My Katrina Word

By Dr. Chuck Kelley

On Tuesday, August 29, 2005 in the wee hours of the morning a monster storm by the name of Hurricane Katrina moved ashore, devastating the Gulf Coast of the United States from New Orleans to Mobile, AL. The scale of the damage is impossible to describe. Katrina still remains the costliest hurricane in US history, but the property damage pales in comparison to the impact the storm made on the lives of all of us who endured its wrath. I was among those many thousands upon thousands, serving at the time as President of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and drowning in despair as I helplessly watched the levees break, filling my city and campus with overwhelming floods. Fortunately, despair was not the end of my story, nor even the end of that terrible day. Even now, the memories, emotions, and trauma of those days can come boiling out at the most unexpected times, filling my eyes with tears and my heart with memories so real it is like being there again.

I have written very little of those days, in part because there is so much to write. Unforgettable images, tragedy, courage, miracles, and so much more carved out a deep well in my soul that will always be with me. Twenty years later I still get questions about those days. Once I dip a bucket into the Katrina well and begin to respond, it is difficult to stop. Rather than recounting what I saw, heard, and experienced, on this twentieth anniversary of the great storm, I am going to answer a question I have never been asked. If I were limited to just one word to describe my Katrina experience, what would that word be? This may surprise you, but the one word to describe my Katrina experience would be: Gratitude. As I sifted through all of my memories and experiences of those days and the years that followed, I find that a profound sense of gratitude overwhelms everything else that lingers in my soul.

I am deeply grateful for all that God did prior to Katrina to prepare our seminary to survive its impact. Of course, we had no idea that is what God was doing, but in the rearview mirror, it is astounding. For many, many years we had a trailer park on campus, dearly loved by the students who lived there. Individual students owned the trailers and would sell them to incoming students when they graduated. You can imagine their age and condition, but the students cherished those trailers and called them the “Beverly Hills” of campus. We had a desperate need for more student housing on campus as a result of growth, and the architects insisted we had to replace the trailer park with multi-family housing to have a place for everyone on campus. This was a hugely unpopular, controversial decision, but we made the call to move ahead and close the trailer park well before the storm. Katrina’s floodwaters were very deep in that area of the campus. All of those trailers would have been destroyed and floating around doing untold other damage. Imagine the individual students being responsible to remove all those trailers in the midst of the chaos of those days. Instead when Katrina hit, that area was a construction site with little damage done in spite of the flood.

That is only one example. Unusual circumstances forced us to replace our health insurance plan, based in a local New Orleans hospital and very popular, with a national health plan not long before Katrina hit. Our employees were scattered to more than 30 states for an extended period of time, but were able to easily access their benefits because of the unexpected change to our health insurance. Also, from the day I became president, we emphasized the revolutionary change we believed was coming to the world of higher education and the resulting need to develop non-traditional strategies to teach students anywhere in the world. Katrina scattered our students and faculty to the winds and took away our classrooms, access to our library, and faculty access to their offices for a year. The only way we could continue to teach was to use the kind of non-traditional educational strategies we had been discussing for years. Many in the educational world were shocked when our faculty reinvented the entire curriculum and found ways to keep teaching every course started before the storm. We had our December graduation as scheduled, just in a different city. And on, and on, and on. Without our knowledge or understanding, God prepared us for our Katrina experience. When the storm unleashed its fury, we were ready. What a mighty God we serve!

