Original subtitles

The flooding in this city is leveling off, but 80 % of New Orleans is still

underwater. And while the mayor wants everyone to get out of the city, people

here are still trying to figure out how to leave.

The Superdome, which was the shelter of last resort, has become the last place

anyone wants to be.

No one's allowed just to walk out of here.

When you say you want to just leave, what do they say? They tell us there's

alligators, dead bodies, disease, and you won't make it.

My cousin, the one I picked up from home, told me he didn't know how much he

going to be able to take. He said, I don't think I'm going to make it.

He was about to break down up in there. I said, we're going to get out of here.

Right next to the Superdome, they have a ramp.

The bottom of the ramp was flooded out.

And I seen, like, a group of National Guard members, like, they was sitting,

like, on the backside by the ramp, just kicking it, relaxing, chilling. I guess

they ain't thinking nobody going anywhere because of the water down

So I was like, I'm going to try to sneak up and get my truck.

We find my truck. I'm all excited.

It just looked like this beautiful horse sitting on a hill, right? I call it

Pegasus. As a matter of fact, it just was the most beautiful sight I ever

My heart was beating.

Got to the truck, put the keys in, turned up, cranked it.

Thank God it started up again.

We're just driving through the water, and there's waves just pushing and

and pushing.

As we pass by the convention center, I'm looking, I'm seeing all these people

just, they don't know what's about to happen next.

They just want to survive.

They just want to get out of here.

And all them people just looking up at me like, man, you about to get out of

here in this truck.

I'm holding on to my crucifix.

I'm praying, I'm asking God to get us through it.

This is where they're picking up some of the refugees out of the Superdome. And

as you can see, these people look like they've been here for quite some time.

There is one scrap of good news from New Orleans.

More than 100 buses evacuated thousands of people from the hellhole that was

once the Louisiana Superdome, and more will be brought out tonight.

After a successful bus evacuation of the Superdome, The National Guard organized

the people in front of the convention center, got them on buses, and we sent

them to the airport.

Buses are loaded up on Capitol Street.

Let's put it all in there. Let's get the whole family in there.

When they put us on the school buses under the interstate bridge, they didn't

tell us nothing.

They didn't tell you where you were going.

Still out there by the convention selling.

I didn't feel like I could go no more. Like, I didn't even feel myself, you

know. I was just done.

And so when they say that the military is taking people to the airport and

they're going different places.

I said, man, I don't care where I go.

I was going anywhere that the plane was going to fly me.

The water had receded.

So we took our mother, who was in a wheelchair, and the rest of the family,

we walked to a vacant lot where a helicopter landed.

That Saturday, we had over 200 helicopters from the 82nd Airborne

Orleans.

The idea was to recover people and get them evacuated and take care of them at

the airport.

At the airport?

We were met by National Guardsmen with guns who said we must get on the plane.

And we begged them to let us go to our sister,

who lived in Houma, Louisiana, which is about an hour's drive away from New

Orleans. We had family that was ready to receive us, but we were forced to get

on the plane.

We had no choice. They had guns.

The first airplanes are getting loaded. Everything seemed to be going well.

But then one of the senior pilots on the ground flying the civilian airplane

said, well, we can't take off. We don't have a manifest.

So he told my major, and my major called me up and said, hey, boss, we got a

problem.

They haven't taken off. The people have been sitting here for hours because we

don't have a manifest.

I said, well, let me talk to them.

So I talked to him on the phone and said, look, a lot of these people here

have identification.

There's no computers out here.

We can't create no manifest. I said, we can give you a yellow piece of paper,

and when they walk on the airplane, you take their names down, and that's going

to be your manifest.

And I fly the fucking airplane, and the planes took off.

We asked, where were we going to go?

Where is this plane going to land?

We don't know.

I said, you don't know. I said, everybody has to know where they're

land.

Don't they have to have a flight plan and this kind of thing?

They said, just get on the plane, ma 'am.

Nothing. We didn't know anything.

We knew that we were leaving New Orleans.

My mind was blank. I didn't know what was going to be next.

We didn't really have control over our destiny.

They tell you you're going to go to Houston. They tell you you're going to

Atlanta, to Chicago, San Francisco. God knows where you'll end up.

The New Orleans International Airport is part of the largest airlift ever on U

.S. soil. More than 10 ,000 hurricane survivors.

We'll witness all day airlifting evacuees to the Louis Armstrong

Airport. Buses also arriving to take people out of the once great city.

