Surviving Hurricane Betsy; The impacts of Camille and Katrina
Jane Sedgebeer by Caroline Gerdes, 2012; 4700.2452
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Jane Sedgebeer.
TEMPESTS: Storms in the Archives
Caroline Gerdes: Do you remember any hurricanes or floods in the Ninth Ward while you were living there?
Jane Sedgebeer: Betsy happened a year to the day that my daddy died. He died in September of '64, September 8, 1964. And I think Betsy was September 9, 1965. I remember . . . Looking back as an adult, I can just imagine the fear of my mother having us six [children] in an old shotgun house. And I can remember the house kind of moving a little bit during the night. Aunt Shirley slept through the whole hurricane. And my mother was up all night with the six kids. We had a cinderblock fence alongside of the back part of our house. All of a sudden there was a big gigantic boom and the house just kind of went, you know, shook. I can remember the hurricane really shaking, shaking. Everything was scary, scary, scary. Then when we got to the eye, everything was silent and still, I can remember that. That's when my mother told my brother to look out and see what happened. She's holding him and he looked out the side door and he said, "Oh the wall fell." And my mother thought it was the wall of the house and she freaked. But it was the cinder block wall just kind of fell and fell right onto our house.
And like I say, Aunt Shirley slept the whole time. Well, when Aunt Shirley woke up the next morning, not even giving any thought to my mother [laughs] and the hurricane, whatever. She's washing her dishes and her kitchen window looked out. She's washing her dishes and all of a sudden she sees like this tidal wave coming toward her. She said by the time she turned around and said, "Oliver," to her husband, "there's water coming," there was three feet of water in her house. So her and her six kids and her husband, found a boat, found a way to get to us and came and we were high and dry because the closer you are to the levee, the higher the ground is.
The water did not stay that long. It came . . . It wasn't like Katrina with us, it didn't sit here for two weeks like it did here. It came and then it pretty much left within a day or so. So we were high and dry, we made it through the hurricane and it was very scary. But my husband who lived in the upper Ninth Ward, his garage which unfortunately had all his baby pictures, his mother stored everything in the wrong place [laughs], so he lost everything, all his baby pictures, everything. And you know my Aunt Shirley you know none of her kids have their baby pictures because they lost everything, sort of like Katrina with us.
But it [Betsy] was a scary . . . Yeah that was the only hurricane I . . . And we never had another hurricane until Katrina. That's what kills me when people say, "Oh, New Orleans is so under water, under sea level. Why would you rebuild?" We had a hurricane forty years ago and we had another one [laughs]. Florida has a hurricanes in one part or another of their state every year, you know. Of course, Camille hit a few years after that, but it didn't hit New Orleans, it hit Mississippi. My husband was at St. Stanislaus when it hit there and when he walked the coast of Mississippi as a high schooler, he thought he'd never see anything as bad as what Camille was. Every other house was down. And when he went back for Katrina, because he was in law enforcement and he walked . . . He said not only every house is gone, every house for three blocks inland is gone, which Camille didn't do that. A lot of those historic plantations and everything survived Camille, but they didn't survive Katrina. I tell people all the time, New Orleans did not get hit by Katrina, Mississippi got hit by Katrina. We got hit by stupidity, by lack of well-built levees.