Columbia Missourian | Aug 29, 2015
COLUMBIA — Idella Anderson Casby arrived in Mexico, Missouri, on Sept. 3, 2005, after water crashed through the levees and flooded her hometown of New Orleans.
After her kitchen roof caved in and she waited three days in vain for electricity to return to her home and the government to come to her rescue.
After she guided her 72-year-old father, who needed a walker, for 15 hours on the journey from Louisiana to Missouri.
Mexico seemed strange, Idella recalled.
Almost no traffic. No one out on the street.
“And they didn’t have very many streetlights,” Idella said. “I had never seen a place this peaceful and quiet.”
Idella traveled to Mexico, a town of 11,500 northwest of Columbia, to be near her son. She wasn’t the only one in the family to head for Missouri. Nearly 40 more made the trip.
Most eventually went back to New Orleans. But 10 years after Katrina became one of the deadliest hurricanes ever recorded, Idella and her husband, Terry, will not return to Louisiana.
The city, they say, is still crippled from Katrina. And Mexico is home.
The storm hits
Terry and Idella Casby were not getting along on Aug. 29, 2005, the day the levees broke. In fact, they had separated.
Idella, then 46, stayed at home to care for her father. She lived in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi. The house was four blocks away from the levees meant to protect her family.
When the storm hit, Idella expected the power to come back within a day. She lit a candle and waited.
After three days, she saw her neighbors evacuate and leave the streets empty. She grabbed a few things — a box of crackers, some clothing for her and her father, Raymond — and stuffed them in a garbage bag.
They planned to leave New Orleans, but as she recalled later, the lines were long and disorganized. Since her father was ill, she approached a group of police to ask for directions. But when she tried, they pulled out their guns.
“Nine guns were pulled out on me,” Idella recalled. “The National Guard. All I seen was four over there (on the left), four over there (on the right), and one in the middle with a bigger gun. They said, ‘Go back! Go back!’ So I just walked slowly.”
She’s still not sure why the police officers drew their weapons. It probably had something to do with the confusion that followed the storm. Police were normally meant to keep order, but the circumstances were far from normal.
Stores and houses were empty, and residents without power grabbed whatever was abandoned. Some neighborhoods were submerged in water. No one knows how many Louisianans were killed by the storm, but government estimates total about 1,500.
Both Idella and Terry saw bodies on the street.
“It was kind of horrific, actually,” said Terry, who was staying at his son’s house two miles north. “There was an old folks home across the street, and they had a couple of bodies, floating there. Why they didn’t get those people out, I don’t know.”
After that, he fixed his mind on one thing — making sure his family stayed alive. His son had an infant at the time, and Terry set off to find food and other supplies.
“It wasn’t like I was stealing nothing, but a cop said, ‘The city is closed down’,” Terry recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean, the city is closed down?’ He said, ‘If you got children, you better go up to that store and get you some Pampers and milk.'”
After three days with no sign of the power returning and no indication of law and order, Idella and Terry set out for Texas in their neighbor’s van. After arriving in Houston, they traveled north on buses to be with their other son, who lived in Missouri.
It was a tough trip, Idella remembered. She helped her father switch three different buses, assisted him with the restroom, fed him.
But her only thought was, “I got my daddy.”
Safe haven in Missouri
Idella made the journey first, with her father and her sister, while Terry stayed behind in a Salvation Army shelter in Texas.
When they arrived in Mexico, they stayed in her son’s home for a few days. It was full. More than 10 people were sharing the three-bedroom house. Idella slept on the sofa.
She soon discovered that her in-laws had arrived from New Orleans. They settled into a few homes, including the one belonging to Birdell Owens, the family matriarch known as “Birdie.”
Eugenia Owens, her daughter-in-law, remembers the house packed to the brim with brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews. Community members donated food, and she said she cooked enough okra gumbo to feed the 40 family members who had fled Katrina.
“Everybody was upset because they had to leave their homes, of course, and they didn’t know if they could go back,” Eugenia said.
Still, she said, a general feeling of comfort settled in, as the family found itself in something of reunion.
Churches helped, as did the American Red Cross and the Mexico Housing Authority. But more than anything else, Idella remembers the kindness of locals who donated everything from living room furniture to coats for the Missouri winters.
“We really saw love, we saw love,” Terry said. “The people saved the people.”
He arrived Sept. 15, after spending two weeks in and out of shelters in Texas. Given a $2,500 voucher by the Red Cross, he bought a plane ticket and flew to Missouri before a second hurricane, Rita, hit the Gulf.
When Terry got to Mexico, he and his wife reconciled.
The two still quarrel, trying to best each other to prove their points. Idella calls Katrina a tragedy; Terry prefers the word catastrophe.
But, Terry said, the hurricane ultimately healed their hearts.
“It really brought me and her back together, really,” Terry said. “I checked on her after the storm hit. I said I was checking on her old man, but I was worried about her.”
Ten Years Later
Idella and Terry returned to New Orleans a month after Katrina to grab their last few possessions.
They recovered the family photographs and high school diplomas that now hang on their walls. Idella also framed a portrait of her father, who died five years after he left New Orleans.
These days, the Casbys are not happy with the way Katrina is remembered, or the way their city is regarded.
In May, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced that the city is “no longer recovering, no longer rebuilding.”
Instead, he said, “We are creating.”
To the Casbys, who visited New Orleans in July, this is only true for some.
“In some areas, excuse me, but high-class areas, they probably think it’s back,” Idella said. “But it will never be back to the way it was before.”
That’s one reason Idella says she will not return.
Another reason is that the Casbys could not possibly afford it: “The rent is sky high, and the houses are not built the way they should be built,” Idella said. She also said there’s too much crime for her to feel safe.
In contrast, almost everyone else in her family did leave Missouri and return to New Orleans. One family moved to St. Louis. Only a few stayed in Mexico.
Even Birdie, who died in 2009, returned to New Orleans, where she was buried in McDonoghville Cemetery.
Kasia Kovacs 