SALT LAKE CITY — Five years after Hurricane Katrina unleashed its fury on southern Louisiana, those who came to Utah for refuge are doing their best to move on. While the physical marks of the disaster have faded, emotionally, survivors say, their lives have been forever changed.
Curtis Crosby, a Katrina survivor who now lives in South Salt Lake, has always believed in God, but after making it through the hurricane alive, the weathered old man has all but dedicated his life to serving Jesus Christ and his fellow men — specifically those who have, like him, survived a horrific disaster.
These days, Crosby, who lives in a cozy, two-bedroom apartment, spends his mornings serving breakfast to the homeless and his afternoons doing advocacy work for Katrina survivors.
"I was a lucky one," he said. Working as a political organizer, he'd spent several years traveling. Many of the hundreds who were flown so abruptly from New Orleans to Salt Lake City had never even left the city. When the sun rose the day after arrival, panic ensued. For many, he said, the culture shock has yet to wear off.
"They'd never even seen a hill," he said. "They was like, 'What? What is a mountain?' "
Crosby decided to form a nonprofit organization, called Survivors, that would help the survivors of disasters to acclimate to their suddenly new lives.
"We still got people around here dizzy," he said. "They're not ready for the reality of the situation."
A Louisiana native, Crosby was living in Ninth Ward, the easternmost, downriver portion of New Orleans, when Katrina hit. Despite the pleas of his family, he decided against evacuating before the hurricane.
"I ain't never scared," he said. "If God wants you to live, he'll keep you alive. I'm too blessed to be stressed."
In Louisiana tradition, Crosby and his neighbors made merry the night before the storm by throwing a "hurricane party." After the barbecue, it started raining. A female friend asked if she could stay the night at Crosby's house. "I don't want to be alone in the storm," she said. Crosby went to bed as usual.
The sounds of the city blowing apart didn't disturb Crosby in his sleep. He didn't hear the car alarms going off. He didn't hear the water sloshing into his house. He didn't hear the roofs blowing off the buildings. He didn't rouse until 5 a.m. when his friend came to tell him there was 2 feet of water on the floor.
"We'll go to my brother's plumbing shop," he suggested, unfazed. It was three stories tall and located just down the road.
Crosby walked to the door and stepped out to the front porch. He was greeted by a rushing, 25-foot wall of water. The levy had broken. He and his friend scrambled to get on the roof before the house was submerged.
"If God hadn't sent someone to wake me up," he said. "I would have been gone, washed away like so many others."
The wind was still blowing. The rain continued to pound down. There were bodies floating in the water, dead rats, garbage. Crosby's friend, who couldn't swim, hyperventilated as the water level rose. The hours ticked by: 6 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 12 o'clock, 4 o'clock. It was 7:30 p.m. before relief came.
"We couldn't get a boat or a ship to save our lives," Crosby said. "There weren't no Coast Guard. There weren't no police. There weren't no Indians with a canoe."
Crosby didn't choose to come to Utah. He found out, after being herded onto a plane as part of the government's mandatory evacuation plan, that the Beehive State would be his new home.
"Hi. My name is Michael," the pilot announced over the PA system. "You are flying JetBlue. In three and a half hours you'll be in Salt Lake City."
For Crosby, who struggled for two years just to convince the Social Security Administration to reissue his identification, the reality is, "I can't work." He suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and "it's all I can to do keep from slipping into blackness."
In a letter he to the president of the United States earlier this year, Crosby wrote, "In Salt Lake City most people displaced by Katrina have no way of knowing what to do or how to live. We don't know if we should stay in Salt Lake or return to New Orleans. … We don't know what options are available in New Orleans."
Crosby is still waiting for news about the several class-action lawsuits he's involved in.
"No one is talking to us about anything, and we'd like to know," he said.
Despite his frustrations, Crosby and his fellow Utah survivors keep the Louisiana tradition of celebration alive through regularly scheduled community events and casual parties.
