I’ll never forget that first drive into New Orleans after Katrina.
Our caravan of military vehicles and SUVs carrying first responders from all over the country rolled stop-and-start along a dark Interstate 10 from Baton Rouge east into what felt like a war zone.
There was no other traffic. The highway was cluttered with debris. Car parts. Chunks of concrete. Metal and wood from who knows where. Checkpoints. And a darkness over a major city that still had no power weeks after the hurricane hit.
Four of us, former Peace Corps volunteers, rode together in stunned silence, taking in the unimaginable. We’d already spent a week in FEMA training in Florida and another few days waiting out Hurricane Rita before being assigned to Task Force 83, a group of about 300 first responders, mostly firefighters, who’d come to help. It had taken too long for FEMA to deploy all of us, and we were hungry to start working.
But the drive in that first night, a day before residents were allowed back into their city, was a sobering reminder that we were entering something for which none of us was prepared.
I’m not from New Orleans, or anywhere along the Gulf Coast. I’ve never ridden out a hurricane, and I didn’t lose anything, or anyone, in the disaster that Katrina became. Like so many other tourists, I’d simply fallen in love with the Big Easy from years past and so I wanted to help.
Wait, let me back up. Infatuation is a better word for whatever I could’ve felt after a handful of visits in the ’90s that barely extended beyond the French Quarter.
There’s no way to know exactly how many people volunteered after Katrina. Tens of thousands — the number I got when I started asking — is probably too modest. The U.S. Peace Corps — the group I came through — deployed 272 volunteers in its only domestic operation. Other volunteers came from every walk of life: faith groups, college groups, private businesses, the people who jumped in their cars and drove for days to deliver food, supplies, generators and rescue boats. Health workers, animal rescue experts, construction workers. The Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the thousands of people who raised their hands not sure what they could offer but wanting to do something.
Their motivations were surely as varied as the places from which they came. Ten years later, many of them are still coming. Volunteers with the New Orleans Habitat for Humanity have built more than 400 homes since Katrina. Common Ground, a collective of volunteers formed days after the storm to deliver basic supplies to survivors, later created roving health clinics and built homeless shelters that still operate. There are far more examples of volunteer generosity than this space allows.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact volunteering had on me. We wear so many hats through life, and I’m usually most comfortable in my role as journalist — looking for stories, questioning authority, digging for truth beneath layers of politics and bureaucracy. To hang that up for a month (the Tribune gave me a leave of absence) and become part of the story would feel strange, but I knew I had to go.
I couldn’t not go.
“It was such a strong feeling that I had to be there,” Tina Borgeson, of Manteca, Calif., told me. Borgeson and her husband (whom she’d met while they both served in the Peace Corps years before in Namibia) scrambled to figure out how he’d manage with their two young sons while she was away for a month. “It was something that felt so important to me that we made it work.”
“There was no hesitation,” said Lauren Herzer Risi, who had just finished serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria. “It was absolutely what I needed to do.”
That’s what I heard from everyone I worked with on Task Force 83 — and from the scores of other volunteers I met in Louisiana, where we canvassed neighborhoods for survivors, delivered food and water and assisted with any other recovery job that came along. We worked alongside firefighters from Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, Kansas and Utah. One group of firefighters from a Blackfeet Indian reservation in Montana — at first reluctant to work with four women — taught us how to operate chain saws to clear debris.
Those 30 days were some of the most exhausting, heart-wrenching, frustrating, joyful and humbling days I’ve ever spent. We encountered New Orleanians as they emerged from their homes for the first time since the storm, telling stories of rising water, darkness, gunfire, the overwhelming fear that they’d die. We listened as they talked themselves back into the present, realizing that — perhaps — life would carry on and then, invariably, springing to action to offer us, the relief workers, a glass of lemonade.
Leslie Noa-Rye, a New Orleans volunteer who had served in Guinea in the Peace Corps and now is a researcher at the University of Illinois, reflected on her Crescent City experience with appreciation for how quickly a disaster, natural or not, can take away life as we know it. “To one day have a home, community, job — and the next it’s gone. I feel so grateful for what I have now.”
Walking through muddy, silent streets, knocking on doors, talking to people who had just lost everything showed all of the volunteers I knew that there was something much deeper happening — for better and for worse — than what was playing out on TV press conferences, in government chambers and in my usual habitat: the newsroom.
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As the Gulf Coast marks Katrina’s 10th anniversary this week, I find myself reliving so many of those moments — and the raw emotions that I thought had subsided. I’ve revisited New Orleans again and again in the years since, developing deep friendships and embracing the city as something of a second home. Countless Katrina volunteers tell a similar story. The food, the music, the characters we got to know who make every visit so unpredictable, so fun, and always draw us back. The painful Katrina memories? They’re always there, too, just beneath the surface, a reminder of that moment when our infatuation turned into love.
Lara Weber is a member of the Tribune Editorial Board.