Deadly storm that destroyed 80% of city and killed hundreds marks 20th anniversary

The memories of Hurricane Katrina continue to haunt Lucrece Phillips like the most stubborn, malevolent ghost. But there is one particularly heartbreaking recollection of the category 5 storm that devastated New Orleans 20 years ago which the poet, singer and community organiser finds impossible to forget. It involves a baby.

When the hurricane described as "the worst natural disaster ever to hit the US" smashed through the levees and tore up the city, Lucrece was unable to escape from her home after a recent operation to repair a broken back and neck. As the flood waters rose menacingly, her house was shaken free from its moorings and started to bob like a cork on the waves.

Speaking exclusively to The Express from New Orleans, Lucrece recalls: "There was so much water. It was like opening a faucet. It was just pouring in and the house was knocked off its foundations. It was teetering. So we were all signalling to each other: 'Wait, wait, don't move. You stay on that side because we're level right now'.

"Then the water would move and we'd all have to adjust. Everybody added their own portion of something to that recipe of survival."

Lucrece's terror only increased when she noticed that trains from the railroad opposite her house were now floating down the street.

When the noxious water sped up to the second floor of her house in just 20 minutes, she and six family members (including a two-year-old) were forced to seek refuge in her attic.

After many hours of utter panic, they fortuitously discovered an old mobile phone. They used it to dial 911 and were finally rescued by an emergency worker in a boat some five hours later.

But then, just as their fears started to subside, the nightmare really began. As the rescuer guided them towards safety on the bridge of a nearby highway, Lucrece caught sight of something near the boat.

Still visibly shaken, she takes up the story. "A baby, hair freshly combed, was in the water. She was deceased, but I still wanted to get this baby.

"I told the guy driving the boat, 'Let me get the baby out of the water. Maybe an ambulance on the bridge is waiting and they can take her and identify her. Maybe we can find out who her parents are.' But he just said, 'That baby is gone'."

She continues: "He took a stick and pushed the baby away. He said, 'Ma'am, we're worried about the living, not the dead right now'."

By this point, tears are streaming down Lucrece's face, her torment still visible today. "It took at least three years of therapy for me to stop thinking that I should have got that baby which the guy pushed away," she says.

"It took three years for me to stop dreaming of that baby being brought to the bridge and handed to the authorities. I needed that therapy in order to sleep. It took a long time."

She was mentally tortured in other ways as well. "There was a time I couldn't cross over water on a bridge," she explains. "I had to lie down on the floor of the car and ask, 'Are we over the water yet?' All I saw in that water was bodies."

Lucrece's story is not unusual despite its ability to shock. Hurricane Katrina was the cataclysm that wiped out not only 80% of the city, but huge numbers of its people. Battering New Orleans with 175mph winds, the tropical cyclone was responsible for at least 1,392 fatalities (the exact number will never be known) and damage estimated at $125billion - the costliest storm on record to hit the US.

Lucrece is one of several survivors who recount their heart-rending tales in the new documentary series Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time on National Geographic this Sunday, and on Disney+. But it was not just the residents who were deeply distressed by the cyclone. Some of the rescuers were equally affected.

Working for the US Coast Guard, Sara Faulkner pulled 48 people to safety from her helicopter on the first day after the storm. One rescue is still imprinted in her mind and as she recollects being winched down from her helicopter to save a baby from a balcony about to be inundated, she wipes away tears with a handkerchief.

"When a mother is so desperate to get her baby out of danger that she hangs him over a two-storey balcony - that's alarming," she says.

"She didn't even bat an eyelash. It was like, 'I don't know you. You're connected to a giant, loud helicopter with hurricane force winds blowing us around. But here's my baby. Just get him out of here'.

"I just snatched him, he was so small," she continues. "We don't have rescue equipment for babies, so to carry a baby in your bare arms with nothing keeping him from falling except for me is very nerve-wracking."

With almost all of New Orleans underwater, the city was an immense, sprawling disaster zone. More than a million people were displaced.

But Lucrece helped her family through the horror by maintaining a positive attitude. Even in the darkest hour, she always looked for the light.

It was extremely tough at times though. "I'd never felt so isolated," she admits. "I thought, 'The world's ending, and we're the only few that are left'."

