Actor and author Wendell Pierce grew up in New Orleans’ Pontchartrain Park neighborhood, and his parents still lived there in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina made landfall.
Pierce’s parents were able to evacuate in time, but the storm destroyed their house of 50 years was destroyed as Katrina flooded 80% of New Orleans and killed 1,400 people.
It’s been 20 years since Katrina hit, but Pierce says he still thinks about what he saw in the aftermath of the hurricane. On the Sunday before the storm hit, Pierce said his neighbors — an elderly couple called the Bynums — were longtime residents and decided to stay in their house to ride out the storm.
Afterwards, Pierce found out they died in the flood; Mr. Bynum died in his home, and Ms. Bynum tried to climb a tree out of the water and drowned.
“I think of them because it was not a natural disaster in New Orleans,” Pierce said. “It was a manmade disaster.”
New Orleans residents knew that the city’s levee system was their only protection against flooding, and if it failed, the city would fill with water “like a bathtub,” Pierce said.
Before the storm hit, Pierce said the area ran a disaster drill, and the local government was instructed by federal officials not to mobilize any relief efforts. The federal government said it planned to send in buses and helicopters to evacuate people.
“When the real test came with Katrina, they abandoned us,” Pierce said.
Additionally, he places blame on insurance companies. Pierce said his parents had paid 50 years of premiums before the storm decimated their house, only to be abandoned by their insurance provider when they needed it most.
“While we reflect on the resilience and our restoration,” Pierce said, “I also reflect on those who were never held accountable and the lives that were lost because of the complacency and the ineptness of the response by the federal government.”
In the aftermath of Katrina, 25,000 residents took shelter at the Louisiana Superdome. Pierce said the only way in or out of New Orleans was to drive a few blocks from the Superdome onto the Mississippi River bridge. Once out of the city, Pierce heard reports of people stuck in the Superdome. He wanted to go back into New Orleans to help them out.
“We weren’t allowed back in the city while the federal government was nowhere to be found,” Pierce said. “That is a sting as well. So many people lost their lives because of it.”
Pierce, who starred in the HBO series “Treme,” about the aftermath of Katrina, was determined to rebuild Pontchartrain Park — largely regarded as the first middle-class Black neighborhood in New Orleans — after the devastation.
“Pontchartrain Park was created at the height of the Civil Rights Movement,” Pierce said. “My father, my mother, that generation of post-World War II did not have access to the post-war suburbia that was being built in this country because of the prohibitions of segregation.”
Pierce credits the neighborhood with allowing him to grow up with a great education system and be successful in the world.
“When we were in the deepest part of the flooding, I knew that we owed it to them to rebuild Pontchartrain Park,” Pierce said, “brick by brick. House by house. Block by block.”
Other neighborhoods, Pierce said, were lost in the rebuilding efforts, namely Black and working-class communities. He said that many of the recovery efforts seemed determined to wipe out Black neighborhoods by turning them into parks.
“There are those who will always try to imply that because we are on a regular basis or have a hurricane season, that we should not rebuild,” Pierce said. “There are those who took advantage of this disaster.”
So Pierce founded a nonprofit land development company and worked to get Pontchartrain Park on the National Register of Historic Places, so if another disaster comes, the homes there will be protected.
Now, decades out from Hurricane Katrina, the federal government has cut funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Without FEMA, more disaster-stricken areas would be on their own, like New Orleans in 2005, Pierce said. To Pierce, it’s like the U.S. didn’t learn anything from Katrina.
“We should celebrate our resilience and our restoration and how we exercise our right of self-determination,” Pierce said. “But we should also remember that it was horrific.”
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Karyn Miller-Medzon produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Grace Griffin produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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