Columbia a refuge from Katrina

Looking back, it wasn’t the way she had wanted to leave — strapped to a soldier, dangling from a helicopter above the water where her house had been, watching as bodies swirled in the eddies under an overpass.

Gloria Rowel was 57 years old. She and her husband, Alfred, had been through hurricanes before. They usually left their brick house by the Lakefront Airport in New Orleans for a few days and returned when things calmed down. But this was different. This was Katrina.

The helicopter took Rowel and her then-74-year-old husband straight to the airport, where people had formed two lines: one on the left, and one on the right. Rowel had to choose.

“A lady said, ‘I would take the right if I was you.’ So I took the right, and wound up getting on the airplane. … I asked where we were going, and the pilot said he didn’t even know. I just took a seat and just prayed,” Rowell said. “We didn’t know where we was going until we got ready to land. The pilot announced it. I really didn’t think anything at first. He just said, ‘Welcome to Columbia, South Carolina.’”

The Rowels were among nearly 2,000 people who came to Columbia after Katrina did its worst to New Orleans in 2005. The goal was to treat the evacuees as guests and to help them make Columbia their second home.

But five years after Katrina, home is something many of the evacuees are still searching for. The Rowels returned home, only to find it wasn’t the home they remembered. Evacuees William and Shay Young made Columbia their home, but their hearts didn’t follow them.

And for Frazie and Cassandra Hall, the only way home was to start over.

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Columbia was one of 370 metropolitan areas that took in Katrina evacuees. The city’s streamlined approach to getting evacuees help was widely applauded.

A total of 705 Columbia households applied for Katrina assistance. A nonprofit organization, S.C. Cares, sprouted up to take care of them, setting up shop at USC’s Naval ROTC center. There is no official count of how many of the refugees stayed in Columbia.

In less than two weeks, 1,700 people received money for food from the American Red Cross, hotel rooms paid for by S.C. businesses, bus tickets from the legal community to be reunited with loved ones and eyeglasses and dentures from state agencies.

When Rowel stepped off the plane in Columbia, the first person she saw was the wife of then-Mayor Bob Coble.

“I mean, it was beautiful. It was like an assembly line — doctors, nurses, shower, clothes, just everything. You couldn’t ask for more,” Rowel said.

The Rowels were sponsored by BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina. The insurance company rented out a motel on Two Notch Road, purchased cell phones and worked out a deal to feed them at the local Lizard’s Thicket restaurant. Jean Suber-Smith, a retired vice president of operations, was the point person.

“Gloria Rowel and Alfred Rowel were an older couple, compared to other couples that came in, and they were kind of reserved,” Suber-Smith said. “Gloria just kind of became a friend. Mr. Rowell the same way. They were just kind of quiet and kept to themselves.”

Gloria Rowel got a job at BlueCross doing computer work. Suber-Smith’s husband would come and sit with Alfred Rowel and even take him to see the Suber-Smith’s grandson play baseball.

But Gloria Rowel had not seen her family for six months, and she was having a hard time. The Rowels moved out of the motel and into an apartment on Parklane Road. But things didn’t get better.

“I had to see a psychiatrist. He told me it was best I try to get close to some of my family members,” Rowel said. “I had a daughter in Baton Rouge, so we moved to Baton Rouge.”

There, the Rowels waited for their home to be repaired. They returned to New Orleans in June 2008. But it wasn’t the New Orleans they remembered.

“The French Quarter looks great, but back in the Ninth Ward and some of the parishes, it looks just like it did right after the hurricane hit,” said Suber-Smith, who has visited the Rowels’ home in New Orleans. “I just couldn’t imagine anybody going back there in that whole neighborhood.”

Rowel found a job as a nurse and worked for a year. She retired in 2009.

“There are some things that I see that, you know, it still depresses you,” she said. “I wish I had stayed up there (in Columbia). I wish I had sold my house down here and stayed up there.”

*****

William Young IV left New Orleans in a Toyota Corolla with his parents, his dog and his nine-months-pregnant wife. They decided to aim small: Baton Rouge, which was 80 miles to the west. It took them just over 12 hours to get there.

So the Youngs headed east, hoping that William Young V would be patient. He was. On Sept. 8, Shay Young delivered a 7-pound, 9-ounce baby boy at Providence Hospital.

“He was the child we needed to have to get us through Katrina,” William Young said. “… He’s just so cool and laid-back.”

William Young played football at Edna Karr Magnet School, and would go on to play cornerback for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette football team. He and Shay married in 2003. They bought a house instead of having a honeymoon.