I tell you, what a difference a day makes.

24 hours ago, this building behind me, crowded with thousands and thousands of

the most desperate refugees you can imagine, has been emptied.

God bless the United States Army. God bless the United States military. They

pulled this thing together from chaos, confusion, anarchy.

God bless you. Oh, I tell you what, it's great. The All -Americans are here to

help Americans.

That's it.

Is this America?

Do I have freedom of movement?

I thought I was still living in America.

So, you know, it was like, okay, I'm going to do what they tell me to do.

I'm going to cooperate.

I'm not going to cause a ruckus.

But I will get back to New Orleans.

The first wave of hurricane refugees from Louisiana is arriving in Texas this

morning. They're being bussed from the New Orleans Superdome.

As we were moving around the country, the news media were calling

people from New Orleans refugees.

Dallas schools are opening their doors to storm refugee kids, and Dallas is

delivering truckloads of donations to refugees.

How can you be a refugee in your own country?

It offended not only me, but a lot of people.

We are not refugees.

We are American citizens that got caught up in a bad way, and we resent that

word refugees, and they shouldn't use that anymore.

We've been traveling and traveling.

We've been going from one.

shelter to the next shelter, but that's okay because we live it.

The thing that's not all right is we got family members scattered all around.

Where they're scattered at, we don't know.

With approximately a million refugees, 30 states in all are accepting evacuees

in this country's largest migration in 70 years. These were internally

people.

This was the forced migration of people because of Katrina.

And I think within modern history, that was the first time for a lot of

Americans that that happened.

I had never even heard Austin, Texas in my life.

But Austin, they showed us love up there.

But I didn't know where my life was headed from there.

About a month.

After leaving the Superdome, once the water receded, I was able to come back

check on the house in St. Bernard Parish.

You can see the devastation.

Coming back after the city was emptied out.

It was strange, for sure. A city that is known for celebrating, known for its

food, known for being loud.

It was dead quiet.

When I came back to New Orleans, everything looked dead.

Everything smelled dead.

It was just desolate.

Just, oh my God, I could not believe. I was like, this is never going to be back

right.

The graveyard, just the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.

We have above -ground tombs, but the water saturated the earth,

and it made a lot of the graves come up.

That casket's coming out, man.

One of my cousins we had just buried, like, not too long ago, her casket was

actually sitting out.

In the open, exposed.

Now my people grave is right on top of my people graves.

Look all around.

This is not cool, man.

I was thinking about after they bury their people, they want to see graves

this. I wasn't ready for this.

It's one thing to think about the loss.

It's another thing to see it.

When you see it, it's real.

When I saw my home for the first time, I was devastated. The tears just kind of

rolled down my face.

Mud was still inside the home. It was just a muddy mess.

All of my belongings were ruined, all of my pictures, everything.

I had mold that was like going up to the ceiling almost.

Birth certificate, pictures, everything was gone.

When you come back to something that has been your dream

and you realize that it has been destroyed,

It was like, what do I do?

Oh, man.

Man, look at my crib.

It's smashed down to the ground.

My mama trailer.

Look at my other crib that we just built, laying it to the side.

Look at my crib.

Man, this don't even feel like home, man.

Hey, girl. Hey, send the money.

Hey. Hey, girl.

Hey. Shake Missy.

Shake Missy.

I'm out of the dog.

She was in the... She was in the...

Look at my skin, man. My face is green.

There's devastation.

I got some of my old letters from the military.

My military books up there, man.

You gotta step over stuff, walk through stuff.

I can't really get in here.

There's so much mud and thick stuff up in here, man.

It's going to be enough. This house is damn gutted out.

I can't get to nothing. I really can't find what I'm looking for.

But I guess whatever I got out the deal, I guess it'll be all

right.

I just leave you confused.

What are we going to do?

How are we going to fix this?

And it just seemed like it was unfixable at the time.

Louisiana today officially ended the search for bodies of people killed by

Hurricane Katrina. The death toll in the state now stands at 964.

Because of the heat, And the lack of communication and the absence of

a lot of the people we found in home dead were elderly, poor, and disabled.

And they were alone.

My brother, when we went walking in the water, kicked the... Stop sign and put a

big hole in his leg.

He died from an infection.

And my niece that was walking with us, she had lupus already, but then she

couldn't take her medicine, so she developed meningitis and it moved up to

brain.

So she couldn't talk. All she could do is lay there with her eyes open.

And so, you know, that was one of the reasons why.

