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Jim Tanner talks with 10-year-old daughter Allie after she finishes dinner. The family relocated from the New Orleans area to Stafford County after Hurricane Katrina.
Anasa Mulagha talks with Kevin Montgomery about projects in her Fawn Lake home. Montgomery moved to this area from New Orleans and is now trying to build a home-improvement business here.
North Stafford Church of Christ member Rick White (left) talks with Slidell homeowners David and Christy Guastella about cleaning their hurricane-damaged home. White is on the board
Dr. Doyle James visits with daughter Darlene Tanner and his granddaughter Allie on the back deck of the Tanners' Stafford home. Darlene Tanner says she misses life on the Gulf Coast.
Dawn Sklepovich and Kevin Dillard with LifeCare Medical Transports Inc. relax in the Chancellorsville Volunteer Fire & Rescue Department as they wait for late-night emergency calls. After Katrina, they ran rescue calls in New Orleans for more than a month. |
Story by Rusty Dennen and photos by Rebecca Sell
Hurricane Katrina wrecked parts of the Gulf Coast with breathtaking efficiency a year ago Tuesday, killing more than 1,800 people, causing $81 billion in damage and searing images of heartache and destruction into the nation's consciousness.
The worst natural disaster in U.S. history was half a continent away from Fredericksburg, but the storm's effects linger even here.
The region has become a home away from home for dozens of evacuees, a staging area for church groups and other volunteers and relief agencies lending a helping hand, and a source of funds for the ongoing rebuilding effort.
Some of those impacted by the storm share their
Away from home
Darlene and Jim Tanner, both 45, are worlds away from the life they had carved out in Mandeville, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, about 10 miles outside New Orleans.
The couple and their two children, Chaz, 14, and Allie, 10, have relocated to a comfortable home at Leeland Station in southern Stafford County.
They are among dozens of Gulf Coast families whose lives were turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina--families who, through relatives, jobs or by chance, wound up living in the Fredericksburg area. Some have returned, some are rebuilding their shattered lives here, and some like the Tanners are biding their time until they can go back.
Jim is a federal agent who works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington. Darlene is a stay-at-home mom.
Both miss life in the Deep South and are adjusting to a world with a faster, more impersonal pace.
The Tanners wisely evacuated to Jackson, Miss., the day before Katrina hit.
After the hurricane, they had no idea whether they even had a home to return to. Three large trees had fallen onto it. Though there was no flooding, the dining room now had a view of the sky.
"I was extremely lucky," Jim said. A close friend was a contractor in Mobile, Ala., where Darlene grew up and met him in college.
Jim gave him a call "and he was there, like Johnny on the spot. He drove a crane all the way down from Mobile, pulled out the trees and set up tarps."
Meanwhile, Jim moved the family to stay with relatives in Mobile.
After the levees broke, flooding most of New Orleans, Jim was assigned to assist New Orleans police struggling to regain order.
"I had a family stuck in Mobile, a damaged house and a mission in New Orleans. I was dealing with all of that," he recalled.
He wasn't prepared for the tableau of destruction.
"You'd see different news broadcasts on TV, but when you stepped outside, you stepped out of this country" into a Third World scenario, he said. He directed seven ICE special-response teams that helped restore order and clear buildings after shootings and looting were reported.
Sixteen- to 18-hour workdays were common. At one point he was hospitalized briefly for dehydration.
His teams handled all kinds of tasks. "We had small Zodiac boats, trying to get as many people as we could." He and his men slept on the floor in the lobby of the damaged Sheraton Hotel off Canal Street.
One of his lasting memories is of stopping in the middle of the Mississippi River bridge one night and seeing no traffic and no lights across the city.
"We saw the best and the worst of people. I think it left an impression on me forever."
When Chaz and Allie returned to school two months after Katrina, they were deeply affected by contact with other children whose families had lost everything.
"Our little girl was saying we needed to get clothes and toys for [those] kids. They would hear stories of somebody dying. Everybody was affected," Jim said.
