Hurricane Katrina 10 years later: Survivors who came to Bay Area offer stories of hope, despair and everything in between

Hurricane Katrina displaced more than 400,000 people when it roared through the Gulf Coast 10 years ago with a storm surge that swamped New Orleans, setting off a diaspora of mostly poor African-Americans. While the vast majority resettled close to home, a relative few found their way to distant places like San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco, where they found shelter, respite and watered-down red beans and jambalaya.

Over the decade, some, like Amber McZeal, of Oakland, embraced the new life they found out west. Others, like Alisha Page, appreciated the kindness of a stranger who brought her to the Bay Area but couldn’t resist the muggy, Old World charms of a mystical city nearing its 300th year. Page’s benefactor, Rena Salomon, still wrestles with the horror she witnessed a decade ago.

Yet they remain linked by the disaster and the struggle to move forward.

“California was nice, it was different,” Page, 30, said by telephone from her rented house in the Algiers section of New Orleans on the Mississippi River’s West Bank. “But it was like a vacation from home.”

Page was 20 when she and her mother, Patricia Page, lost everything. Salomon, the so-called Angel in a Hummer who became something of a media star for her daring rescues of stranded New Orleanians, brought them to her Santa Clara home after the storm.

Alisha shuttled between the South Bay and New Orleans before returning for good in 2011 to help rebuild her hometown with youthful optimism and joy. She and her partner have an infant son, a steady income and a nice house behind newly fortified levees. Her mother returned, too, but only reluctantly and to help care for the infant boy.

“I love my city,” Alisha Page said. “I just love to see it, to see the water, the people. I love the food, the music, everything. I guess I have a happy ending because I didn’t die. I didn’t suffer, at least not how other people did.”

The storm killed 1,833 people and caused more than $150 billion in property loss. A decade later, New Orleans has more or less rebounded. But for whom — blacks or whites, rich or poor — has become a running argument, even in the faraway places where some of them remain. Though still a majority-black city, New Orleans now has fewer blacks and more whites, Latinos and Asians than it did before the storm, Census Bureau figures show, bolstering suspicions among many blacks that the rebuilding left them shortchanged.

“They wanted us out,” said McZeal. “You could see that in the land grabs than ensued.”

In a bittersweet story, the hurricane swept away McZeal’s possessions, inflicting more anguish than she could bear. Yet it also brought her to a place where her education and career plans could stay on track — west Oakland.

McZeal was a 21-year-old jazz singer studying music and psychology when Katrina flooded her apartment. From her base in Oakland, she earned degrees from Vermont’s Goddard College in a program that required campus visits every six months. She is currently working on a doctorate in psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute near Santa Barbara.

On her brief and frustrating returns to New Orleans, she began to think of Katrina’s aftermath in the context of African-American history, a story that begins with a massive, forced relocation. At the same time, her individual anguish gave her personal insight into the traumatic effects of disasters and displacement. Whether she stays in the Bay Area or returns to New Orleans, McZeal plans to become a therapist who uses the emotional, mental, social, aesthetic and spiritual powers of music and sound to heal.

“Katrina was an outside storm, but it was also an inside storm, a storm in my psyche,” McZeal said.

Another Katrina survivor who stayed in the Bay Area, Diane Evans, is now 67 and walks happily around San Francisco’s impoverished Tenderloin district on a surgically rebuilt knee and hip, having repaired the damage from years of hard labor as a cement worker in New Orleans.

“The parade of people and diversity in the Tenderloin is awesome,” she said. “Nobody robs or bothers us old people.”

Over the years, her emergency housing included a comfortable basement apartment in Burlingame, a government subsidized hotel room, a car when she became homeless and now a room in a senior housing complex where she regales young volunteers with Katrina stories.

“Do not ask me about Katrina unless you have two hours!” she said, adding she’d rather explain why she never returned to New Orleans and probably never will.

After landing in Burlingame, she enrolled her 7-year-old grandson, Maurice, in a public school where he excelled. She kept him there even after they had to move into the hotel in San Francisco. As a young mother in New Orleans, she also fibbed about her addresses to send her own children to better neighborhood schools.

“My priority in life was always a safe place for my children to live and decent schools,” she said. “I never cared about fancy clothes, doing my nails and going out at night.”

Maurice eventually moved to Chicago to live with his mother, but he plans on attending college in the Bay Area starting next year.

“I’m going to be here for him,” Evans said.

Jewel Dixon returned to the Crescent City in 2009, but she’d rather be back in San Jose.

“I had a good life there,” the 59-year-old said by telephone. “I miss that community out there.”

She and her longtime partner, Reggie Melancon, also were plucked from Katrina’s floodwaters by the Angel in a Hummer, Salomon, who gave the couple shelter at her Santa Clara home.

While Melancon waxed nostalgic for Louisiana, Dixon took a liking to the South Bay. She earned $13 an hour at the San Jose Marriott Hotel, enough to rent a small house south of downtown. She joined Emmanuel Baptist Church, where she volunteered in the food kitchen for the poor.

“It was a giving community,” she says. “People in San Jose, in that church, were willing to help me after Katrina and then I wanted to give back.”

Dixon and eventually Melancon wanted to make San Jose their new home, but her aging mother in New Orleans broke her collarbone. Dixon and Melancon returned to care for her. She found a waitress job at the local Marriott but it paid only $7 an hour. Worse, she said, New Orleans housing costs skyrocketed and the city, she felt, had lost the mellow, everyday peacefulness she once knew.

“People are getting robbed in the streets in broad daylight,” Dixon said. “When my mother passes, I’m going to be on the first plane back to San Jose.”

When a screenwriter called Salomon about putting her Katrina story to film, she would have none of it.

She’s 50 now and still drives two Hummer SUVs, but she mostly tools around her new home in San Diego County for her grading business or on horseback for recreation. She fled there a few years ago to find peace of mind and write a book about the experience.

Salomon said she and some members of her unofficial rescue team suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from a “horrible” incident she won’t talk about in public but intends to put into the book she’s writing. She visits the Bay Area now and then to tend to her properties.

“We are all still suffering the aftermath of Katrina to this day,” she said. “I feel like that moment in life now defines who we all are. Just like the city of rubble, our lives are still in the process of being rebuilt.”

Contact Joe Rodriguez at jrodriguez@mercurynews.com; Twitter.com/joerodmercury.