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'A new beginning'

For these families, just surviving Hurricane Katrina is a great relief. But it will be a long trip back to normalcy.

By SHERRI DAY, JANET ZINK and AMY SCHERZER
Published October 7, 2005

Nearly six weeks have passed since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast destroying communities and ripping apart lives from Mississippi to Louisiana.

The hurricane and flooding displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Many lost their homes. Some lost their businesses. The most unfortunate lost their lives.

Dispersed around the country, many hurricane survivors still occupy makeshift shelters in churches, community centers, hotels and private homes.

About 32,353 people who evacuated to Florida have registered for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Of those, about 10,000 evacuees moved to the Tampa Bay area, federal housing officials said. The Tampa Bay chapter of the American Red Cross provided assistance to 2,343 families, 60 percent of which plan to stay here permanently.

The displaced are doctors and bus drivers, chefs and casino workers, the elderly and the infirm. More than 500 are children who have enrolled in bay area public schools. Hillsborough County has the bulk, more than 300 students, school officials said.

With the initial shock of the disaster behind them, many evacuees have begun the long walk back to normalcy. They must try to rebuild their lives. It will be anything but easy.

"They're doing as well as can be expected," said Derek Alden, planning and program development coordinator for the local Red Cross. "But the older people are in big trouble because it's much harder to find a job."

Here are a few of their stories.

Soon after Booker Diggins Jr. made a harrowing escape through neck-high water in New Orleans, his thoughts quickly turned to supporting his family.

Safe, dry and grateful for his life, he was uncomfortable whiling away his days.

"I consider myself a go-getter," said Diggins, 58, who moved with his wife and son from a Baton Rouge shelter to a relative's home. "I don't like handouts. I knew that I was going to get a job and take care of my family."

Diggins' brother, a driver for a truck company in Tampa, suggested that he look in the area for employment.

Diggins called the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority. Soon, he found himself en route to Tampa with a job offer and a chance to resume a 27-year career as a bus driver.

HARTline hired Diggins and another New Orleans bus driver in early September. The agency expects to employ at least five former New Orleans bus drivers, said Steven Roberts, the agency's general manager of operations.

"Individuals like (Diggins) have so much experience; they're all ready to go," Roberts said. "We hope that some of them will decide to stay with us. But if they don't, we're glad we were able to give them the opportunity to earn a living."

Diggins began an eight-week job training program at HARTline on Sept. 14. He expects to graduate in November and take his place behind the wheel. First, he must learn his way around the city. He lives in an apartment near the University of South Florida.

Every now and then Diggins allows himself to think about New Orleans and the floodwaters that washed away much of his life and livelihood.

He remembers his escape. He and his wife, Wanda, who also works in the transit business, stayed in New Orleans after the hurricane to help drive people to safety. But when the levees broke, water flooded the streets. The couple and 200 other New Orleans transit employees waded through fuel-slick water to safety on the Mississippi River Bridge. They pulled their 10-year-old son on an air mattress.

Last weekend, Diggins returned to New Orleans for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. His house on Cerise Avenue had 3-foot high watermarks on the walls. It smelled of rotting food.

But the house and many of his belongings, including a 400-movie DVD collection, were salvageable, he said. An investment property, several blocks away, was destroyed.

Diggins won't allow himself to cry. If he does, his son, Jeremy, might realize the family's multistate move is not an exciting adventure.

When Diggins closes his eyes, he sees the New Orleans of old, the place where he has lived his entire life. He wants to return and finish his career there. But for now, Tampa is home.

"I just thank God that me and my family are living," he said. "As long as we've got each other, we're going to make it."

- SHERRI DAY

When Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans, thousands of people fled west.

So Katrika Green Smith and her son Elmo, 15, headed east, away from the crowds.

They ended up in Tampa, where one of Smith's cousins lives.

For three weeks, Katrika and Elmo stayed in a hotel on a Red Cross voucher.

Last month, they moved into one of eight government-owned houses the city offered to people displaced by the hurricane.

The city acquired the houses through foreclosures and planned to sell them through its affordable housing program. Instead, the city decided to lease them for one year to people chased out of New Orleans.

"We're hopeful that they will get jobs and want to end up purchasing the houses if they don't go back to New Orleans," said Sharon West, Tampa's manager of housing and community redevelopment.

