The Dispossessed
Of New Orleans Tell Of Their Medieval Nightmare
By David Usborne
Inside the Houston Astrodome
05 September, 2005
lndependent/UK
A brand new city has arisen inside the
Astrodome in Houston, Texas, population 15,000. Not the best address
in America - they gave it its own postal code, 77230 - but it offers
some benefits to its residents. It is almost clean, more or less safe
and entirely dry. No longer are these people clinging to the roofs of
houses above swirling waters or squatting on elevated roadways in the
sun unsure if they will live or die.
And, happily, they
are no longer cowering in the New Orleans Superdome, a place that turned
mad with murders, rapes, suicide, abortions and the ammonia fumes of
human waste. Or imprisoned in the convention center without food or
water, in the company of corpses. Those two places of sanctuary became
hell-holes of a kind unthinkable in the United States of America. Until
last week.
No doubt, the new
arrivals in the Astrodome are among the blessed of New Orleans. But
most are nowhere near the end of their ordeal. Their faces have that
blank, glazed look of people mentally overwhelmed. Thousands have another
anguish: loved ones are missing. Some vanished during the chaotic bus
transfer from New Orleans to here. They will probably be found - eventually.
Others have not been seen or heard from since the first hours of the
storm.
Gabrielle Benson,
40, has to think for a second. It is five, she says, the number of her
family who are unaccounted for. "I don't know where my mum and
dad are and I have three kids of mine who are missing." Two other
children are with her. Ms Benson is calm about the missing kids. They
survived the storm and were with her in the New Orleans Superdome all
last week. They got lost in the pandemonium of boarding the buses. Quite
likely, they are in a different city by now.
It is the mess with
the buses that makes Ms Benson most angry. She and her family had abandoned
their home in the projects last Sunday and fled immediately to the Superdome.
The stampede for the buses began on Thursday. She described soldiers
of the National Guard barking orders - "Make a hole, make a hole,
that was their favorite order," she says - and making no effort
to keep parents and children together. "They treated us like dirt,
like dirt. They wouldn't even help my kids when they got lost. 'Ma'am,
you've got to stay behind the barricade' is all they said." The
soldiers did at least give them water while they waited - throwing bottles
into the crowd. "Just popping people on the head with them."
But if getting on
the buses was hard, what came before was far worse for many among these
evacuees. Thousands never made it to the Superdome or to the convention
center Some now are saying they are glad of it, like Ruby Taylor.
Ms Taylor was not
a looter exactly, but the looting helped save her life. She is tall
and proud, and 62 years old. Eating a Red Cross dinner here on Saturday
of rice, beans and diced beef steak, she describes fleeing her first-floor
apartment on Monday, when the water had risen almost to her shoulders,
and wading to the local school. "We were fortunate because we had
the school kitchens, so we got all the food they was looting and cooked
it," she recalls with a brief smile. Surrounded by water on all
sides and eventually forced to the third floor of the school, she and
everyone else watched in frustration as their SOS signs went unheeded
by circling helicopters for two days. "I know they saw our signs,"
she says. "I know they did." Finally, on Wednesday, boats
arrived and they were taken to an interstate causeway just west of the
city. There they remained - without food or shelter - for 30 hours,
until the first buses arrived.
Many people here
described similar hours of desperation in the open air - on elevated
roadways, beneath bridges, even in mosquito-infested fields - before
the buses arrived. Many had hopped from one location to the next over
several days, fleeing the water - from their own home, to homes of friends
that were still above the water level, to roofs, and to the elevated
roads that are all around the city. Some, like Linda Bertoniere, clung
to lampposts to stay alive. Others had to leap from rooftop to rooftop.
Yet, it is the testimony
of those who did as they were told and responded to government appeals
to take refuge in the New Orleans Superdome and the convention center
who are now coming forth, here and in other evacuee shelters, with stories
of deprivation and danger almost too awful to fathom.
Devan Allen is 11
years old. Here with his dad, he gingerly approaches to tell what he
saw in the Superdome. They were things no child should witness. Like
the moment on Tuesday - or was it Wednesday? The days have blurred together
for everyone here - when a man stood on one of the balconies and screamed
so everyone could hear that he had lost everyone in the storm and now
he would die also. He dived headfirst on to the playing field below,
his head bursting open. Devan shouldn't have seen that. Nor should he
have heard the gunshots. Nor the whispers of the girls who were raped
and stabbed to death, right there with him in the Superdome. Or of the
boy who was raped.