I am profoundly grateful for the courageous response of the seminary family to devastating circumstances no one expected. When our faculty, staff, and students evacuated the campus and city, they left with what they needed for two or three days. That is standard New Orleans protocol for hurricane evacuations. This time, however, there was nothing to return to. More than 70% of the city, including our campus, was underwater and would be for days on end. The mayor would not allow people to come back to salvage what they could for a month. When students, staff, and faculty finally did return, seeing how much was forever lost was shocking. I circulated continually around the campus during the four days of recovery and shared in the overwhelming sense of grief and loss. It made what followed even more amazing. Nearly all of us were homeless, likely for a year. And yet . . . The faculty gathered on the campus of Southwestern Seminary ten days after the storm with little more than the clothes on their backs. In the course of a weekend they reinvented the entire curriculum. Two weeks later, we were back in business, the only institution of higher learning in New Orleans to not drop a course or lay off a faculty member. Nearly all of our students continued their studies during that semester. Professors kept teaching, students kept learning, and staff kept supporting, all in ways that were new to everyone. Perhaps the most unnoticed and underappreciated fact from those days: the wives stood with their husbands through it all. To quote an ancient Hebrew expression: WOW! This was the greatest performance by a theological faculty and a student body in the history of the world. Without the courage and grit of faculty, staff and students, Katrina would have been the end of NOBTS.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude as I remember what Southern Baptists did for us. When the Florida Baptist Convention heard the faculty would be gathering in Fort Worth ten days after the storm, they moved heaven and earth to hand-deliver a check and Walmart gift cards to every faculty family who gathered. When a Sunday School class at FBC Euless, TX heard we would be in Fort Worth, they went shopping for everything, and I mean everything, they thought families would need, brought it all to the Southwestern campus, and told our families to help themselves to anything they needed. Everywhere our seminary family was scattered, Southern Baptists helped them find shelter for as long as it was needed. When we set up our temporary administrative center in Atlanta, the Georgia Baptist Convention provided housing for every administrator, faculty, and staff member who would be working there. Chick-fil-a brought breakfast every morning for a month to our center. Southern Baptist Disaster Relief units began rolling into the strike zone as soon as the winds died down, and they stayed on station for month after month, rotating people in and out to help deal with the enormity of the damage. The other SBC entities reduced their Cooperative Program allocations so that more CP could go to NOBTS. The other five seminaries reduced their CP for three years to help our school get back on its feet. Guidestone covered the entire cost of our health plan for three months to take that concern off the table. All over the nation, Southern Baptists made things harder for themselves in order to help our seminary family and others affected by this catastrophic event.

My debt of gratitude extends beyond Southern Baptists to the whole nation. Hurricane Katrina was the worst natural disaster in American history, and America stepped up to help. The hurricane scattered people from the Gulf Coast to all fifty states. Everywhere Katrina refugees went, they found both help and encouragement. My wife went to a Kinko’s one morning to   make copies. When the person helping her discovered she was from New Orleans, she came around the counter to give Rhonda a hug and tell her she was not alone. In many ways, Katrina recovery became a national project. Many people came from all over the nation to work in recovery efforts. A large number of recent college graduates stayed to make a life in the midst of the devastation. Some Katrina refugees thought they were leaving home for two or three days, only to see that home completely destroyed. As a result of the kindness and help they experienced in unfamiliar places, they made the radical decision to make that unfamiliar place their new home. I find bits of New Orleans scattered all over the nation now, on a scale I never imagined. Helping people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast became a national project. I believe God honored that outpouring of kindness and help in at least one very particular way.

2005 was the most active hurricane year in US history. Katrina was the worst of an unprecedented number of storms. Interestingly, the year that followed Katrina was one of the least active years in history. That hurricane season was predicted to be another very active year, but the opposite was true. For the first time in memory, no hurricane made landfall in the US that year. The day after the 2006 hurricane season officially ended, the New Orleans Times-Picayune put two graphs side by side on the front page of the paper. One graph showed the track of every hurricane during the 2005 season of Katrina. It looked like an artillery barrage on the Atlantic and Gulf Coast of the nation. Next to that graph was one showing the track of every 2006 hurricane. Again and again, storms moved toward the US coast, but turned away before making landfall. I think God gave us a year of respite after the catastrophic impact of Katrina. Perhaps he did so in light of our national response to so much misery.

These are just a few of the reasons why the one word to describe my personal Katrina experience would be: Gratitude! For the rest of my life I will live with the trauma of those days. Yes, I have more stories than anyone wants to hear. But if you only give me one word to summarize all my stories, that word is gratitude. Whatever experiences God’s children face, whether pleasant or catastrophic, believers should eventually realize that the Lord was neither surprised, nor unprepared nor nervous over what unfolded. As Paul reminds us: For God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28 NASB).  Blessed be the name of the Lord!