During a welcome home reception, Smith, 35, said the three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Lowry Park North offered them "a new beginning." Local community organizations, churches and businesses supplied furniture and household goods.

Smith grew up in New Orleans, where she most recently worked as a food and beverage supervisor at a casino. She and her son left the city with three changes of clothes, and nothing else.

Her Louisiana home, she said, has been destroyed.

"I can't sit around and dwell on what has happened," she said. "I'm thankful for my life."

Smith is looking for a job and waiting for her 18-year-old daughter and 3-month-old granddaughter to arrive in Tampa. They evacuated to Houston when Hurricane Katrina hit.

So far, three families have moved into the city-owned houses, where they will pay below-market rent to the Community Development Corp. of Tampa, a nonprofit agency serving as the property manager.

The city has already selected other Gulf Coast families to move into the remaining five houses, which are being rehabilitated. They houses will become available by the end of the month.

More than 150 families in the Tampa Bay area have received shelter provided by the Red Cross, and 67 families have received housing through U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to a HUD spokesman.

"Housing offers you stability. You can develop some daily routine and normalcy," said West, Tampa's housing manager. "It starts at home."

- JANET ZINK

It could have been so much worse, Robyn Kessler repeats endlessly. She says it to her three children, who have been uprooted from their New Orleans home and schools. To her husband, Bob, an oncologist now commuting to work at a Westbank area hospital. And to herself, who until a few weeks ago was a part-time nurse at her children's private school.

The roller coaster ride began Aug. 28 when the Tampa natives awoke to news that Hurricane Katrina had grown to Category 5 proportions.

"We never panicked," Robyn said. Her husband boarded the windows while she did the laundry. Son Alex, 13, packed a deck of cards and a CD player. Beth, 14, took a favorite pillow, cell phone and purse.

They loaded two coolers of food, clothes for three days and piled into their Lexus SUV with their Australian shepherd, Benji, and Labrador retriever, Baylee.

No one thought to pack photos, jewelry or important documents.

"We never thought we wouldn't be going back in a couple of days," Robyn said.

They spent the next four nights in Lafayette, La., with friends of friends they didn't know. Watching television news absorbed their every waking minute. At night, Robyn and Bob slept with the dogs in the garage.

Later they learned 18 inches of water filled their home, warping wood floors and ruining furniture, walls and carpet.

"You watch disaster movies, like Twister, but you don't think it can really happen to you," Alex said.

The next move took them to Destin, where they connected with two of Beth's best friends who also had evacuated from New Orleans. They decided to come together to Tampa, where the Kesslers have roots.

Robyn graduated from Plant High School in 1973, Bob from Jesuit in 1969. Their parents are Trudy and Phil Brinen and Walter Kessler.

The Kesslers rented a townhouse a block off Bayshore Boulevard and furnished it from Triage and The Missing Piece. The other two families are renting on Harbour Island.

After settling in the family, Bob Kessler, 54, returned to his patients in New Orleans. He lives in a friend's empty house during the week and returns to Tampa whenever he can. He met with an insurance agent and a contractor who estimated it would be a year before their home would be habitable.

Beth is enrolled at Plant High, where the freshman class is bigger than all 12 grades in her school back home. She misses her life in New Orleans, where she was the only freshman to make the varsity cheerleading squad. Still, as she reaches friends spread across the country by cell phone and Internet, she realizes how lucky she is.

Alex, an eighth-grader at Wilson Middle School, plans to get involved in baseball and band. By coincidence, one of his New Orleans classmates and her twin brother also landed at Wilson.

Robyn was starting a ballet class "to keep me sane," she said, when another cloud came.

Daughter Jen, 19, a sophomore at Indiana University majoring in communications, fell down a hill on her way to a football game Sept. 10 and broke her ankle.

"No, I was not drinking," she says, before anyone asks.

Surgeons put a metal plate in her ankle and planned to discharge her the next day. Instead, a pulmonary embolism formed in her lung and phlebitis in her arms. After eight days in the hospital, with her parents at her side, Jen withdrew for the semester and joined her family in Tampa.

It could have been so much worse, Robyn says again. "Our friends and family are all safe, and in the end, that's all that matters."

- AMY SCHERZER

[Last modified October 6, 2005, 08:25:09]