanctuary of his home we watched the pictures streamed from the city we had set-off from, but it was not a New Orleans that we could recognise.”
5th Oct 2005