He worked the long days in New Orleans until a few days before Christmas. The couple managed to sell their house, and in the meantime, Tanner was reassigned to the Office of Homeland Security in Washington.
Darlene and the children arrived here last Mother's Day.
The journey from Mandeville to Jackson, Mobile and Stafford has not been easy. Friends and family are hundreds of miles away.
"You're used to big Sunday dinners," Darlene said, sighing. "You still cook like a lot of people are going to come. It's a different way of life here. Your life revolves around work."
"The kids are doing pretty good, but it's hard to move a 14-year-old," she added.
It's still painful for Jim to talk about his experiences in New Orleans, and to watch the TV coverage of the storm that is all over the news with the anniversary approaching.
Still, he said, "We definitely want to go back. That's home."
To the rescue
It's been a memorable year for Kevin Dillard and Dawn Sklepovich, who ran rescue calls for more than a month straight in and around New Orleans.
Dillard, 46, is president of LifeCare Medical Transports Inc. of Stafford, the largest private ambulance service in Virginia. Sklepovich, 51, is director of operations for the company's Northern Virginia region.
LifeCare was one of the first out-of-state ambulance companies to arrive in Louisiana, two days after the monster storm.
A year after Katrina, Dillard and Sklepovich are back to running medical calls on their regular Tuesday night shift at Chancellorsville Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department in Spotsylvania County.
But part of them remains among the ruined homes and towering live oaks along the Gulf Coast. Days and nights running calls from Baton Rouge into New Orleans are frozen in their memories, and in the minds of the 30 LifeCare workers who spent a total of eight weeks in Louisiana last September and October.
The day after Katrina hit last Labor Day weekend, Dillard got a call from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He needed to find rescue workers who could drop everything, pack immediately and drive the 20-plus hours to the disaster zone.
"Everyone I called agreed--not knowing how long we would be there," he said.
LifeCare is no stranger to disasters. Its ambulances were among the first to respond to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon.
"The first call, Dawn and I were sent into downtown New Orleans to help move somebody out of one of the [flooded] hospitals," Dillard recalled. The conditions were unlike anything the pair had seen.
"It was night, there was no electricity and no lights," he said. Street signs were damaged, gone or twisted in another direction. The scope of the disaster was such that no one at the emergency operations center even thought to have a supply of city maps on hand for rescue crews to use.
In the first few days, some hurricane survivors were taking pot shots at police, ambulances and helicopters, and some vehicles were hijacked.
"We left thinking we'd be there a couple of days or a week to start off with. But there was so much devastation that we lost track of the days," Dillard said.
One day, Sklepovich and Dillard helped remove bodies of elderly patients who had been left to die in their beds at a hospital in New Orleans after power went out and generators flooded.
Sklepovich's eyes filled with tears as she remembered the scene recently. "Even today you get flashbacks and it affects you," she said.
Some days, she and Dillard accompanied rescuers in boats who pulled people off rooftops.
Less than a month after Katrina hit, Hurricane Rita arrived, whipping the Texas-Louisiana border. FEMA asked LifeCare to stay another month. With lessons learned from Katrina, Dillard's crews evacuated nursing home and hospital patients in Lake Charles, La., before the storm, and returned afterward to run rescue calls.
Every few weeks, LifeCare crews would head home and fresh ones would return. Dillard was there six weeks straight.
He has lasting memories of his time in Louisiana, some nightmarish, some uplifting.
In Lake Charles, near the Texas border, "I remember this big, husky doctor hugging me, with tears in his eyes. He said his family lived in New Orleans and if it was not for people like us, many of them would not have survived."
Earlier this week, after tropical storm Debby formed in the eastern Atlantic, FEMA called to see if LifeCare would be available in the event of another big hurricane. Dillard said yes, without hesitation.
"If we had not received a dime, if it happened again, we'd go," he said. "If there's a need out there, you have to worry about that later. We're in the business of helping people."
