For more than 24 hours, LSU gymnasts rode out Hurricane Katrina together in the safety of West Campus Apartments, 107 miles west of the eye of the storm.
Half the team had no idea what was heading its way, why people were stocking up on gas and water and how bad the storm could get. Only five gymnasts on the 2005-2006 team hailed from the southeast and had experienced a hurricane before.
Then-senior gymnast Kelly Lea, born in St. Louis and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, said it was nerve wracking not knowing what to expect, but she was comforted by her southern teammates.
“I had a lot of teammates at the time that were from Florida and even from there in Louisiana, so they were telling me what to expect, saying we were going to be OK,” Lea said. “We were all planning on being together, so I guess that kind of helped calm my nerves.”
But even the gymnasts who endured several hurricanes during their lifetimes and were well-versed in what to expect, were ill prepared for the storm that breached the levees surrounding New Orleans in more than 50 places, flooding 80 percent of the city and turning LSU’s PMAC and Carl Maddox Field House into refugee centers.
A field house divided
When the team emerged from the apartment the following day, campus was surrounded by sirens and helicopters flying overhead.
The gymnasts found their practice facility filled with sleeping doctors, nurses and other volunteers who were helping about 350 displaced refugees inside the field house.
Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters dropped off refugees at Bernie Moore Track Stadium. Some of the people ushered into both the PMAC and field house had nothing but the wet clothes on their backs.
The field house was sectioned off with different wards and people crammed into small spaces, and the coaches and gymnasts lent a helping hand wherever they could be useful.
Gymnastics coach D-D Breaux said the gymnasts volunteered day and night inside the field house, with jobs ranging from helping people get settled inside the building to dealing with hospitalized patients.
“In the first few days we were taking donations, doing laundry, helping people get a toothbrush and showing them where a bathroom was,” Lea said. “As the days kind of went on, it became more of a hospital setting, it seemed. I did really anything from sitting next to someone who had a bunch of tubes and IVs to helping do room care to bringing somebody a clean t-shirt.”
“Each day when we arrived, I would help out whatever way I could.”
But on the fourth day after the storm, as the fatalities rose in number by the day and the situation became more dire, Breaux and assistant coach Bob Moore pulled the gymnasts from volunteer work as it was psychologically detrimental to them, Moore said. The volleyball team followed suit.
“I went into the field house one night and I saw Kelly Lea and Terin Martinjak — two of my student athletes — putting food into a feeding tube for one of the patients,” Breaux said. “At that point I realized that enough is enough. We began to try to pull our student-athletes and rely more on the volunteer services for the agencies that are designed to do this kind of work.”
To restore a sense of normalcy, Breaux constructed a cloth wall between the doctors, nurses and volunteers — who were sleeping in the gymnastics practice facility inside the field house — and brought back equipment so the gymnasts could practice.
But the partition only affected what happened inside the gym.
OBSTACLES
A week after the storm, April Burkholder was stopped at the front door of the gymnastics practice facility by an armed National Guardsman stationed outside the field house., who didn’t know she was an All-American gymnast.
“April Burkholder shows up for practice one afternoon and she’s stopped at the front door by a National Guardsman with an automatic rifle,” Breaux said. “I’m like, ‘Nothing about this is normal.’ The chancellor and athletic director — it was Chancellor [Sean] O’Keefe and Skip Bertman — they did a tremendous job of settling the situation down and getting it back to the educational institution that it is.”
The team returned to class eight days after the storm, and the normalcy of getting back into the routine of going to school followed by gymnastics practice helped clear the gymnasts’ minds.
As the team walked to classes, attended practice and went through the motions of being student athletes, visions of the crowded field house were not easy to shake.
Although they tried to keep their minds off it, Lea said the team never erased the memory of the sorrowful time. The gymnasts collectively used it as motivation during the upcoming season and even later in life.
“Any sort of obstacle like that makes you stronger as a team,” Lea said. “We carried that on through the season with just saying we started off with this new team with these trials and tribulations, we built on it and used it as motivation saying, remember what’s at stake this season, how we poured our hearts out at that time to help them, let’s continue to use that to help us this season.”
“We had made the commitment to one another that we weren’t going to use it as an excuse, we were going to use it as motivation to better ourselves.”
Katrina still affects Lea’s drive to work every day.
She said it was the driving force in why she became a physician’s assistant, and in her PA school application, she wrote her time as a volunteer solidified her decision to go into medicine.
Deja Vu
Breaux was no stranger to hurricanes.
Years before Katrina plummeted through the Gulf Coast, Breaux lost her home during a different hurricane.
She was a freshman in high school when Hurricane Betsy made landfall in 1965. The eye of the hurricane hooked the Mississippi River and ravaged her hometown of Donaldsonville, Louisiana.
She was hunkered down in her family home with her parents and seven siblings when the windows imploded and the house filled with water.
“Donaldsonville was pretty devastated,” Breaux said. “Of course, we lost our home and everything. It was a real community effort to take care of us, as well as take care of all the other families and people that were totally displaced.”
Breaux said she identified with the people in the field house and the PMAC and exhausted the last of her resources to help as many people as possible.
Even the organizations that are tasked with responding to national disasters were unprepared for the number of supplies needed to take care of everyone on campus, Breaux said.
Breaux and LSU strength and conditioning coordinator Tommy Moffitt called in favors to supply people with necessities.
“We were getting people that were arriving with wet clothes. There was no bedding. The level of preparation was — if it was a scale of one to 10 and we had a 10 emergency — the level of preparation was about a three,” Breaux said. “I made a couple of phone calls to some people I knew and the next thing I know, people were flooding in with sheets and towels and things to help service the situation that we had.”
Breaux and her team worked hand in hand with Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, Red Cross and other volunteers, including other teams on campus who helped those in the field house.
Moore was tasked with the heavy lifting and assembling bunks, while Breaux ran operations in the field house.
“She is a great orchestrator, organizer and line boss,” Moore said. “There were a lot of things that she did out there that she got people organized, helped institute other volunteers in places they can go and things they can do. She did that a lot for them out there.”
Moore said once the situation calmed down and gymnasts were pulled out of volunteer work, Breaux helped out every day and checked on people she met on the track.
Breaux still has phone numbers of people she met in the field house because she doesn’t want to let the memory of them go, she said.
She continued to help people look for lost loved ones for three years after the storm, fielding multiple phone calls from people thanking her for helping them recover.
“I had given people my phone number, and I’d have them call me and just say, ‘I don’t know if you remember me, but I met you at the field house and I have your number and I just want to say thanks,’” Breaux said. “That’s kind of enough.”
10th anniversary
Though LSU helped countless people, the storm still looms in the field house.
Moore leaves the phone in the gymnastics practice facility unplugged to this day because up until a year ago, people called looking for loved ones.
LSU wasn’t able to help everyone affected by the storm, but Breaux said she hopes time helped people get back on their feet and people remember the way the LSU community rallied.
“Your life experiences kind of prepare you for the next thing that you’re going to have down the road,” Breaux said. “What my family experienced during Hurricane Betsy and the community coming together was a life experience, but what New Orleans, Jefferson Parish and St. Bernard — what those people experienced in Katrina and what the Baton Rouge community and what the LSU community was able to do to facilitate their healing and help them at least move to a better place, it was a 10. It was a 10 in performance.”
“We had people that had been living under bridges that we brought to a better place. Hopefully from this, our city and our state was able to move forward and help some of these people go to better places.“