Amber McZeal had just wrapped up her first summer semester back at Southern University of New Orleans in August 2005.
“Then the big tropical storm came, which was crazy, massive,” she said. “And then Katrina hit Aug. 29.”
Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana as a Category 3 storm — with 120 mph winds and a surge over 12 feet tall in some areas — decimating New Orleans and other coastal towns along the Mississippi shore.
In the aftermath, 1,833 people died and survivors were left stranded on rooftops as the federal government was slow to respond. Thousands of people — mostly poor and Black — were displaced in one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.
Twenty years later, some who were evacuated and relocated to other parts of the country, including the Bay Area, reflect on how Katrina changed their lives and how they remain rooted to a place that, for them, is more than geography.
Like many of her neighbors, McZeal, who now lives in Oakland, initially planned to ride out Katrina, which made landfall two days before her 22nd birthday.
“I’m glad I didn’t, because my apartment got 8 feet of water at the bottom and then mold from the roof,” she said.
McZeal evacuated to Mississippi with friends and later returned to a ravaged New Orleans. She ultimately decided to leave Louisiana — where she said her ancestors have lived since the 1700s — after suffering a respiratory tract infection and growing weary of battling the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help.
Instead, she accepted the government’s offer to pay for a hotel room outside of New Orleans in early 2006.
“It was a forced exile, if you will, or forced displacement,” McZeal said.
She landed in Emeryville, where a friend had a spare hotel room. She joined organizers pressing the U.S. government to follow the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which they interpreted to mean that New Orleanians should be able to return to their homes there.
But many never did — not by choice.
Nell Myhand, then a Bay Area volunteer with the nonprofit Global Women’s Strike, worked to support Katrina evacuees, many of whom were low-income.
“Our question was not, what kind of charity can we provide for them, but how can we call attention to the violence that is happening to them at the hands of the government?” Myhand said. “In some countries, in natural disasters, they respond to them by moving people out of the danger as close as possible to where they were.
“But in the case of Katrina, the U.S. government decided to disperse people from Louisiana, throughout the country, far away from their homes, from their families, sometimes in places where they had never been before and didn’t have connection.”
Myhand said many people were placed in hotel rooms without kitchens or transportation, leaving volunteers scrambling to meet basic needs.
“There was no central place where we could say, ‘Where are the evacuees who came to the Bay Area?’ There was no coordination that helped us get ready for the folks who were coming here,” Myhand said. “There was really no reason that they had to come here in the first place, except that they were being displaced from that very vital location, that geography.”
About 1,700 people relocated to California after Katrina. A 2008 Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that only up to 3% of evacuees came to California and stayed a year later.
Chet Hewitt, the head of Alameda County’s Social Services Agency at the time, said of the 1,700 people who came to the Bay Area, 1,100 were in Alameda County.
To meet their needs, the county set up a “one-stop center” in Hayward, where retired social workers helped 400 families apply for housing assistance, food stamps, school enrollment, replacement medications and new IDs.
“The kind of public, private, faith and nonprofit partnerships were essential,” Hewitt said. “The government has a critical role to play — particularly in long-term assistance — but the more rapid response was often of a more communal nature, with the faith community and nonprofits stepping up. We were building a system to respond, not relying on any one segment to do all of the work alone.”
Over the last 20 years, McZeal built her life in Oakland, earning degrees in psychology and a doctorate in trauma and sound therapy. She said her work is deeply shaped by the traumas she endured after Katrina.
“It’s a gem in my heart. New Orleans made me. It ushered me into all of the things that I eventually turned into a job, a vocation, a career path,” McZeal said. “I work in cultural transformation now, and I can, for sure, say it’s directly tied to my experience living through Katrina.”
She has thought about moving back to Louisiana, as other evacuees in the Bay Area have, but she said she’s happy where she is.
“Maybe one day when I’m old, I’ll settle, because I don’t even want to live in the heat,” she said, laughing. “You know the Bay grows on you. That 61-degree weather.”
Dan Smolkin also found himself resettled in the Bay Area. He arrived with his parents and grandparents to stay with his uncle after floodwaters engulfed their New Orleans home just days after his 17th birthday. Smolkin’s parents decided he should stay with family in Palo Alto to finish high school, while they returned to salvage what they could.
“Never, in my wildest dreams, did I think that I would end up becoming a Californian,” Smolkin said. “One of the things that I’ve struggled with is I wasn’t there in those couple of months where my parents literally were gutting our house down to the studs, and there was part of me that felt like I was missing out on being part of that recovery effort for my family, but also being there in New Orleans.”
His parents later rejoined him in the Bay, and he participated in the relief efforts while attending James Madison University in Virginia, where he and his peers routinely traveled into Katrina-ravaged areas to help.
Smolkin now lives in Half Moon Bay, where he volunteers with Coastside Hope, helping people with food insecurity, immigration and other needs.
“I don’t want to wait until there is something truly bad that happens to jump in, but rather recognizing there are these ongoing, omnipresent needs in the community. We should all be reaching out and helping in our communities in some way,” he said. “That’s part of what really stuck with me from Katrina, that there’s so much value in having strongly built safety nets and coordinated programs to support people when they’re truly in need.”
At home, Smolkin and his wife have a room ready for their first child, a boy due in December.
He hopes Louisiana will remain a part of his son’s life, starting with the family’s annual crawfish boil at his uncle’s home.
“To me, New Orleans isn’t just a place, but it’s an identity, and something that I hope to be able to impart on my kid,” Smolkin said.
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