Children of the Storm – Inside Climate News

BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala.—It was already too late. 

As Hurricane Katrina blew ashore along the Gulf Coast with winds over 125 miles an hour, Truong Van Dai, an oyster shucker, drove off in his station wagon to help a friend in dire need.

Before he realized what was happening, floodwaters from the hurricane’s storm surge were slapping against the floor of the car. He couldn’t go any further. Soon, he’d realized he couldn’t even turn back. The car would be his family’s first loss to what would become one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history.

Truong got out of the station wagon and started doing the only thing he could—wading through the floodwaters back toward his home. 

When he arrived, his family had finished packing their 1988 brown Chevy van. His wife, Ana Chau, and his children, David, Jim and Michelle—ages 11, 9, and 2—were ready to evacuate. Truong, now soaking wet from the waist down, knew the other roads out of town might also be flooded. It was a risk he was willing to take. 

Joining half a dozen other Vietnamese families, the Dais attempted to escape Bayou La Batre. None would make it to safety.

The caravan got as far as the intersection of Hemley Road and South Wintzell Avenue, just south of the Bayou La Batre drawbridge that led further inland. There, in the blink of an eye, the floodwaters blocked their way, in front and behind. The families tried a detour, hoping they could take another route back home. No such luck.

“The stormwaters were just too great,” Ana recalled last week, 20 years after the storm, as translated by her son David, now a teacher in Mobile. “There was nowhere we could go.”

The Dais and the other families did the only thing they could. They found an empty parking lot nearby, next to a bank and an old grocery store, and prepared for the worst. 

It wasn’t the first time the Dais had faced adversity. Both Ana and Truong had emigrated from Vietnam to the United States in search of a better life. Truong, who left Vietnam in 1980, remembered hiding in the forest as a child to avoid being conscripted into the war. Ana left later, around 1990, and the two met in California before moving to Bayou La Batre, where a small Vietnamese community was growing, centered around a seafood economy that was similar to what they’d experienced in Vietnam. 

So the Dais knew resilience and perseverance. But none of that would part the floodwaters blocking their way. 

“We couldn’t make it home,” Ana said. “So it was in our best interest to find a spot we could all ride out the storm together—in our cars—in the event that one family or another needed serious help.”

Hurricane Katrina didn’t just batter the Gulf Coast. It exposed how poverty, and government neglect, shape the contours of survival. For families like the Dais, and for mine, the storm never ended. 

Today, stronger storms and rising seas show Katrina wasn’t the end. 

It was just the beginning. 

Grace and Grit

My family, several miles away from the Dais, never even attempted an escape. I didn’t know David Dai then, but the two of us would become close friends as freshmen in high school.

I recently asked my mother, Cindy, why we didn’t try to evacuate.

“What do you mean, ‘Why didn’t we evacuate?’” she said, laughing. “We didn’t have no damn money.”

It was true. Even putting aside the long lines and high prices for gas ahead of the storm, my mother—Ma, as I’ve always called her—single and living on Social Security benefits from my father’s death from cancer a decade before, had no money for a hotel or travel expenses. We’d moved to south Mobile County from North Carolina a few years prior, so there was no family on higher ground in Alabama whose home could provide a safe escape. 

Our situation wasn’t unique. According to government data, nearly a quarter of Mobile County residents experienced poverty pre-Katrina, a rate well over double the national average. It was likely higher in the county’s coastal communities and among children.

Like the Dais, we were stuck. Poverty had put us in our place, and Katrina’s winds and rain would keep us there. 

As the storm barreled toward the coast, Ma spoke to our neighbors in Palmer’s Trailer Park. Some had the means to leave, or family nearby who lived in brick homes, or even friends with trailers on higher ground. Many others—the majority—had nothing but grit and the grace of God. 

Before the storm made its way ashore, Ma realized we might not survive in our trailer, though it was one of the newer mobile homes in the park. Its built-on deck looked nice, but as the wind began to stir up, it began pulling against the trailer’s frame, groaning as it lurched to and fro. 

“It started creaking and making all kinds of noises,” Ma recalled. “I didn’t know what it was doing—if it would cause the trailer to flip over—so I knew we should probably just go.”

She, my brother and I gathered a few belongings and made our way to where the Marenos lived in an older trailer a stone’s throw away. Their place made me nervous, but Ma had made up her mind.

“I decided that if we die, we’d die together,” Ma told me last week, now two decades since she made that call. “We’d be over there with a crowd.”

On the Beast’s Bad Side

What came next I’ll never forget. No one who lived through it ever will. 

When it comes to hurricanes, meteorologists often repeat a rhyme about where the worst damage is likely to occur: “The east is the beast. The west is the best.” The eastern side of the storm, to the right of the storm’s eye, faces the highest sustained winds and the worst of the storm surge. 

Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, as a major hurricane near the border of Mississippi and Louisiana. The Dai family and my family were riding out the storm about 75 miles to the east of the eye—the side of the beast. 

A beast it was. 

David, then 11 years old like me, remembered the floodwaters’ slow rise around the caravan of vehicles, parked in loose formation in the Bayou La Batre parking lot. He and his mother remembered debris flying through the air. 