I didn't want to come back to New Orleans because I didn't want to have to

relive that again.

From the air today, we saw miles of once -flooded houses. As many as 250 ,000

homes may be uninhabitable.

In New Orleans, there was anger and frustration today when a sweeping new

blueprint to rebuild the city was unveiled.

Anyone who lives in a neighborhood highlighted here in yellow, most of the

could be forced to move. The plan calls for new parks in green that would help

control flooding.

Residents would be resettled in areas circled in red.

This was a plan that somebody had come up with to turn different areas into

green spaces for people that would also be able to capture water during storms.

A great, great idea.

except that people actually lived there.

When they came up with the plan about the new New Orleans, it angered me

many of the areas where the people at the bottom of socioeconomic scale and

people who did not have a voice were being discounted.

Immediately we need to identify and begin assembling properties that can

part of the system.

The Lord Knight Ward.

It was supposed to be a green space.

How are you going to make a green space out of my property?

When the map came out, the first thing that came to my mind was, hell no.

It was hell no because it goes back to the legacy that that house that I live

provided.

I'm not giving up this man's property, and I'm referring to my grandfather.

Some worry that the black wards of the city are being intentionally neglected

and may even be bulldozed, leaving residents displaced and disenfranchised.

It did not go over well with me.

It didn't go well with most of the citizens who wanted to come back and

their homes and their life.

And that's when I think folks started to think about how can we organize and

fight back.

Any area of the city of New Orleans that is sparsely populated, they are going

to want to use the eminent domain to take over the property.

We have a resident on the phone. Whoever's in here, we have a resident on

phone right now. She's watching them at Galveston and Renee, bulldozing a house.

Give me the city attorney's number.

We will move the people. Just get your doors and stop. Ain't no danger as long

as they stop.

These are people's homes.

They're leaving. All right!

Yeah.

Now you got a whole bunch of mad citizens that's in the city and going to

whole lot madder. So mad they were screaming today at the commission that

up with the rebuilding plan.

This is a big audacious plan. It was put together by obviously very brilliant

people. But guess what?

You missed the boat.

In fairness to them, there were some areas that you knew because of the

elevation and because of the amount of flooding that it may have taken on

the storm, it may have not made sense to rebuild there. But everything is

personal in New Orleans.

For people that grew up here, their neighborhood is everything.

The high school where they went to is everything.

So if the mayor says, if the city says, this part isn't going to come back,

we're going to make this green space, like...

it's going to cut you deep. I hate you because you've been in the background

trying to scheme and get our land.

It's been happening. That's not happening.

We know that they have wildfires in California.

They have tornadoes in the middle of America. They have flooding in Florida,

they've never told them, you can't rebuild.

I don't think it's right if you try to take our property.

Because like I said, Over my dead body.

I didn't die with Katrina.

Bye.

The blowback of it was so bad that the mayor basically said, not only we're not

doing that, we're not going to do anything except what the localities want

do.

We as a community will have the ultimate say in how we move forward.

If you don't have the resources, how can you put your life back together?

The people who live in these more affluent neighborhoods, they're up here.

So who's going to need the most resources?

The people who are here or the people who are down here? It shouldn't be about

equal. It should be about equity.

How you survive a disaster is directly proportional to how well prepared and

well you are before the disaster.

The bottom line to that, the poor got poor and the rich got richer.

When the federal levies broke 10 years ago, we in the world gasped at the

possibility that in the blink of an eye, New Orleans as we know it would be

gone.

But 10 years after Katrina, we're no longer recovering.

We're not rebuilding. Now we're creating.

We're in the midst of a retail and restaurant building boom.

Can you think of any other place in the world where you can lose 100 ,000 people

and gain 600 more restaurants than we had before Katrina?

I mean, come on.

Ladies and gentlemen, your city is changing before your eyes.

It was the tale of two cities.

The rest of the city was pulling back together.

But go ask those in the night watch.

Ask them who was left behind.

In some instances, the city was back, but it just wasn't back equitably for

everyone.

Louisiana got $10 billion in federal money to create and oversee the Road

Program. It's the largest housing recovery effort in American history.

Our plan offers a fair and practical solution to return people to their homes

and their community.

This is a great victory for Louisiana.

The road home turned out to be the road to nowhere for a lot of people.

The road home was supposed to cover the cost that insurance and other federal

aid didn't.

People have waited for months for clearance of the money and everything

strangled by all this red tape.

Every time you went in there, applying to the government for road home

assistance.