"This is a horrible thing we've been through, but we talk about it; we relate to each other; we share resources," he said. "With God's help, we are gonna get through this."
Perseverance
Roi Maufas knows, without looking at the calendar, when Aug. 29, the day he and his wife — then eight months pregnant — lost everything to Hurricane Katrina, is approaching. He can feel it in his blood, an unrestrained panic racing through his veins. For a few weeks this time of year, he forgets that his wife and baby boy, now a rambunctious, mop-headed 4-year-old, are safe with warm, dry beds to sleep in and worries irrationally that the successful small business he's built up from nothing will tumble down around him, shattered. He checks and rechecks his ample food and water storage. Even though he's a big, 42-year-old man, he sometimes breaks down and asks his wife, "Hold me?"
"I don't feel secure," he said. "I just know how quickly things can change."
Before Hurricane Katrina, Maufas was in the movie-making business in New Orleans. He had a 9-to-5 gig renting out equipment and was juggling a couple of film projects on the side. His wife, 32-year-old Alyssa Kay, was using her architecture degree to put together a self-sustaining "eco village" a few hours north of the city. They'd lived in Louisiana not even a year, but already, they said, they'd fallen head over heels for the Southern state's loud, boisterous culture.
"I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," he said of his first night in the city. "I opened the door of my apartment and I could hear laughter. There was a bass playing over there, a horn over here. I was just assaulted by this insane, wonderful smell of Cajun barbecue."
When the hurricane warnings rolled in, his neighbors assured him there was no need to worry. He and Kay left their New Orleans apartment not because they evacuated, but because they were showing family around the eco village in Lafayette. When the wind started to shake the windows, snapping off the shutters, Maufas and his neighbors busted out the guitar and a couple of six packs. When the rain, pounding horizontally against the house, started crashing through the door frame, Maufas and his friends just sang louder. The power was out, most of the trees had been ripped up by the roots, but it wasn't until Maufas got news of the broken levee that he realized, "it's all gone."
"When you're in that moment you realize your whole city is a speck to nature — it is nothing," he said. "All the things that make men great — the great toolmaker … your opposable thumb ain't worth nothing."
Maufas didn't lose much time fleeing the state. With his job underwater and a baby on the way, he jumped at a friend's offer to help film a sequel to the horror flick, "I Know What You Did Last Summer" in Utah. Kay, too pregnant to travel, stayed behind, living with several others in a friend's garage.
After Hurricane Rita hit, Kay called Maufas at work to update him on the situation. As she related to him the death and desperation of the situation, he could hear someone on the movie set yell out, frustrated, "The light is not hitting the blood right." In that moment, he knew his life would never be the same.
"I was done with the film industry," he said.
"I can't afford to play pretend. How can I think about making fake horror when I'm living through real horror?"
In Louisiana observing the wreckage firsthand, Kay, the eco architect, had an idea. Among the debris, she noticed, were hundreds of shipping containers. They were dented, but they were whole.
"What if," she thought, "you could build a shelter out of a shipping container?"
If just one home, outfitted with all the environmentally friendly gadgets she'd come to love, had survived the hurricane, how many lives could that have saved?
After the baby was born — just days after Hurricane Rita hit the already-broken state — Maufas and Kay got $469 from the government to relocate to Utah. They spent their first year living in an RV parked alongside Redwood Road, saving every penny from Kay's job with an architectural firm to fund their new dream: making sturdy, shippable, sustainable emergency shelters.
Five years later, the couple have completed their first prototype. It's 160 square feet, sleeps four people and — just as Kay imagined — is made out of a shipping container. There's a one-burner stove, a microwave that doubles as a grill, a water purification system and a toilet that treats its own sewage.
The unit can be easily shipped and runs completely on solar energy.
Earlier this year, the couple, so recently homeless and destitute themselves, were able to send one of the water filtration systems they'd designed to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
"After surviving something like Katrina," Kay said, "you can't just turn away."
e-mail: estuart@desnews.com