Second Line Rescue: Improvised Responses to Katrina and Rita

Transforming Endurance

91 In the wake of Katrina, through a series of rare chances, Houstonians experienced more dimensions of heroism than most of us had previously conceived of. As the storm surge and the collapsing levees drove hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents far from their homes and into our city, we prepared a heroic response, only to be humbled by the selfless courage of the “victims”—who continued to save each other spiritually as we provided material aid. We witnessed our mayor orchestrating one of the greatest acts of sustained civic heroism in recent times, marshaling resources that the national government had failed to provide. Even as the mayor’s office struggled to help, a host of congregations and individuals performed their own spontaneous rescue acts, thousands daily. And as the years passed and many of those who had been driven here continued to live as exiles in Houston, we were inspired daily by their courage of endurance, their power to accept their losses so graciously that they made us grateful to know them. I witnessed the transforming endurance of the survivors from a privileged position, as cofounder and codirector of a project that employed CARL LINDAHL Transforming Endurance 92 Carl Lindahl them to record each other’s experiences of disaster. The survivors themselves acted both as interviewers and interviewees; it was my honor simply to listen in, but also in the process to learn from their own lips how profoundly humble and heroic my new neighbors were. New Orleans West New Orleans and Houston: at first glance, an unlikely couple. Yet for a moment during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the two cities were twinned in American perceptions. In early September 2005, with New Orleans under water, as hundreds of buses emptied the Superdome into the Astrodome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center into the George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston’s population grew by as many as 250,000 while New Orleans’s dwindled to a few thousand. With stunning swiftness, Houston had become New Orleans West. One year after the disaster, Houston’s count of Katrina survivors was estimated at 150,000; arguably, more black New Orleanians then lived in Houston than in any other city, including New Orleans itself. The two cities stood together at the center of a national debate, a profound soul search over how generous Americans can afford to be. To put it simply, New Orleans is now known throughout the world as the site of America ’s most gratuitous abandonment of its own people, and Houston, in the year following Katrina, represented a rare and courageous affirmation of humanity, responsibility, and hope. In the days of the deluge, with pathetically few exceptions (notably the heroism of the U.S. Coast Guard), the governmental response to the older city’s need was at best inadequate and more often criminally negligent. Even years after Katrina, the norm remains inexplicable indifference, broken promises, aid presumably marshaled but as yet undelivered. More than three hundred miles to the west, the response of Houston was compassionate, bipartisan, generous, and smart—to my mind, a rare instance of institutional heroism and grassroots heroism working together. Bill White, the city’s Democratic mayor, and Robert Eckels, the Republican judge of Harris County, worked selflessly in tandem to staff two enormous refuges, the Astrodome and the Brown Convention Center. At the Dome, Dr. David Persse and the staff of the Houston Fire Department Emergency Medical Service performed on-the-spot triage for tens of thousands of evacuees. The Second Baptist Church deployed more than 40,000 volunteers to the Dome and the Convention Center, and Transforming Endurance 93 numberless other private citizens, from the Houston area and around the world, converged in the city to offer their time, their skills, and their hearts to the survivors. Yet something was happening in these shelters that transcended the generosity of the volunteers. All of the volunteers who have shared with me their thoughts about those times told me that they left the shelters in the knowledge that they were bringing away much more than they had taken there: they had been transformed by their human contact with the survivors. My experience accords with theirs. At the George R. Brown Convention Center I was assigned the job of sorting donated clothing and helping the male survivors find the shirts and...