An Interview with Mary Foster

This interview was conducted on November 22, 2007, at the home of Mary Foster in New Orleans.

ROWELL: You live in New Orleans, and you have experienced many hurricanes. Did you leave before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans?

FOSTER: I didn't leave because I was at work. I went to the Superdome at 11:00 AM on Sunday morning and I walked out of the Superdome at 6:00 PM the following Saturday night. I stayed there for the entire duration. I stayed there for the hurricane and then of course they were bringing refugees there, so I covered that story for the Associated Press.

ROWELL: How many days were you in the Superdome?

FOSTER: Almost a full week.

ROWELL: How and where did you get food and drinking water? How did you take care of your personal needs?

FOSTER: It started out that the Superdome was not supposed to be a shelter. It had been used twice before as a shelter and the Superdome management wanted, if it was going to be a shelter, to do things like put in supplies, put in port-a-lets, put in those kinds of things, which was never done. I don't know if you are aware of it or not, but the Red Cross will no longer set up shelters in the New Orleans area because they say it is unsafe. There were no buildings that they felt were secure enough, so there were supposed to be no shelters in New Orleans. Prior to Katrina, they were urging everyone to evacuate and people who had money evacuated. What was left were the poor, including the working poor, people who didn't have the "wherewithal," I think, to leave primarily.

The Superdome was opened up on Sunday morning and the first ones to get there at 11:00 AM were people that they called the "special needs" people, people with medical conditions and the elderly. Several nursing homes brought their patients there, people who were sick. Then on Sunday evening they opened the doors and started letting in the general population. As they came into the Superdome, the National Guard was there and everyone was patted down and searched to prevent anyone from bringing in weapons. They weren't permitted to bring in cigarettes or, of course, booze.

I was covering the story because I had spent the night at the Superdome a year earlier, when they had opened it as a shelter and the hurricane didn't hit here. So people came in that night and left. It was families, it was the elderly, it was people who worked minimum wage jobs. People said, "There were two hundred thousand cars that flooded in New Orleans, why didn't people use them to get out of town?" Many of these people didn't have cars or if they had cars they didn't have the money to just gas up and go, and they had nowhere to stay. It is easy to say that you should evacuate, but it is not as easy to do.

They came in the first night, which was the night before the storm hit, the Dome was air-conditioned and the toilets were all working [Laughs]. People brought in blankets and stuff, put down cardboard and slept where they could. Some of them sat in the seats of the stadium. There is a phone in the press box, so I went up there to file my story and slept that night on the floor of the press box because there was no one else there, so I had it to myself. I got up at 5:00 AM the next morning and went downstairs and by that time it was pouring rain. There is a walkway around the entire Dome, and some of the National Guardsmen were kidding and told me that they had gone out and taken a shower out in the rain. They had soaped and had stripped down and had showered.

Well, I walked around the corner and when I did the wind hit me. Fortunately someone saw me and opened the...