Irish nun recalls Hurricane Katrina savagery in New Orleans

Larger Text

Print

E-mail

3 Comments

Dominican Sister Maeve McMahon

Tweet

A Belfast nun who spent twenty-seven years as an educator in New Orleans has written a harrowing firsthand account inspired by actual events she witnessed living through the most deadly and costliest hurricane of all time on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“Riding out the Hurricane” recounts Dominican Sister Maeve McMahon’s traumatic and catastrophic experience having worked amongst thousands of evacuees in the evacuation centres of Houma and Baton Rouge in Louisiana.

From the Falls Road in Belfast, Sister McMahon spent the majority of her adult life in New Orleans where she accomplished many things before the hurricane hit including teaching African American boys and girls, becoming principal of an award winning school in 1990 where she was honoured in the White House by President Bush and opening an innovative pilot school for five year olds two weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated it.

Sister Maeve had just opened a primary school in New Orleans before the hurricane hit on August 29 2005.

“On the Saturday before any sign of the hurricane I was working at the school with two Catholic priests from the local Catholic senior high school and four of their senior boys and they were laying woodchips under the children’s climbing apparatus when I got a call to say that this hurricane was very dangerous and gaining in strength. I called everyone together to say they would have to go home to board up and secure their homes which was a custom in New Orleans and leave the city. People were saying this hurricane was the one people had feared all their lives” said Maeve.

Before they left, the pupils and priests helped her lift everything up four feet, of the belief that if there was flood water coming in from the storm that four feet would secure everything. “All the children’s computers, books from the library, rocking chairs and toys, everything was put in plastic bags, locked up and left” she said.

Maeve then went home to watch the television that evening as the commentary was increasing about the storm which was hottening up at this time.

The news informed the public how the mayor would more than likely give mandatory evacuation at dawn. However this was never given in the city of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina.

“I was told the Dominican sisters would leave the next morning and we would set off for Houma where one of our sisters worked in a diocese there and thankfully she was able to get us accommodation to stay in an old three story convent which was above the floodwater” she explains.

That night the wind took down the electricity so the nuns had no light and air conditioning.

“This was the beginning that suggested that this was going to be bad” she said.

Print

E-mail

Tweet