Moving mountains
Others who showed up in force from the Fredericksburg area to work in New Orleans and devastated locales such as Pass Christian and Biloxi on Mississippi's Gulf Coast were doing God's work.
Churches of every denomination here responded in the months since the hurricanes, sending hundreds--if not thousands--of volunteers.
The numbers are significant. Kip Robinson, Virginia Conference Coordinator of the United Methodist Volunteers in Mission, estimates that through June, 3,000 volunteers had gone to the Gulf Coast.
Rick White, a member of the North Stafford Church of Christ, made his first trip down shortly after Katrina and has been back several times since.
It's been a life-changing experience. He's now on the board of Hilltop Rescue and Relief, one of the larger church-run agencies still working in the Gulf.
"The week before last we were down for an extended weekend," said White. He and his wife, June, joined up with other volunteers to "muck out" a house. Sons Alex, 19, and Lee, 17, have also made the trip.
Armed with crowbars, shovels, and masks to keep out the dust, the faithful work in dirty, sometimes dangerous conditions, gutting houses, removing ruined possessions and appliances, leaving only bare studs.
There's a mountain of work still left to do.
Since the storm, more than 3,000 Hilltop volunteers--many from the Fredericksburg area--have cleaned out more than 1,100 homes.
"We've still got about 900 [homeowners] on the list, waiting to be mucked out," White said.
The Louisiana United Methodist Storm Recovery Center in New Orleans estimates that cleanup and construction there could last another five years.
Hilltop started in a backyard in hard-hit Slidell, La., and grew quickly. White, 47, a defense contractor who lives in White Oak, found himself drawn to the task.
"We were convinced that this was something only God could do and he did it. As soon as the doors opened, we had about 500 volunteers in for spring break," White said.
The group recently relocated to expanded quarters in an empty school in Chalmette in New Orleans. Next weekend, Hilltop is having a reunion for volunteers to return for a three-day "muckfest" to work on more homes.
White said the organization hopes to set up affiliates around the country to respond to future disasters.
A helping hand
New Orleans native Kevin Montgomery now calls Fredericksburg home.
And, for now, he plans to stay.
"It's been one experience after another, and I've had a lot of challenges to deal with," Montgomery said this week.
Left with little after Katrina but the clothes on his back, the 42-year-old has found a church family and friends in a place he never expected to be.
Montgomery rode out the storm in an apartment on the east side of New Orleans. He wound up in his attic after 10 feet of water flooded the neighborhood. He cut a hole in his roof and set up a tarp to shelter him from the sun.
The next day he was rescued by a police boat. He was taken to a highway overpass and then made his way to the infamous convention center, which was crowded and chaotic.
After four days he was evacuated to Fort Smith, Ark., where he met a family with connections to the Fredericksburg area. He lived in a motel here for a few months.
Last November to February were a low point.
"I was not doing too well," he said. He was waiting on financial help from FEMA, which never came.
Then he began attending Mount Hope Baptist Church in Spotsylvania. That connection helped him find woodworking, painting and ceramic-tile jobs. He's trying to build a local home-improvements business.
He's been impressed by the kindness of strangers: One man gave him a computer. Century 21 Realty on Courthouse Road in Spotsylvania gave him money to visit family back home over Christmas.
Many evacuees here continue to need help. In Stafford County, for example, 10 families get regular assistance from the Department of Social Services, said department director Michael Muse. This year, over 3,000 evacuee households were receiving FEMA rental assistance statewide.
The Central Virginia Housing Coalition, a local nonprofit housing help agency, got Montgomery into an apartment, and he's found a girlfriend who works at Mary Washington Hospital.
Earlier this week, he visited his 74-year-old mother in an assisted-living center in Pearl River, La.
Despite all he's been through, "God has been blessing me," Montgomery said.
"I'm just grateful for the opportunity to do better for myself."
To reach RUSTY DENNEN:
Email: rdennen@freelancestar.com