It seemed like the rules changed from week to week.

So now you have to expend more time and energy, and you're still dealing with

the mental effects of Hurricane Katrina. It's overwhelming.

The road home had a fatal flaw.

It awarded grants based on repair costs or pre -storm value, whichever was left.

In the poorest neighborhoods, a home's pre -storm value tended to be less than

the cost of repairing or rebuilding it. Those neighborhoods were majority black.

So folks who lived in Lakeview, a predominantly white, upper, middle

to upper -class area that already had the resources to rebuild, they got

more money than folks.

that lived in, let's just say, the Lower Ninth Ward, even though the building

materials cost was the same.

A two -by -four for my house cost the same as a two -by -four for another

person's house. So why are you going to give me a different amount of money?

It was like they were sabotaging the recovery in areas where black folk

Everybody wants to come home.

It's just that we can't come home because the government is trying to keep

away from home.

This is going to cost at least $250 ,000 to repair my property.

I was fully insured, but I had just borrowed on the building.

And when I borrowed on the building, it was put for collateral.

And when the storm hit and I went back, the bank took the money. They told me.

that they weren't giving me anything.

I got zero from Road Home.

Homeowners can choose repair, rebuild, accept a buyout and relocate within

Louisiana, or sell and leave the state.

I started looking at what they were trying to do. I'm like, you're not

my property because I am not selling.

But some folks just did give up and say, I don't want this headache.

I'll take the buyout.

And so what they accomplished with a lot of people was to get them out and away

from the city.

After like nine and a half years being in Austin, I went back to New Orleans.

But when I came back, it wasn't no more affordable housing.

No more houses in the hood, you know, where you can get a one -bedroom for

and a two -bedroom for $500.

Back in the day, most of the houses was doubles, you know, a family on this side

and a family on that side.

But after Katrina, they started making single houses out of double houses like

you see here.

That's two families that's out of a house.

The cost of living became so high, I made a decision to leave New Orleans.

After Katrina, I knew I couldn't come back home immediately since I had to go

and work and make money.

My dad had been a master carpenter for many years, so I just drove all the way

to California to work with him.

Now I just got to keep it clean and travel where God wants me to travel.

Then go back home eventually.

I just was thinking about a new beginning because I knew what I had left

It was a lot of devastation, a lot of pain, so...

I just had my moments when I'm like, you know, kind of like singing an old

spiritual hymn, you know, from like my grandmother and going through the

mountains.

Lord, I'm climbing higher mountains,

trying to get home.

So that was kind of like my whole thing. Like I just was like, I'm just trying

to get home and I don't even know where home is just yet.

Trying to get home.

Well, the driving force behind me coming back to New Orleans was my mom.

After the storm, we had

FEMA trailers all over the land.

And that's another trailer in front of my house.

And from that Road Home program, she did receive some money.

My mom bought this trailer.

And so with that money, my mom finally bought like a big mobile trailer to make

sure we had a place to stay.

But then maybe about 20 days later, my mom passed away.

All I have left is these pictures.

I kept remodeling. I kept working on that house.

Almost complete. I still have somewhere to go.

But as the years start going on, the grants start going away.

Eventually, I had to move to another location, make more money to be able to

come back and put in resources.

So every now and again, I'll just come back, try to touch up on some things.

Whoa.

A lot of work still left to go up in here. But something that me was saying,

my mom's sake and everything that she did, I need to finish the house.

Even though it was impossible to finish the house.

Every time I come back here, I got memories of my life, my mom, my stepdad.

All my people right there.

My neighbor next door, she's gone. Everybody is gone.

It's depressing to come here and look around and know that none of these

who know me, that know my story, they're no longer here.

It's like pictures flashing, videos flashing of what it used to be, but

it's no longer.

So when I finally felt like I did all I could do, now maybe, I

felt like my mom's spirit was all around me saying, it's time to

go, man.

You can go.

It's okay.

Don't worry about it.

And I left.

Hurricane Katrina laid bare the massive failures of the Corps of Engineers

hurricane protection system of levees and floodwalls.

Congress gave the Corps $14 .6 billion to make it right.

All of this was done after Katrina.

If you look at this, you can see the construction of it is different.

It's more stable.

It goes down deeper.

and it's fortified much better to take stress from rising water or wind.

Since Katrina, the U .S. Army Corps of Engineers repaired the levees. Many of

the repairs are quite robust.

However, the Corps of Engineers themselves recently admitted that when

determined the height, they didn't take into account global warming.

