Survivors' tales of life on the mend

August 28, 2006

One year after the most devastating storm in U.S. history killed more than 1,300 people and left more than three-quarters of a million people homeless, New Orleans remains a shattered city, its inhabitants still groping to gather the pieces of their broken lives.

Newsday interviewed dozens of people in Louisiana in the days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. Staff writer Martin C. Evans and Washington correspondent J. Jioni Palmer returned to New Orleans and tracked down several of them to find out how they are faring today.

YVONNE GAILLARD, 72

Yvonne Gaillard had been trapped alone in her house for days, first by Hurricane Katrina's surging waters that made her mattress an indoor survival raft, then by hunger and dehydration that left her too weak to force open a front door that had warped shut.

Now the former bar and restaurant owner, who for half a century regaled her customers with tales of New Orleans while serving platters of oysters and bowls of gumbo, remains so frightened that she rarely leaves her home.

"Before the storm, I'd walk everywhere," said Gaillard, sitting in her dining room one afternoon last week, with the doors locked and the blinds in her house drawn tight. "But since the storm, it's scary out there. You've got people killing up people. It's terrible.

"If I didn't have my brother, I don't know what I would do," said Gaillard, who was so frightened she refused to leave her home with rescuers three weeks after Hurricane Katrina flooded her Bywater neighborhood. "It's too scary to go outside. My friends, I don't even know where they are. They all scattered after the storm. And they are not coming back."

In many ways, Gaillard is lucky. But she remains so riddled by anxiety that members of her family are concerned.

"Every now and then she tells me 'I haven't been right since the storm,'" said her youngest brother, Lloyd Gaillard, a 59-year-old postal worker who says he must check in on her almost daily to assure her that she is safe.

She survived Katrina on cookies and water - and wine after the water ran out - until National Guard troops pushed open her front door swelled shut by the floodwaters. That was in early September. A guardsman estimated that Gaillard, emaciated and dehydrated, had lost a quarter of her body weight.

After moving in with relatives while the house's flood damage was repaired, she moved back this spring. But a neighborhood that once seemed safe and familiar at night - grandparents, aunts, cousins and longtime friends had once lived within blocks of her - is now eerily vacant.

She also lost her former husband and onetime business partner, Austin Leslie, the New Orleans chef whose soul food restaurant Chez Helene inspired the 1980s television show "Frank's Place." Leslie, who had remained close with Gaillard after their divorce, fought an infection after cutting his foot while wading in the floodwaters, she said. Leslie evacuated to Atlanta, and died there in late September.

Lloyd Gaillard said his sister remains badly shaken by her ordeal and by the changes to her city.

"She worries a lot now, because she doesn't know who is in the neighborhood," he said, as his sister sat nearby. "She used to be so independent. Now she won't even open the door."

- Martin C. Evans

LAWRENCE PALMISANO, 40

There is nothing shy about Lawrence "Tracy" Palmisano. A blunt-bodied ex-Coast Guardsman with a voice like andouille-spiked gumbo, Palmisano has a riverfront boatyard across the murky Mississippi from downtown New Orleans.

Palmisano initially wondered whether Hurricane Katrina would dash his business. But with estimates of Katrina damage to recreational boats reaching $750 million - about half of that amount covered by insurance - Palmisano's telephone rings almost constantly.

"Right now, there's a shortage of boats," Palmisano intoned into the receiver during a break in an interview last week, something he would repeat perhaps a half-dozen times more in the following two hours. "I've got buyers lined up, so bring yours over."

For a while, Palmisano was not sure whether Hurricane Katrina would even leave him a place from which to sell boats, or a staff to help seal deals. Winds blew the metal siding from the cavernous work shed where employees do boat repairs, and wrecked 1,700 feet of fence. He had no insurance to cover the damage. And he is down to three employees - he had 10 last year - after several took refuge in other states, found work elsewhere or quit to fix up damaged homes.