Just before Lucrece's family struggled into the attic, she recalls how her 20-year-old daughter "started writing our names and dates of birth on the wall."

When Lucrece asked her daughter why she was doing this, "She said, 'So when they come in here and find us, they'll know who we are. Because, you know, mum, we're probably not going to make it through this. It's too much!'

"I erased her writing from the wall and told her, 'Girl, we're going to make it through this.' I felt hopeless during that time when she was writing on the wall, but something inside told me: 'This isn't it. If we keep our heads together, we're going to live'." Lucrece was right, of course.

The fate of all the people left stranded in New Orleans, however, was jeopardised by the scandalously inadequate official response to the hurricane.

Local officials dubbed the painfully slow federal effort "a national disgrace". The disaster was caused as much by people as by nature.

For instance, a fleet of buses meant to transport people to safety, which had been promised by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), never showed up.

People died of thirst, exhaustion and violence in the days after the storm, and this only intensified the anger directed at George W Bush's government.

Some have alleged that racism contributed to the delays in the federal response. For instance, during A Concert for Hurricane Relief, a benefit concert for victims of the hurricane, rapper Kanye West attacked the government's reaction to the crisis, asserting that, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Malik Rahim, a community organiser who helped coordinate relief efforts, is still angry about the woeful official response to the carnage. "This didn't have to happen like this, not in America. You can't justify what happened after Katrina."

He adds: "What makes a disaster a tragedy? A tragedy is when you fail to do what you should be doing. The first tragedy of Katrina was not being prepared, not having an exit strategy in this city for the 100,000 people that we knew didn't have a means of escape."

An image of Bush looking down imperiously on the hurricane damage from an aeroplane summed up the government's indifference to the plight of the survivors and did enormous harm to his reputation.

As misinformation swirled around the city about the conduct of the 30,000 who had taken shelter in the Superdome, the National Guard were called in and prevented anyone from leaving it. They also initiated a "shoot to kill" policy.

Ten civilians were shot in the mayhem after the storm. "Nothing prepared me for what happened after Katrina," says Malik. "It's very hard to see when that violence is being inflicted upon you and you can't defend yourself from it."

When Lucrece's family arrived at the Superdome after being rescued from her home, soldiers searched the nappy of the two-year-old in her party to see if it contained any concealed weapons.

Twenty years on, Lucrece can still barely contain her fury about the appalling way in which her community was abandoned. "The levee system failed us. The police failed us. FEMA failed us.

"We were just human beings who needed help and we weren't getting it from anyone. We were just discarded. We were the only ones who stuck by us."

One of the most regrettable aspects of the catastrophe is that no official lessons appear to have been learned from it.

According to Traci A. Curry, the director of Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, "The storm is something that happened to people in New Orleans in 2005, but it continues to reverberate in their lives 20 years later."

She adds: "It can also be very instructive. We've seen the contours of the Katrina story play out again and again.

"You have an extreme weather event that is exacerbated by man-made impacts on the environment. It then encounters an infrastructure that is not prepared for it. The outcome is that the people who are most vulnerable experience the most harm on the front end and are the least able to recover on the back end."

Lucrece reflects on the calamity that laid waste to her home city two decades ago. "That yearning, that culture, that music, that language that no one could understand, that close-knit community - everything changed that day."

All the same, New Orleans's astoundingly resilient people have refused to be beaten by the hurricane.

Kevin Goodman from the 7th Ward, who defiantly continues to dress up for the city's world-famous Mardi Gras celebrations every year, muses. "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. We are some surviving people."

Still suffering from the trauma, Lucrece was unable to return to New Orleans for several years after Katrina. "I'm scarred by the events. I'll never be the same. But I hope to God I'll never be as broken as that ever again."

Eventually, in 2013, Lucrece felt compelled to go back to her home city. She was inexorably drawn by its indomitable spirit and its unfailing support. "Now it's the new New Orleans, it's totally different. It's like the roots are here, but the tree's been stopped."

For all that, she says: "New Orleans is a special, special place. I came back because I couldn't stay away. I had to come home to the love that I'm used to."

• Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time is on Nat Geo at 8pm on Sunday and is streaming on Disney+