No sooner did the Corps of Engineers finish the last piece of that upgrade

project than it posted a notice in the Federal Register saying subsidence and

sea level rise will cause levees to require future lifts.

Within 70 -odd years, the water level around New Orleans is

going to be four feet higher than at present.

In addition, many of the wetlands are gone. There's no friction.

Their water can move much further and get much higher.

As it relates to climate change, communities of color are the ones who

impacted the first and the worst.

Many folks that live in and among these communities do not have the resources

that others have, and so they are at a higher risk.

for what's going to happen in the future. Tonight, Maria's direct hit,

devastating Puerto Rico.

Unfortunately, it's not going to get any better.

Sweeping devastation in Lahaina.

It's just going to get worse.

The deadliest and most devastating storm in North Carolina history.

This is home.

I've been here all my life.

But what really gets me,

the Lower Ninth Ward, really the hardest hit area, is forgotten.

An entire ward of this city, the Ninth Ward, appears to be...

up to its rooftops in water. I told you earlier today I didn't think this had

turned out to be Armageddon. I was wrong.

The environmental injustice that is happening in our community

is man -made.

But that man also could be man -soul.

See?

I can remember as a little boy, we used to go back there into the swamp.

It was our wonderland, our playground.

It started out small, and it grew.

It's a little bit like it was before.

They're planting cypress trees.

There's an outdoor classroom.

You can fish.

I'm an ambassador to the park.

I welcome people.

I tell them it's much.

as I can about when I was growing up in that same area, you know, and what we're

trying to do.

Because it's something that we are doing for ourselves.

The start over, you know, new beginning.

When Katrina hit and it took so many of our elders, it was

like... losing so much of our history.

They celebrated together.

They praised the Lord together.

It was a true community.

A lot of people couldn't come back. A lot of people didn't come back.

It's heartbreaking because New Orleans lost a whole, maybe two generations.

of people and that took away a lot of the culture that

sits in this area.

And so I wanted to come back into the community and do what I had to do.

And I was not going to stop until I got back to where I intended to be.

Back in 2005.

Every penny I have made since Katrina has gone into me getting

back into my salon and my property.

It's mine.

And like I told the people that wrote home, you will have to prime out of my

wrinkled up little brown hands to get it.

There have been a lot of changes in New Orleans since Katrina.

You would enter by steps here, and you would come into the living room. The

living room ran the width of the lot.

The kitchen would have been right up in here.

This is where Mom did all her famous cooking.

You know, I'm a New Orleans boy.

There's a certain energy that comes out of that land.

That house was an extension of me.

And the most difficult thing was to demolish the house.

I felt like I was taking a piece of me away.

Came back here because I couldn't stay away. I wanted to be home, but now it's

the new New Orleans.

It's totally different.

You know, it's like the roots are here, but the tree has been stubbed.

We still have our culture, and that's a good thing.

A lot of my friends.

They kept them masking and Mardi Gras going after Katrina.

That was their life, you know, and it was my life

too.

I'm in a tribe that my father started, the Flamin' Arrows.

My dad, he was an Indian chief. My mom was a seamstress.

We really not Mardi Gras Indians.

The correct name is Black Masked Indians.

On Carnival morning, we wear these suits and pay homage to the real Native

Indians who helped our people.

So it's a family thing passed down through generations.

It's my last time putting on a suit, but I have grandchildren, and I'm going to

keep the tradition going.

We got to pass the torch down.

One of my cousins who I'm turning my tribe over to, he was like, well, you

we need you to come back home because we can't let you go out like that.

I still take New Orleans with me wherever I go.

But before Katrina, I would have never thought that I would have ever left New

Orleans. You know, I just thought that I was going to be a New Orleanian, like,

all my life.

I mean, I love New Orleans, but it's not the

same New Orleans, you know.

20 years later, it's totally different.

Talk is different. The walk is different.

The neighborhoods that we grew up in with our families is totally different.

Katrina took a lot, but it didn't take my pride, my

dignity, or my culture.

That's one thing I can say about New Orleans. This is some surviving people.

We are the Canaries.

And this coal mine called America.

The horrors that people went through after Katrina didn't have to happen.

There's no way you could justify to me why Hurricane Katrina turned

from a disaster to a tragedy.

I guess the bottom line is show how much we cared then for the

most vulnerable and how much we care right now.

What makes America great is our ability to reach out and help others in time of

need.

But that's where the lesson is learned.

It's upon us.

It's upon us to wake up.