ROUSES_Summer2025_Magazine PAGES web

What the Water Couldn’t Wash Away A LOOK BACK, 20 YEARS AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA by Marcelle Bienvenu O my home in St. Martinville. My husband greeted me with the news that a hurricane was in the Gulf of Mexico and was heading toward the Louisiana/Missis sippi coast. We both knew the drill. • Take down all hanging flower baskets and wind chimes. • Stow patio furniture — chairs, umbrellas, cushions — in our storage shed. • Check our battery-operated flash lights (at the time, we didn’t have a generator). We had a case of bottled water on hand, as always. Medicine, cash and important papers were secured in a watertight container. And both cars were filled with gasoline. As the weekend approached, we kept up with the forecast and prayed Katrina would not come our way. Other than experiencing a few gusts of wind and light rain, we felt secure and safe. I was scheduled to attend the Duck Festival in Gueydan on Sunday afternoon to judge a cook-off. My contact told me everything was fine, and I spent the afternoon tasting myriad duck dishes. I headed back to St. Martinville in the late afternoon; I observed the darkening clouds and felt the wind bouncing off my car. When I arrived home, my husband had a cocktail waiting for me, and the radio and television were on. We sat on the porch and noticed that Bayou Teche was a little choppy. We went to bed listening to weather reports. It appeared we were not in the path of Katrina. Aah, we were safe. n Thursday, August 25, I was working at Emeril’s Homebase in New Orleans and, around 4pm, I packed up to return to

Early the next morning I received a call from a photographer friend in Canada who wanted to know if we were okay. He was concerned (as I was) about New Orleans. It wasn’t until later in the day that we were shocked by the news that New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast had taken the brunt of the storm. Anyone who lived in the devastated areas of both Louisiana and Mississippi after the storm can attest to the chaos that ensued. Phones — both cell and landline — were mostly useless. The electricity was out; in fact, most utility service of any kind was disrupted. I tried to reach Judy Walker, my food editor at The Times-Picayune , to no avail. I remembered that Pableaux Johnson (formerly of nearby New Iberia and a freelance food writer then living in New Orleans) had a second home in St. Martin ville. I headed there and found him and Brett Anderson (at the time a restaurant critic for The Times-Picayune ), and learned that the newspaper’s staff had fled the city. After Hurricane Katrina caused severe flooding in New Orleans, the staff of The Times-Picayune evacuated their flooded headquarters and relocated to Houma, Louisiana, approximately 60 miles southwest of the city. Approximately 230 staff members and their families used the newspaper’s delivery trucks to travel through the flooded streets to safety. This move was deemed shocking by some, including Steven Newhouse (chairman of Advance Publica tions, which owned the paper at the time), who noted that the situation was even worse than imagined. While many staff members evacuated, some reporters remained in the region to cover the storm. The newspaper’s website was kept updated with continuous coverage, and the print edition resumed publica tion after four days. The Times-Picayune ’s coverage of Katrina was critically important during a time when communication and information were extremely limited; their work earned them two Pulitzer Prizes. It was a good week or more before I heard from Judy Walker, who was at the time in Houma with other staff members. Needless to say, my weekly food column was not a priority at the moment, and I was told to just hang on. The staff at The Times-Picayune returned

to the T-P building and somehow got into a temporary rhythm of publishing the paper and, eventually, my food column Cooking Creole returned to print. About a year after the storm, James O’Byrne, features editor at the T-P, called to ask if I would be willing to put together a cookbook featuring recipes that had been lost and found during the aftermath of the storm. A few days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans area and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I remember thinking about the opening title of the movie Gone With the Wind , in which it says something to the effect that the civilization once known in the South is no more than a dream, that you should look for it only in books, as it is gone with the wind. I realized that the New Orleans I knew and loved might never be the same again. I pushed the thought from my mind as my husband and I began receiving evacuees at our home, which was virtually unscathed from Katrina since we were some 130 miles west of the monster storm. For days we lodged and fed people who had no idea what they were going to find when they returned to the flooded city. But as usual in times of crisis, I turned to my stove and made gumbo, jambalaya, po-boys, and red beans and rice, which gave us all a zone of temporary comfort. After all, we Louisian ians do best when our stomachs are full and satisfied. I’ve always believed that New Orleans locals have a 24-hour-a-day love affair with food. They regale you about a meal they enjoyed the night before, spend most of their mornings deciding what to have for lunch and where to have it, and anticipate the menu for their evening meal. I (along with so many others) watched as the city was pumped dry and inhabitants

Photos by Romney Caruso

71