“The wind was incredibly strong and the shingles and roofing of neighboring homes and businesses were being ripped off and were being slung into some of the cars,” Ana remembered. “Everyone was concerned that something was going to hit one of the cars and break one of the windows open.”

All of the vehicles, especially the Dais’ large van, were rocking back and forth in the wind. Everyone was afraid they’d soon tip over. 

“So they decided to move the vehicles closer together so that the wind wouldn’t catch the sides of the vehicles too much,” David said. “That cut down on the rocking.”

David, who’s interpreted for his parents as long as he can remember, said it was difficult to find English words for his mother’s descriptions of the storm. “She described it as a kind of tornado,” he said, lost in translation.

But he remembers his primary emotion: fear.

“I was definitely scared, definitely worried and anxious about the whole situation,” he said. “As a kid, you just don’t know what was going to happen.”

No one did. 

A few miles away from that Bayou La Batre parking lot, my family and the Marenos were riding out the storm. 

I, too, remember the rocking—the groans of a mobile home I hoped beyond hope was actually strapped appropriately to the ground. 

“You couldn’t help but be scared,” Ma said. “Especially because you can see all of the stuff flying.” 

The Mobile International Speedway, a small drag strip and race track, was located just across Highway 90 from the trailer park. As we watched from inside the trailer, much of the speedway blew by us. Everything that wasn’t attached to a foundation—sheds full of tools and car parts, the roofs of gazebos and pavilions—were like leaves in the wind, crashing between our trailers and occasionally finding a fit target. 

A metal shed, crumpled like aluminum foil by Katrina’s wind, slammed into the Marenos’ truck. Scott Mareno, a ship welder, wasn’t having it. He and his older boys opened the front door of the trailer and formed a line, holding hands to stop themselves from being blown away. Eventually, they reached the vehicle and were able to push the shed off Scott’s truck. 

“Anything could have flew by and hit anybody and killed them right then,” Ma said. 

I asked whether she still thinks we had been safer with the Marenos than we would’ve been at home.

“I don’t necessarily think we were actually any safer,” she said. “Nobody was safe.”

She took a brief pause. 

“But I’d rather be with people,” she said. “I didn’t want to be by myself. 
If something happened to me, and it was just y’all, at least somebody else would be there.”

Sardines

I remember walking around the trailer park with my younger brother Michael, then age 9, after the storm. Looking at the state of things, I was shocked we’d survived. 

For me, the aftermath of a hurricane has always felt like the beginning of a fresh fallen snow in the Deep South. There’s an eerie calmness, paired with things scattered across the landscape that shouldn’t really be there. But these weren’t snowflakes.

There were trailers with holes in their roofs. There were others knocked off their foundations, tipped to the side as if they’d been flicked over by a giant. One old trailer a few doors down from us had its entire front ripped open, its yellow aluminum and pink insulation curled up at one end. The trailer looked like a sardine can that had just been opened. To my knowledge, its residents survived. 

The roof of the deck attached to our trailer that Ma had been concerned about was gone, as were the wooden railings that had supported it. We looked around the neighborhood to see if we could find it, without success. 

But in the end, we’d all made it. We were lucky. Hurricane Katrina would ultimately be responsible for the loss of well over 1,000 lives. 

The Dai home suffered damage as well, but it hadn’t blown away or been totally flooded. Many of their neighbors weren’t as fortunate. Across Bayou La Batre, the impacts of Hurricane Katrina and the 14 feet of storm surge that accompanied it were devastating. Research suggests that the storm’s flooding was between 15 and 60 percent higher than it would have been circa 1900, before the impacts of climate change—elevated sea levels and reduced wetlands—took hold. 

In some places, whole streets were underwater. Nearby residents launched boats from the grocery store parking lot to retrieve neighbors who’d been forced to ride out the tail end of the storm in their attics or on their roofs. As many as 80 percent of homes in the bayou were deemed uninhabitable, according to government reports. Shrimp boats that had been docked neatly in the bayou’s water now lay sunken in its depths or—worse—lined its streets. 

“My brother and I would ride our bikes around the neighborhood just to see what it was like,” David said. “I felt helpless. I’ve always hated that feeling.”

The helplessness wouldn’t soon subside. 

Initially, much of south Mobile County didn’t have running water. But even when water was restored, in some places within a few days of the storm’s end, boil water advisories were standard fare. The power was out for weeks in the dog days of Alabama summer. High temperatures remained in the 90s in the storm’s wake, and humidity soaked the air. 

I remember the heat the most. It was unrelenting, and there was nowhere to escape. Once the water was turned back on, there was no hot water, but it had become somewhat of a joke—it’s not like you’d need it. Ma, who was going through the early stages of menopause, couldn’t turn on her “hot flash fan”—an oscillating, remote controlled fan she’d bought months earlier to squelch what was then just an internal heat. So she’d find comfort in the cool water of the garden tub in our trailer’s master bath—one of the few amenities of a newer trailer. 