The Youngs’ home in New Orleans was damaged, so after Katrina they lived in some rental houses in Columbia for a while. Young persuaded three of his childhood friends, who were scattered throughout the Southeast after the storm, to come and live with him in Columbia.

In 2006, Habitat for Humanity built houses for each, side by side by side by side, on a street in West Columbia. Young has nicknamed the area “New Orleans, South Carolina.”

But even with a house, a job, a church and friends, the Youngs couldn’t feel at home in Columbia. They held on to their damaged house on Kent Street in New Orleans. Devout Christians, they faithfully send their tithes to their home church, Olive Branch Baptist, which is about three miles from their Kent Street house.

“If I wanted to move, if my wife and I had said, ‘Let’s get out of New Orleans. Let’s move,’ and we moved to Columbia, I would be a very happy person,” Young said. “But because I feel like we were forced out, we miss home all the time.”

Habitat for Humanity officials are scheduled to build a home for William Young’s mother in Columbia. But most of the Youngs’ family members moved back to New Orleans, he said.

It’s difficult to visit.

“First of all, it’s an 11-hour ride,” he said. “And then when you get there, we have jobs here, so you just get — you start basking in what home is like, and then you have to come back home. And I mean it’s kind of funny because some of the things are not the same as the way you left them.”

The Youngs kept their Kent Street house as long as they could before losing it to foreclosure. Shortly after that, the Youngs joined Brookland Baptist Church and stopped sending their tithes to New Orleans.

“At that point, it was like, ‘OK, all right. This is home,’” Young said.

*****

The house in north Columbia smells like paint. Bungalow Gold in the living room, Coffee Whip in the bathroom and Sassy Violet in the bedroom.

But Cassandra Hall hardly has time to admire her work. Her twin 1-year-old granddaughters are screaming in their car seats, and neither crackers nor Nick Jr. can soothe them. She quickly shows a reporter a ceiling fan in her bedroom — which she installed herself — before bounding out the door with the twins.

“It makes me feel good,” she said. “It’s something my husband and I achieved together.”

Her husband, Frazie, smiles from his seat on the couch. It’s been three years since the Halls moved into their Habitat for Humanity home, and Frazie hasn’t looked back. He and Cassandra celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary Aug. 22. They have a daughter and three grandchildren who live in Charlotte and another daughter with the twins who lives in Sumter.

Columbia is where they want to be.

But it didn’t start out that way. The Halls were lifelong New Orleans residents who dreamed of owning their own home. Frazie Hall worked as a doorman at the Omni Royal Orleans hotel in the French Quarter.

When Katrina came, Frazie Hall would not have evacuated had it not been for the pestering phone calls from his daughters. They headed out as officials began to shut down roads to keep people out of the storm.

“It was a convoy leading out, and just as we got to the checkpoint, they put all the barricades behind my car, and they had at least another 25, 30 cars behind me,” he said. “I often wonder what happened to them.”

The Halls have been back to New Orleans a few times, and what they saw shocked them. Frazie Hall is a Vietnam veteran. He was stationed at Da Nang Air Force Base, about 80 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, where he was exposed to toxic Agent Orange, a specific blend of herbicides used to remove leaves from trees that provided cover to enemy forces.

“It looked 100 times worse than a war zone,” Hall said. “From the extent of the damage that I’ve seen, I knew recovery was going to be an uphill time all the way. And I just said, ‘You know, it’s time for a fresh start.’”

The only thing that survived the storm was a battered dining room set Cassandra Hall picked out with her mother before her mother died. In 2007, when the Halls were living in an apartment, Cassandra Hall filled in the cracks in the wooden table with a brown marker. After reading about the Halls in The State newspaper, a furniture restorer from North Carolina came down and touched up the dining room set as best he could.

And while Katrina left so many families homeless, it had the opposite effect for the Halls.

“We had constantly been trying down in New Orleans to become homeowners. It was just one obstacle after the other,” Frazie Hall said. “So when we came here and we got into the Habitat (for Humanity) program, they did something that the other programs didn’t do. They said, ‘Yes, you can.’ And we had never heard that before.”

The Halls helped build their house, and spent 250 hours volunteering on other Habitat building projects, as is required by the program.

But what really sold the Halls on South Carolina was one phone call.

“Mayor Coble had put out the word that if anybody needed anything, to call him. The evacuee center had a phone bank with like 25 phones. And I got on the phone, and I called the mayor’s office, and I didn’t talk to no secretary; I didn’t talk to no in-between; I talked directly to Mayor Bob Coble,” Frazie Hall said. “I told him what I needed, and he said, ‘Whatever you need, you will get it.’

“And I got it.”