Ten years later, she still can’t figure out how her mother knew where to find them. Phone lines were down. Cell coverage didn’t work.
And their last known address was several feet under water.
Amanda and Chris West had fled across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, a 28-mile bridge to rural Louisiana, where they rode out the storm with Chris’ Grandpa Lassalle while Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. Expecting to be home in 48 hours or less, they had packed granola bars and a change of underwear but found themselves trapped for several days with toppled trees and storm debris blocking the roads.
“Once we ran out of water and food,” Chris says, “it started to get scary.”
Then, somehow, Amanda’s mother showed up one night in a rental car to bring her back to Owasso. Like hundreds, if not thousands, of Katrina evacuees — nobody will ever know the exact number who came to Oklahoma — Amanda and Chris wound up nearly 700 miles from home. And like many, if not most of them, they weren’t very happy to be here.
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“I didn’t want anything to do with Tulsa,” Chris remembers. “No way.”
Growing up together in New Orleans, where they went to the same grammar school and started dating in the eighth grade, Chris and Amanda found Oklahoma to be, frankly, a little dull. Downtown at the time was still mostly deserted after 5 o’clock, the food options were decidedly less flavorful, and music rarely came spilling out of anybody’s window.
“When you’re a New Orleanian,” Chris says, “you don’t care about the rest of the United States. You don’t pay attention. And it really opened my eyes to how different New Orleans really was. There’s no other place like it. Certainly not Tulsa.”
“All we could think about,” Amanda says, “was ‘I want to go home. I want to go home.’ Twenty-four seven that was going through my head.”
So, about six months after the flood, they moved back into their old apartment. But New Orleans wasn’t the same. Streets were abandoned, businesses shuttered, homes vacant. And longtime friends had simply vanished.
“It looked gray,” Amanda remembers. “Everything died, all of the greenery. The lawns were gray. The trees were gray. Even houses turned gray. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
More than 1,500 Katrina evacuees were bused to Camp Gruber, a National Guard base near Muskogee, where the Tulsa chapter of the American Red Cross had 48 hours’ notice to set up shelters, medical clinics and kitchens. The convoy came nonstop from Houston, and some evacuees had soiled their pants aboard the buses. Others were too exhausted to get out of their seats, and a frantic — but, fortunately, inaccurate — report went out over Red Cross walkie-talkies that bodies were on board.
Nellie Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Tulsa chapter of the Red Cross at the time, remembers a man who had just received a transplant but hadn’t had his medication in several days. And babies who hadn’t had their diapers changed.
“Mostly, I remember being really proud that I could wear that red vest, because it was such a symbol of hope for those people,” says Kelly, who now works for a Tulsa-based adoption agency. “The volunteers were just very calm, very collected, and did what they had to do.”
The Red Cross made plans to keep Camp Gruber open through the holiday — even opening a video-game parlor, a movie theater and a library for the temporary residents — but the shelter closed in early October after people relocated to private apartments, many of them in Tulsa.
Shanna Boudreaux had the option of going to San Antonio but chose Tulsa instead because she grew up here before moving to Louisiana as an adult, and she still had family here. With her home and everything in it a complete loss, Boudreaux didn’t even think about going back to New Orleans.
“It had nothing for us anymore,” she says. “There were no jobs, no places to live. We had to start over.”
With a 15-year-old daughter who barely remembers the storm and a 10-year-old son who has never known anywhere but Tulsa as home, Boudreaux is here to stay.
“Tulsa is our home now,” she says.
Back in New Orleans, Amanda and Chris West gave up on the city ever returning to normal. With hardly any tourism, the restaurant that Chris was managing struggled to make ends meet. And after two years, they were ready to give Tulsa another try.
“Desperation is what brought us back to Tulsa,” Chris says. “I had just had enough. The future was very bleak there, and I didn’t see any hope of things getting better.”
Last year, they opened Lassalle’s on the southeast corner of Sixth Street and Boston Avenue, where authentic New Orleans-style food has made it one of the most popular lunch spots in downtown Tulsa.
“The turning point for me,” Chris says, “was when I stopped comparing New Orleans to Tulsa, because there’s no place like New Orleans. I would never be happy in Tulsa until I embraced Tulsa as its own thing. And then I realized that Tulsa is awesome. I absolutely fell in love with this city once I gave it a chance.”
David Brittle may be the most recent New Orleans transplant to arrive in the Tulsa area as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
Brittle and his wife fled New Orleans before the storm hit, taking their two small children to Houston. But his father, Salvation Army Maj. Richard Brittle, defied orders to evacuate the city when he stayed behind to open a shelter for people who were too old, too sick or, in some cases, simply too reluctant to leave. Richard Brittle died in January 2008, less than three years after the storm, from complications related to a parasite, which he likely contracted while wading into the water to rescue flood victims. Some news reports have called him Katrina’s “last fatality.”
His father’s sacrifice inspired Brittle to join the Salvation Army himself, and he was assigned to Sand Springs just two months ago.
“My father never thought about his own well-being,” Brittle says. “He served Christ without hesitation, and that’s how I want to serve, too.”
