On Nov. 5, Carie Ann Foster returned to New Orleans and picked up her pre-Hurricane Katrina college life, which had been neatly packed in cardboard boxes and stacked on the floor of Tulane University’s gymnasium.
As Gulf Coast schools assess the damage and prepare to reopen, students have joined the masses of humanity returning to the ravaged area to find varying levels of devastation. Some, like Foster and her Tulane classmates, are free to return and retrieve the belongings they abandoned when they evacuated. Others, enrolled at schools like Xavier University in New Orleans, must wait for news of whether any of their possessions survived the storm while they decide whether to return for classes next semester.
“It was really depressing driving in,” Foster said. “The whole city was flooded with at least three feet of water and it sat there for two weeks. All the shops were being gutted. There were piles of junk – drywall. It was basically a ghost town. It was really quiet.”
One of the about 100 students from Tulane who enrolled at this university after escaping Hurricane Katrina, Foster, a freshman letters and sciences major, said Tulane emerged from the storm largely unscathed because it lies in New Orleans’s Uptown district on higher ground than many surrounding neighborhoods.
A sixth-floor resident of Monroe Hall – one of two mainly freshman dorms – in the center of the campus, Foster said her belongings were largely untouched. University workers, as part of the cleanup process and to allow aid workers to stay in the dorms, sorted and boxed students’ belongings and deposited them in the gymnasium. All of her possessions were accounted for, she said, except a few pairs of sweatpants and a few other “little things.”
Around the Tulane campus, Foster said, signs of the old days are emerging in time for the university to reopen in mid-January.
“Most cafes are starting to open,” she said. “The bars the students go to are open and fine.”
Foster said she looks forward to returning to Tulane and volunteering with the city’s restoration effort.
Kristian Owens, a freshman psychology major, lives with Foster in an Ellicott Hall room this semester. Enrolled at Xavier University, a historically black school in New Orlean’s heavily flooded Downtown district, Owens has not seen her dorm since August and cannot return to retrieve her belongings because the campus has sustained too much damage. Although the school is slated to resume some classes in mid-January, Owens said the administration has not given any indication of whether her belongings are intact.
“A lot of dorms and buildings were destroyed with the water,” she said. “They’ve had mold and mildew growth; they’ve had roof leaks.”
No electricity for air conditioning means objects that escaped the floodwaters may fall prey to fungus. The school is telling students not to expect to reclaim many possessions, she said.
“As of now, I’ve gotten over it,” she said. “If anything, I’d like to go back and get my pictures – family, friends. If I can’t, I’ll be upset.”
Mandy Domaschk, a sophomore letters and sciences major, returned to her apartment at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in late October to find fire trucks from New York, the chaotic aftermath of a post-hurricane crime spree and maniacal roommates.
“My roommates who stayed there were pretty crazy,” she said. “I had things on the walls and they changed everything around. They were like, ‘Why didn’t you stay?’ They kind of wigged out on me. My roommates were not the same people I left.”
Domaschk said her possessions were largely fine, and she has settled into life in a Knox Box and at the university.
“I think I’m going to stay,” she said. “I really like it.”
Contact reporter Kate Campbell at campbelldbk@gmail.com.