"I was scared,"
says Devan. "I knew that there was rapes going on and they said
they were men snatching the boys." He recalls the suicide: "He
just jumped right off." Like so many of the adults, he also remembers
the ordeal of boarding the buses. "It was a big old crowd all right.
It was terrible."
James Allen, his
father, is among those boiling with anger with what they found when
they fled to the Superdome. "We went there because we thought we
would be safe, but instead we were more inmates than anything."
James, 31, was born in New Orleans. After what happened in the Superdome,
he says, he will never, ever, go back to the city. "I can't go
back there after what we've been through." By the last night, he
says, the soldiers of the National Guard had given up even patrolling
the inside of the arena, leaving it to succumb to its own ugliness and
anarchy.
The details of the
stories from inside the Superdome vary slightly depending on who is
telling them. The accuracy of some of the details cannot yet be proven.
It will be one of the elements of the bungling of the rescue effort
that will be a subject of official investigations. But Gaynell Farrell,
56, who has worked for the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans for
27 years - her husband rode the storm out in a suburb of New Orleans
and has survived - says she is certain of what she saw and heard. If
there is an official investigation of events in the arena, Ms Farrell
might want to testify.
"You don't
want to know what it was like. We had killings, abortions, babies born,
toilets stacked up and it was hot, hot, hot." Pressed for details,
she doesn't hesitate. She speaks of two girls being raped and murdered
inside the dome, one aged seven. The other was 16 and was "slit
open" by a knife after she was raped in the woman's bathroom, she
says. Much of what she tells is similarly described by several other
dome evacuees. A boy aged seven was also raped by two men. (Mr Allen
says the rapist was chased down by other men and beaten before being
handed over to the soldiers. He claims they also beat him and then threw
him from a terrace outside the Superdome to the asphalt, killing him.)
"There was
babies born and put in the garbage," Ms Farrell continues. Apparently,
someone else found one infant alive and took it to the small clinic
they had inside. Almost everyone talks of gunshots in the night, including
one shooting of a National Guard soldier. Ms Farrell says the soldier
died, others spoke of him being wounded in the leg and surviving. Meanwhile,
she adds, a black-market trade flourished in marijuana cigarettes, crack
cocaine, guns and alcohol, in plain view of the authorities. Men were
flashing their penises at the women, who dared only go to the bathroom
in groups of five. When the bathrooms became so foul that going into
them was impossible, people began squatting down just anywhere to relieve
themselves. "Human beings don't live like that, people in the street
don't live like that," she says.
All this weekend,
federal officials will interview the heads of each family group in the
Astrodome to give them money and some guidance on what to do next. The
same process was getting under way at other evacuee centers here in
Houston and in several other cities across Texas, including Dallas and
San Antonio, and in other southern states. It's everyone's hope that
as many people as possible here will somehow find the means to get alternative
shelter, maybe in cheap apartments or with relatives in Texas. Some
will end up staying in Texas, others will eventually return to Louisiana.
Yesterday, announcements would occasionally come over the loudspeakers
or on the electronic message boards that used to carry sporting results
with the good news for some that friends or family had arrived to pick
them up.
But it won't be
so easy for most of the souls in here. Many of them are exhausted and
quite obviously traumatized by their experiences over the days since
Hurricane Katrina hit. "I'm not moving," Ms Benson says flatly.
"This is going to be my home. My home for me and my kids."
She just prays first that the three children who are missing can be
found and brought to her here.
VOICES FROM THE
STORM
"None of us
have any place to go."
Julie Paul, 57,
in a poor area last Sunday, watching New Orleans empty.
"The water's
rising pretty fast. I got a hammer and an axe and a crowbar, but I'm
holding off on breaking through the roof until the last minute. Tell
someone to come get me please. I want to live."
Chris Robinson,
Monday, calling from New Orleans.
"There are
lots of homes through here worth a million dollars. At least they were
yesterday."
Fred Wright,
surveying Mobile's Eastern Shore
"I don't treat
my dog like that. I buried my dog. You can do everything for other countries
but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with
the military but you can't get them down here."
Daniel Edwards,
pointing at a dead woman parked in a wheelchair outside the convention
center
"I do think
the nation would be responding differently if they were white elderly
and white babies actually dying on the street and being covered with
newspapers and shrouds and being left there."
David Billings
of anti-racist organization, The People's Institute.
"I don't want
to see no more water unless I'm taking a bath."
Anona Freeman,before
being air-lifted out.
© Copyright
2005 lndependent/UK