Chestnut Hill native loses her home to Katrina

Photo 1: Dan took this photo of his family’s flooded house on September 7 as he was wading in hip boots.

Photo 2: A watercolor painting by Pat Stokes of Stephanie and Dan’s second house in New Orleans. They moved into the home in Metarie in 1998. Once before they had to evacuate the house because of a hurricane (in September, 1998), but the house was not severely damaged. Now it is uninhabitable. (Photo by Pat Stokes)

Photo 3 : Dan and Stephanie with their children, Catie and D.J., at Mardi Gras in March, 2003.

by PAT STOKES

It is early on Sunday morning, August 28, and Stephanie Stokes, 45, assistant city editor of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans is packing: her clothes, the children’s clothes, some food, some water, in sharp contrast to the pleasantries of the day before when she had been overseeing a birthday party for 6-year-old daughter Catie. Now, at 6:46 a.m. with bags, Catie, 8-year-old D.J., and Yertle the turtle settled in the car, she drives away from the home where the family has lived since 1998.

Husband Dan, 47, is staying behind, moving special furnishings and keepsakes to safety if possible, putting away the outdoor furniture, the flag, the porch swing. Then he’ll head to the newspaper, where as managing editor, he along with the staff will face the once-in-a-lifetime challenges of this particular hurricane.

Stephanie, my daughter, will drive for five hours, amid four lanes all moving out of the city. Her destination, a friend’s home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she had found hospitality once before in September 1998, ahead of Hurricane Georges (which spared the city). Foremost in her thoughts is the first day of school, coming up fast on the calendar. What are her options for a school for them? At first she thought of coming back to Philly, where I was able to work out a temporary rental for her. She even investigated three schools, whose headmasters sent literature to me for her. Later, however, as we know now, those plans became unrealistic.

She drove on, knowing she and the family were safe but feeling heavy of heart as they contemplated what would happen to their home, to the city itself and especially to the thousands of New Orleans poor who would surely be stranded there, deprived of shelter, food, water and their already meager belongings.

At the newspaper, Dan and others move into high gear to create a place to report online the crisis developing around them. He described the experience in an e-mail from which I quote in part: “I stayed with the paper and witnessed the extraordinary death of a city today. We survived the initial assault of Katrina well. While we lost power, I had a bunker prepared where we worked on Internet stories on a generator and prepared a PDF version of the paper. It was hot, dark and smelly but we were initially relieved that the storm seemed to skip east at the last minute. Later Monday, I ventured out in a delivery truck with the Times-Picayune editor, and (we) were shocked by the sudden rise in water all over the city.” (The levee had failed.) “Other staffers were caught in it, and some swam for their lives.” (They got back OK.) He continues: “This morning we awoke and found water rising rapidly around our building, and there were people walking up the expressway and fires burning all over the city. We made an instant decision to put 300 journalists, pressmen and support staff into trucks … We … barely made it to the expressway.” They decamped at Houma, La., with 10 journalists at the Houma Courier. Working online, they produced the second might of storm coverage on laptops. “We haven’t slept in days … but we have air conditioning, and I’m thankful to be at work.”

That experience of Dan and editor Jim Amoss driving through sometimes four feet of water, and the others literally swimming for their lives and up to their necks in water was the coming-to-life of the scenario that Mark Schliefstein and John McQuaid had predicted in a 2002 five-part Times-Picayune series, “Washing Away,” based on an evaluation of the city’s structural deficiencies. They referred to the coming catastrophe as “a matter of when, not if.”

David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker quotes the paper further: “For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped work on the New Orleans areas east bank hurricane levees, (work) that won’t be finished for at least another decade.”

(Perhaps the destruction of this great city could have been prevented by a government that had its priorities straight. Like Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned, George Bush played golf while New Orleans drowned. He turned the Big Easy into the Big Hurt. People were dying like stray animals, and for several days Mr. Bush did not seem to notice. As a result, more than 25 percent of the nation’s oil production has been knocked out; gasoline is up one dollar a gallon in one week; a typical homeowner will pay about $400 more for home heating oil this winter; there is no commerce at the nation’s most important port, and on and on and on, not to mention the incalculable toll in human death, dislocation and suffering.)

While Dan and the staff were struggling to keep ahead of the news … and the storm, Stephanie, tooling along in the sea of cars, had time to reflect on what has led up to this moment. A Chestnut Hill native, after the basic 12 years of schooling at Ravenhill Academy in East Falls, she went to Georgetown University for a BA in English, then to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for an MS in journalism. No trouble finding a slot at the Boca Raton News in Florida as a business reporter. Then to The Record in Hackensack, N.J., as municipal and business reporter as well as copy editor. She met Dan Shea, a Worcester, Mass., native at the Record. They were married in 1993, and shortly after, when Dan was offered a position at the Times-Picayune as managing editor for news, they moved immediately to New Orleans.

Their first small house was in the shadow of the giant pumping station on the now-infamous 17th Street Canal. It was a sweet house. I especially liked sitting on the little porch in the evening, listening to the magnificent repertoire of the local mockingbird. Before long, baby D.J. arrived, and more space was needed. They were able to find a larger, comfortable house a mile away in Metairie on Cedar Drive, a house that, seven years later, Dan would find in water up to the first floor.

Every time I think of that little charming house and that porch, I could just die. It’s as if it happened here, and all of Chestnut Hill was gone. It’s just horrible beyond belief. And New Orleans is such a wonderful city and completely unique. Only in New Orleans, for example, the city that gave us jazz, Cajun and Creole cuisine and the “let the good times roll” philosophy, could they possibly have an airport named Louis Armstrong Airport.

By Monday morning, August 29, the Times-Picayune staff’s efforts were paying off. The paper, with its consistent reporting online was emerging as a lifeline not only for news on the Web, but for information about various parts of the city, in answer to residents’ queries. On a kind of message-board they gave out whatever news they could about specific areas of concern.

By Tuesday, using electric power at the Houma-Courier, the paper triumphantly published a print edition of 50,000 copies, and hoped to raise that to 60,000 by the next day. Dan ended his e-mail saying, “New Orleans is a terrible and wonderful place. I’ve seen it all today. But everything happens for a reason … we will stay here and rebuild our lives.”

(The 60,000 figure is just a fraction of the paper’s usual circulation of 270,000. The paper is distributed at Red Cross shelters and emergency stations and in areas that are not under water.)

In Tuscaloosa, the ever-cheerful Stephanie radiated family-type vibes. The children went off to school on Tuesday, Sept. 6, with the children from their host family. D.J., now in third grade, said he had “piles of homework.”

For a while, Stephie was on the phone all the time, but at times she was hysterical, so upset she could hardly talk. Now she sounds more like herself. She eats ice cream every night, even though she does not want to get fat. You do crazy things when you’re under such tremendous stress.

Feeling that it would be best for the family to be together, Stephanie and Dan have arranged for temporary housing in Baton Rouge and have even found a school there, making it possible for Stephanie to put into practice her words to me, “Routine is good.” This weekend she will once again pack the gang, including Yertle, into the car for another long ride, to be reunited with Dan, to face together an unpredictable future and the vague hope of some day going back to New Orleans, even though it may never be the same wonderful place they have known. In a month or so, they hope to go back and get their stuff out of the flooded house, the stuff that can be salvaged, that is.

News from the Times-Picayune may be read online at www.NOLA.com.

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