Evacuating with her elderly mother in the days after Hurricane Katrina
Barbara Terance by Tatiana Clay, 2007; 4700.1962
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Hundreds of thousands of displaced people were transported out of Louisiana and Mississippi.
TEMPESTS: Storms in the Archives
Barbara Terance: Well, my mother never did leave during a hurricane. We'd figure we going to ride it out and my sister was going to go stay with Button in Gentilly because we have a duplex in Gentilly. We thought we were safe that morning and my mother and I were eating breakfast and all of a sudden we heard, like, this rushing sound. We were like, "Well, what in the world is this?" And so when we looked down, the water was just bubbling up through the floor. And then when we ran to the door, it was like a river. So I called 911 and they told us to try to get up on the roof. And I called my sister, and all she could say was that the water had risen real high over there and then the phone went dead and that was it. That was the only communication we had.
That was that Monday and we didn't get out until that Wednesday morning. I think either that Wednesday or Thursday morning. Because I would come and sit on the porch and we thought we were the only ones in the neighborhood. But in that double . . . that duplex right there, there were people that we saw. And we would holler to them across the way. They told us to come over but neither one of us could swim and we didn't have a boat. And so we would sit outside, I would put my mom in her wheelchair and sit her the porch. And a boat passed by, the National Guard, and they picked us up and they brought us right down there by the bridge, right off of Gentilly Boulevard and dropped us on the bridge on the interstate. And we had to wait there for a bus, a school bus.
But they don't tell you where you were going. They put you on a bus and they don't tell you . . . They bring you to a staging area and then somebody comes and whispers to the bus driver in his ear and then he takes off. And when he's way out, then I asked him, I said, "Well, where are we going?" He says "Well, I can tell you now," he said, "We're bringing y'all to the Cajundome in Lafayette." Which we didn't want to go there. So I asked him if he could make a pit stop. He crossed the bridge going into Port Allen and Baton Rouge is right across. So when I knew that we were . . . had crossed over from Baton Rouge to Port Allen, he stopped at this gas station. I dragged my mother off the bus with her walker because I couldn't bring her wheelchair. We got to walk to a Days Inn and she said she could make it. We sat there in the lobby, the lady gave us coffee and stuff because she didn't have any rooms. And then hours later she came and told us that she had a room and we were like, "Thank you Jesus!" [laughing]