Holding On to Home

It’s August 2005. It’s dark outside, and the floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina keep rising higher and higher. Yvonne Blue and her family are forced into their attic, as their alternative option is to wade through the waist-deep water that has consumed the main level of their home.

For one long night, Blue and her family waited to be rescued. Around them, they heard howls cutting through the darkness as people screamed for help. When her family was eventually forced onto the roof, Blue saw a body hanging on a fence and several others floating through the water.

“That’s an experience that I wouldn’t wish on nobody,” Blue recalled.

When help finally arrived the next morning, Blue said she was not satisfied with the treatment her family received.

“It was miserable,” Blue said. “The army people stuck a big ol’ gun in my grandbaby’s face, and he was just three years old. We made it by the grace of the good Lord, but we went through hell.”

For Blue, Katrina did not end when the floodwaters receded.

To this day, she said, the storm continues to affect her family.

“My grandson is 23 now,” Blue said, “and when it rains hard, he gets paranoid.”

For many residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, the storm never really left. The neighborhood still bears visible scars nearly 21 years later, and so do many of the people who survived it. Blue is one of many New Orleans residents who can vividly recount what happened to her family during Hurricane Katrina and the years that followed.

Like thousands of others, Blue was forced to leave the city. She spent time moving between Westwego, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Texas and Chattanooga in the weeks and months after the storm, relying on rides wherever she could find them.

“Anywhere we could catch a ride,” Blue said.

When she finally returned home in 2006, she found devastation.

“I was looking at my coffee table floating down the hall,” Blue said.

Most of her belongings were destroyed. Of everything inside the house, Blue was only able to salvage a single photograph.

“When you came back into New Orleans, you could smell nothing but death,” she said.

Today, Blue lives in a house on the opposite side of the Lower Ninth Ward from where she lived during Katrina. She enjoys sitting on her porch in the New Orleans sunshine, but when she looks to her right, she is greeted by a lot filled with weeds taller than herself.

The overgrown lot has become a constant source of frustration. The weeds attract unwanted visitors, including snakes, rodents and possums.

Blue once tried to cut down the vegetation herself but said she was warned by the city not to do so.

“They said we were trying to take the land,” Blue said. “We weren’t worried about the land. We were just trying to keep our house safe.”

Unable to rely on the city to address the issue, Blue found her own ways to deal with the animals.

“Those things carry too many diseases,” Blue said, recalling a possum she recently spotted near her house.

Worried it would make its way inside, she shot it, placed it in a garbage bag and threw it away.

“I’m not gonna let nothing hurt me,” Blue said.

Blue is tired of what she sees as neglect in the Lower Ninth Ward. She is tired of the vacant lots surrounding her home, tired of looking at an abandoned house across the street that still bears spray-painted markings from Katrina, and tired of road construction on her street that never seems to end.

“They’re not doing nothing,” Blue said. “Nothing but taxing the hell out of us. That’s about it.”

Despite her frustrations, Blue continues to call the Lower Ninth Ward home.

The reason, she said, is simple: the people.

“New Orleans people have just been stepped on so much, so they don’t take nothing, but it’s not the worst,” Blue said. “New Orleans people are more friendly than anybody.”

Blue said neighbors routinely help one another. After she underwent surgery to remove part of her lung following a cancer diagnosis, a neighbor cut her grass while she recovered.

During the interview, one of Blue’s neighbors pulled into her driveway and glanced toward me, making sure she was okay and not being bothered by a stranger. Blue laughed and explained that moments like that are exactly why she stays.

“We help each other out,” Blue said.

Nearly 21 years after Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward is still recovering. Empty lots remain. Houses continue to sit abandoned. Residents like Blue still carry memories of floodwaters, evacuation and loss.

But as Blue sat on her porch, watching neighbors look out for one another, it was clear that while the storm changed the Lower Ninth Ward forever, it never washed away the sense of community that keeps people like her there.

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward nearly 21 years after Hurricane Katrina. It was created by an immersion journalism student in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on The Storm That Never Left: Inside New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward Nearly 21 Years After Katrina.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.