Hurricane Katrina 20 years later: Chicago’s many connections

Tovi Khali, 52, a former New Orleans nightclub singer has put down roots in Chicago, 20 years after evacuating her home city during Hurricane Katrina.

In late August, WGN News visited her as she mixed perfume in her south shore shop, Pen and Paper: A Joint Creative at 6900 S. Stony Island Ave. There she sells hand crafted home and body products, a result of the filth and misery she experienced in the hurricane’s aftermath. 

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“The only thing I wanted to do was take a shower, take a bath,” she said. “So, I started making soap, and I started making things that made me feel whole, healing made me feel clean.”

A forecaster’s first day

On August 27, 2005, Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans. 

Mike Janssen was 29-years-old, and working for WGN’s sister television station WGNO-TV in New Orleans.  

“Twenty years ago today, I make my on-air debut,” he said.

Within 24-hours, Katrina had transformed over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, exploding into a category 5 hurricane.

“As we go through the night, Katrina just keeps gaining steam and just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Janssen said. “By the time we get to mid-morning hours on Sunday, New Orleans, for the first time ever, issues a mandatory evacuation.”

‘It was a wall of water’

Khali had worked as a performer in jazz clubs and at festivals. She left her apartment above a club in the French Quarter for the safety of a hotel.

“The last thing I remember about being outside of the hotel when they were rushing us to get in was, we saw this black shiny thing in the distance,” Khali said. “It was a wall of water. Yeah, it was water coming toward us. And we were in shock.”

The city’s levee system had failed causing catastrophic flooding. Thousands were in desperate need of rescue, but for some, it was too late.

“It’s just an absolute monster,” Janssen said as he remembered reporting on the levees. “When that happened, the decision was made by the folks up at the tribune tower to say, ‘We can’t protect you as journalists, you too need to go,’” he said.

Evacuation: ‘The last seat on the last bus’

Janssen and most of the WGNO-TV news team had to report from the safety of Baton Rouge, 80 miles northwest of New Orleans.

“When the anchor person on the news warns and says, ‘I’m leaving,’ then you should probably leave too,” Khali said.

Khali said Sen. Ted Kennedy had helped arrange for buses to take people out of the city as the conditions worsened.

“I was able to get the last seat on the last bus and be able to get out of there,” she said.

‘American Refugees’ land in Chicago

By September 4, nearly 500 evacuees had been airlifted to Illinois. Over the next two weeks, over 6,000 displaced people arrived on their own, and most of them settled in the Chicago area.

“It’s different when you want to, and when you have to,” Khali said.  

It took 45 days for the water to recede. In that time, the natural disaster morphed into a human catastrophe. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was slow and unprepared. One of the nation’s great cities was brought to its knees.

“The crescent city,” Khali said. “The city that’s known for its cuisine, its food, its vibrancy, it was dead. There were no birds. No dogs. There were no sounds. Just the stench of death.”

Nearly 2,000 people who either could not or would not evacuate died in the storm and its aftermath.

A Chicago-based company’s relief effort

Tens of thousands of people needed shelter, food, and medicine.

“The health needs were immense,” said Kathryn McKenzie of Abbott Laboratories.

Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories sent trucks and medical supplies to New Orleans and to Katrina refugees in the Houston Astrodome. 

“It’s a wakeup call,” McKenzie said. “The lesson was clear; we could not just have a reactive response anymore.”

It led to a new method of disaster relief: stockpiling resources in areas prone to disaster ahead of the storms, so help is there when it’s needed. The stockpiling strategy has become the best practice industry-wide.

“Hurricane Katrina was a turning point,” McKenzie said.

‘This Can’t Be Real’

Post-Katrina New Orleans looked like a war zone, according to many residents.

“You drove around thinking this can’t be real,” Janssen said. “You could not put it together.”

Janssen’s TV station cobbled together a temporary broadcast center, with signal coming from WGN-TV. A plaque on the second floor of the center thanked WGN.

“We had two double wide trailers and a second trailer that was the bathroom, so we set up in a parking lot across the street from the superdome and conducted our newscast from there for months,” he said.

With more than $200 billion in damage, it was the most destructive hurricane in U.S. history.

“Twenty years later, you still have parts of that city that have not been rebuilt,” Janssen said.

Sweet Home Chicago

Khali looked through a binder of old Katrina-era documents and photos, while sitting on a couch inside of her shop.

“I often wonder where I might have been if Katrina had not happened,” she said.

Khali said after two decades, she’s ready to move on from the hurricane that changed her life and the lives of so many others.  

“I’m home,” she said. “I’m home now.”