By Tony Richards and Vanessa Truell

One year after Hurricane Katrina, along with its aftermath, resulted in the deaths of nearly 2000 people and the utter destruction of much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, both the emotional and physical trauma of Katrina remains imprinted on the national landscape.

Traces of this post-catastrophe imprint are visible more than 1000 miles north, in Highbridge. Robert Franklin Sears, a Highbridge resident who spends much of his time at the Highbridge Advisory Council Senior Center on Nelson Avenue was at home watching television last August when he saw images of the city where he was born and raised being flooded. “At first, I didn’t know what to think,” Sears said. “Who’s alive? Who’s dead?”

Eventually, his son called. He had walked about 3 miles in neck-deep water from his home to the Louisiana Superdome, before returning home to retrieve his wife and two sons. He was bussed to Dallas a couple of days later.
The relief at discovering his son was alive, however, was soon accompanied by the profound grief of learning that his nephew had drowned in the flood, while his grandnephew was shot in Algiers in what Sears believes was a robbery attempt.

It was eight months before his nephew’s family was able to identify and claim the body. Sears returned to New Orleans in May to join his family in saying goodbye to his nephew.

“When we buried my nephew, his body was stinking,” Sears said. “It was a hurting thing, but God got us through it.”

Sears said he was horrified at the condition of New Orleans, and in particular the 9th Ward, when he visited the city. “Half the stuff, they don’t even show you on television,” Sears said, adding that he was particularly struck by seeing houses piled on top of one another, and knowing that many of these homes were still inhabited by corpses.

“I was very angry. I felt my people were being neglected,” Sears said. “They can send all this money to Iraq to fight a war we ain’t got no business in, and you can’t help people here at home? Come on!”

Sears' nephew, incidentally, is Eddie Compass, who retired as police chief of New Orleans not long after Hurricane Katrina. Compass was faulted by some for crying on television and allegedly providing exaggerated information about criminal activity in the city, but Sears defended Compass.

"I think he did a fine job," Sears said. " He was out there most of the time with three, four hours sleep."

Right around the time that Sears went home to bury his nephew and survey the damage to his hometown, Adriane Paniagua, administrative director of community services for the Highbridge Community Life Center, traveled to the Crescent City as part of a team from Trinity Church Wall Street. Panigaua and his fellow volunteers emptied houses and helped to clear debris.

“When I went into neighborhoods,” Paniagua recalled, “the blocks were still strewn with garbage. Every street in the 9th Ward and Bernard County was this way. Water was everywhere.”

Paniagua recalled visiting one park and viewing what he estimated to be tens of thousands of empty FEMA trailers.

At the same time, he was moved by the welcoming spirit and camaraderie among the people of New Orleans. If he could, Paniagua said, he would like to live in New Orleans.

New Orleans area native Erica Sage, a volunteer in the senior services department of the Highbridge Community Life Center, had friends and family in her hometown at the time of the storm. Attending college in Memphis at the time Katrina hit, she said she wasn’t initially worried about reports of a Category 4 or 5 Hurricane heading toward the Gulf Coast; her childhood in Tarrytown, a town roughly one minute away from Algiers on the opposite bank of the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans, was filled with memories of rowing makeshift canoes down the street.

However, when New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered the city evacuated, her mother fled with her boyfriend, only to run out of gas in snarling traffic in Hattiesburg. Cell phone service was erratic. “I tried to keep in touch the whole day,” Sage said. “When you couldn’t get in touch with them, it was scary.”

Her family’s home was not damaged. But it took about four months for her to reconnect with many friends as they settled in Houston, Atlanta,and Baton Rouge.

Around Thanksgiving, Sage returned to New Orleans for the first time since the hurricane. She visited her aunt’s house near where the levees broke. “The neighborhood was desolate,”Sage remembered “and she even thought about rebuilding until that day. [but then she thought] ‘Oh my god, there’s no one here. I can’t move back.’”

Still, Sage said that because of New Orleans’ food, culture, and history, she hopes the city is rebuilt completely.

“The first thing they need to do,” Sears said, “is to fix those levees. The concrete is not gonna hold that water. They gotta put steel in the middle of those levees.”