Hurricane Katrina’s damaging winds and rain hit New Orleans and the surrounding area 10 years ago this week. The storm and subsequent flooding killed more than 1,800 people and destroyed homes and businesses, causing $108 billion in damage. Like many parts of the country, people from western Massachusetts responded in the weeks, months and years that followed.
Singer Ellis Paul had the idea for Hurricane Angel when he was sitting in his car two years after Katrina devastated New Orleans listening to a radio story about people whose homes had been destroyed and had to leave FEMA trailers because they were getting sick from formaldehyde in the drywall.
“I was on the phone with American Express because I had missed a payment and they had jacked my percentage rate up to 29 percent and in the same moment I heard the story,” Paul said. “I was waiting on the phone to talk to somebody in India about my financial situation feeling sorry for myself and then this story comes on the air while I’m on hold and I thought ‘My problems are nothing compared to these people’s.’”
The song describes a person whose life has been decimated by Katrina trying to navigate endless problems with bills piling higher and higher.
“He sees the president flying overhead and everybody who could help him is a million miles away and it’s futile even to talk to them,” he said. “So he’s sending up talking to angels and praying instead because there is no human help coming.”
As heard here, Paul performed Hurricane Angel at The Guthrie Center in Great Barrington in 2008. He also sang it during a benefit at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center celebrating Berkshire volunteers and the people they helped in New Orleans. State Representative Smitty Pignatelli of Lenox went to the Lower Ninth Ward a little more than a year after Katrina hit to repair a house. He says he was so moved by the experience that he returned.
“I organized a group of 25 contractors all from the Berkshires,” Pignatelli explained. “Sheet rockers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, heating contractors and window guys. We rebuilt an entire house in six days.
Pignatelli says the Stewart family moved in a week later. He recalls how one volunteer described the experience.
“He said it’s the greatest thing he’s every done in his life other than having a child,” Pignatelli recalled. “That’s a powerful experience from a contractor in the Berkshires to make a claim like that for a total stranger.”
Members of the Stewart family were flown to Great Barrington for the benefit to personally thank volunteers. Event organizer Lynette Najimy says about 400 people raised $4,000 for Hope for Stanley, a volunteer organization named after Stanley Stewart.
“The family is very humble and gracious and were genuinely moved in gratitude for themselves, but they also represented all of the other communities that were helped so generously from groups all around the country, but in particular really a remarkable showing from the Berkshires,” said Najimy.
Local churches, Habitat for Humanity and students from Lenox schools were among those who went to New Orleans to help rebuild. Still, a decade after the storm, Pignatelli says not all is well.
“Stanley’s got a beautiful home because of the good volunteer work of so many from the Berkshires, but you don’t have to travel very far to see other homes that are still devastated,” Pignatelli said. “That are just foundations or steps leading up to what used to be a house. I think it’s an epic failure of government at every level that 10 years later there are still areas that are devastated.”
Excerpts from Yvette Jamuna Sirker’s When The Sky Falls were also performed at the Mahaiwe event. Then known as Hell or High Water, the play details the New Orleans’s native experiences when Katrina hit.
“I was one of 7,000 tenured faculty to lose a job,” Sirker said. “My home was damaged. It came off its foundation so it was inhabitable. The cost of living in New Orleans immediately went up 400 percent.”
Sirker realized those conditions when she returned home for the first time six weeks after the storm.
“I spent quite a bit of time, weeks possibly, riding my bike around listening to the stories,” Sirker said. “All I had to say was ‘How’d you make out?’ Then I would sit there. Sometimes for a half hour, hour or sometimes two.”
Those stories became part of When The Sky Falls, which has been performed across the region. Having vacationed in the Berkshires, Sirker now lives in the area and works for Pittsfield Public Schools and Berkshire Community College. When The Sky Falls is being presented Tuesday at Civic Ensemble in Ithaca. It’s part of an event called “Katrina: 10 Years Later: A Theatrical Response.”