Ma eventually loaned her hot flash fan to the Marenos, who were one of the only families in the trailer park to own a generator. They’d run the generator sparingly, given the limited access to expensive gas, but it would allow folks to charge their phones and, at least for an hour or two, provide Scott Mareno with a breeze—from Ma’s fan. I selfishly resented it. 

All schools were closed for weeks, along with grocery stores, restaurants and most businesses. Residents hoped for a quick government response, but it was slow to come. It seemed that Alabama—and particularly the small fishing communities lining the coast—weren’t a priority. 

In the beginning, help largely came from neighbors. Those who’d stocked up before the storm shared with those who hadn’t or couldn’t, providing lifelines in the government’s absence. 

In the days immediately following the storm, some of us ate like kings. Meat and other foods that had been stocked in residents’ deep freezes would soon go bad, so community cookouts became the norm. Some neighbors, particularly the kids, would go from cookout to cookout, gorging themselves before the food ran out. It wouldn’t take long. 

Once the government response did begin, it was minimal and left residents scrambling to make sure they could make ends meet. 

“We waited in line for hours in the Marenos’ truck to get a single box of MREs,” Ma said, referring to Meal, Ready-to-Eat military rations. “The National Guard wouldn’t let you get out of the vehicles, and we were burning up.”

When they finally got to the front of the line, they received only a single MRE box. One per vehicle, no matter how many people were inside. We split up the box and made do. 

Of MREs and M&Ms

In the months that followed, more MREs would be distributed among residents, sometimes to those waiting in line, sometimes handed out through the windows of FEMA trucks to neighbors lining the streets in wait. David and I spent time last week laughing about our memories of those calorie-dense MREs, rations meant for soldiers in combat. He preferred pasta, he told me, and could remember fighting with his younger brother to get one. For me and my brother, it was the sweets we’d fight for, opening all of the MREs when we got them to fish out the molasses cookies or the small bags of M&Ms. 

They were small victories—finding the M&Ms in the MREs—but they meant so much at the time. 

“We celebrated the little moments like that, but at the same time, reflecting on it now, 20 years later, it’s crazy that it’s something we had to do,” David said. “We survived off MREs as 11-year-olds.”

Even close to a year later, when the immediate impacts of the storm had begun to fade, the poverty stuck around. When the end of each month came around and Social Security survivor benefits had run dry, there were still MREs. We may not have always had a home-cooked meal at the end of every day, but we could hope for M&Ms and a molasses cookie.

For families experiencing poverty along the Gulf, disasters like the aftermath of Katrina expose how little daylight there is between survival and catastrophe—a gap that climate change is widening.

Twenty years later, it would be wrong to say that south Mobile County has recovered from Hurricane Katrina. It’s certain that Bayou La Batre has not. The self-proclaimed “seafood capital of Alabama”—with 80 percent of its economy tied to the water—was already vulnerable to overfishing and global competition. 

Katrina’s destruction, worsened by rising seas, shrinking wetlands and warming waters, accelerated its decline. Since Katrina’s landfall, the bayou’s once-bustling small business community has contracted. Shopping centers once filled with Asian restaurants and legacy grocery stores now sit empty. Its population, nearly 3,000 before Katrina hit, is still declining, slowly approaching just 2,000. The environmental and resulting economic effects have left the community reeling, compounded by additional devastation like the 2010 BP oil spill and the ongoing dredging of Mobile Bay, which has continued to reduce oyster harvests critical to the bayou’s survival. 

Asked what she wants the world to know about the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, Ana, who, like her late husband, shucked oysters for a living for decades, said that nobody has recovered in the 20 years since Katrina struck. 

“There was never a true recovery for those who worked in the seafood industry that were part of the Vietnamese community,” she said. “Even 20 years on, it’s still not what it was. We as a people, as a community, are still trying to recover.”

It’s a challenge, Ana said, but she still has some fight left in her. 

A Shell of Itself

David, who now works as a math teacher in downtown Mobile, worries about whether the community is now better positioned to endure another major hurricane. In 2005, as an 11-year-old, he had to translate weather forecasts and evacuation information for his parents because none of it was in Vietnamese.

“Looking back, it was pretty crazy to be put in situations like that,” he said. “The information I’m sharing is going to be life or death.”

Two decades later, federal, state and local governments have made halting progress in improving access to weather information in languages like Vietnamese. 

In April, the Trump administration announced that the National Weather Service would be pausing even Spanish-language translations of weather information because of a lapsed contract. The decision was later reversed, but language access remains precarious, particularly in a time when the nation’s chief executive has declared English “the official language of the United States.”

For David, it all spells potential disaster. 

“Every major entity that is charged with providing information that could cost people their lives should have translations in languages that locals actually speak,” he said. “Otherwise, we’re not prepared. There’s no way we can be.”

Twenty years after the storm, families along the Gulf—and those living along coastlines across the world—face a future where intense storms like Katrina are less often the exception and more often the rule. 

David says he’s reminded of south Mobile County’s slow recovery every time he visits his mother, who still lives in that same home in Bayou La Batre. 

“I drive down to visit my mom, and every time I drive through, I just think to myself, this is such a sad and depressing little city. It was vibrant before Katrina. There was a lot of camaraderie. Now, it’s a shell of itself.”