Interviews With Evacuees
September 20, 2005 – 10:18 pmTwo friends of mine, Matt Carey and Nick Vitolo, and Matt’s younger sister, Colleen Carey, went to the Astrodome in Houston on September 2, 2005, to conduct interviews with evacuees who were willing to tell their stories in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Matt cut the footage into a ten minute, thirty nine second film that has been placed on the Current TV website. The film is competing for airtime on digital cable, and an online voting process is used to determine which of the films are selected for airing. In order to cast an online vote, you need to take about ten seconds or so to sign up for a free account. If you find the film to be television ready, I strongly recommend you give it a greenlight, in the parlance of Current TV.
I transcribed a couple of the interviews Matt, Nick, and Colleen conducted.
Woman: “How you gonna get out of town if you don’t have a car? How you gonna get out of town if they stop the buses, planes, and airplanes from running? Huh? How you gonna get out of town? Especially with no money, too. If you on a fixed income…what can you do but stay there and try to fight it out, huh?”
Woman: “The only person was left was low income people. Now you put the puzzle together for yourself. And you know, like I said, for President Bush, you have a helicopter, if it just took you to get a bullhorn and just come say “I understand y’all, and I have y’all”, you know? You didn’t do that for us. You, you got on the news and then. With some places, we didn’t even have TV. We had no water. We just sit there, and we listenin’ to what other people was tellin’ us, you know? That’s not right.”
Nick: “So you guys have felt ignored or…”
Woman: “Abandoned.”
Nick: “Abandoned.”
Woman: “That’s the best…the whole word is abandonment. President Bush is on the news now saying he signed this, he signed that, but ahead of time you could have signed it because you knew what our situation is. The, the food stamps we get, it comes from you. The Medicaid we get, it comes from you. So you know our situation before it even came.”
Man A: “I ain’t goin’ nowhere without him.”
Man B: “We stuck together the whole way. There were four of us. Three boys and one girl, and the girl don’t know how to swim.”
Man A: “And we had to save her.”
Man B: “We had to save her. And we made sure one thing. If she go down, we all gonna go down. It’s the one thing we made sure.”
Man A: “And we weren’t gonna go down.”
The film is good for several reasons, the most obvious of which is that it captures the evacuees telling their own stories. Each story is unique to the individual telling it. There are stories of heroism, stories of despair, and stories of immense frustration. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a film is worth a million.
Wonderful job Matt, Nick, and Colleen.
2 Responses to “Interviews With Evacuees”
That kind of doom and gloom talk really doesn’t do anyone any good. The Astrodome is in fact reasonably aerodynamic and has a fairly low profile for a stadium. There might be some damage, but I seriously doubt it will be anything significant.
Additionally, Houston has many advantages that New Orleans doesn’t. Houston is at and above sea level; Houston has lots of tall buildings to help cut the wind; Houston is farther inland than New Orleans and farther removed from storm surge; Houston isn’t built on a river delta. Except around the bay any flooding will have to be caused by the rain alone, unlike New Orleans which was flooded due to breaking levees. And, finally, the barrier islands off the coast from Houston are still very much intact, unlike in New Orleans. Unfortunately, Galveston sits on one of these barrier islands and a direct hit will do much damage. On the plus side, Galveston is much smaller than New Orleans and is being evacuated very effectively.
By Adam on Sep 22, 2005 at 3:53 am