Sunday, September 04, 2005
April Johnston, Times Staff
09/01/2005
CENTER TWP. - Last September, when Hurricane Ivan threatened to march up the Gulf Coast and into New Orleans, then 19-year-old Dominique Hayes sat in a room on the 19th floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, staring out the window and waiting for the worst.
"And you want to know what I saw?" she asked. "I saw one drop of rain."
So on Saturday, when a friend dialed Dominique at her New Orleans town house to warn her Hurricane Katrina was coming, Dominique shrugged it off. She figured Katrina would take a last-minute turn, just as Ivan had.
But that afternoon, Dillard University, where Dominique is a speech communications and theater arts major, ordered all of its students out of the dorms near the city's French Quarter and onto buses bound for Shreveport, La. And that night, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin appeared on television and urged everyone to get out.
Dominique looked at three of her friends.
"It's time to go," she told them.
They packed themselves and their luggage into a two-door Mitsubishi Mirage and started driving inland to Baton Rouge. On any other day, the drive would have taken an hour and a half. On the Sunday before Katrina came roaring ashore, it took 4½ hours.
---
Early Monday, when it was still black as night outside, Katrina arrived in Baton Rouge. Dominique could hear the wind screaming outside her friend's house. She started praying. She wouldn't know it for a few hours, but that wind was ripping trees out by their roots and tossing them around like Popsicle sticks. One tree fell on the house next door.
Around 5:30 a.m. a call came from a friend of Dominique's in Gulfport, Miss. Waves nearly 30 feet high were crashing onto the Mississippi shore, he told her. At 6:30, just after the electricity went out, Dominique called her parents, Michael and Mary Hayes, back in Center Township.
"You can't cry because I can't cry," Dominique told her mom. "I'm going to be OK."
That afternoon, the stores reopened in Baton Rouge, and the girls drove to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket for food. They waited in line for three hours and listened to the rumors.
Whole towns were wiped out.
People were dead.
The water in New Orleans was 12 feet high.
No, the water in New Orleans was 30 feet high.
Dominique didn't know what to believe, and she had no way of knowing the truth. The electricity was still out, leaving her without a television or the Internet.
She and her friends passed the hours playing card games, trying to make each other laugh and driving around town, using car chargers to power their cell phones.
---
On Wednesday morning, Dominique finally left Louisiana.
Originally, she was to fly out of New Orleans International Airport on Tuesday. She was supposed to have surgery on her tonsils Wednesday in Beaver County. After much quibbling with the airlines, Mary Hayes got her daughter on a flight out of Baton Rouge.
Moments after she arrived at Pittsburgh International, Dominique got a call from her friends. They had finally seen a newspaper, and it was bad. Dominique could hear it in their voices. She knew they had been crying. She called her mom.
"Don't look at the newspaper," Mary told her daughter.
So she hurried through the airport, past all of the newsstands and into her father's arms. When they arrived at the family's Center Township ranch house, Dominique clung tight to her mom, then made her demand.
"You have to let me see it," she told them.
Her mom turned on Fox News, and on the screen, Dominique saw her beloved New Orleans: flooded, looted, ravaged.
She started to sob.
"It's so hard," she said a few hours later, sitting on her parents' couch wearing one of the few outfits she has left. She had recently learned from her friends that Dillard was buried beneath 12 feet of water and classes probably wouldn't resume for months, maybe even an entire semester.
"But I'm home, and that's all that matters," she said. "There are some people that can't get home, who have nowhere to go. I'm grateful. I'll wear this (outfit) for 10 days."
Her mom chuckled.
Her parents have been trying to keep their conversation light, teasing Dominique - an admitted shoe addict - about her flooded footwear and telling her she won't be allowed to leave the township again.
And they've turned off the television. Dominique doesn't want to see anymore. But she knows the highway she took out of New Orleans is now submerged and the Hyatt Regency Hotel where she waited out Ivan is now heavily damaged.
Katrina blew out all of the windows.
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Sunday, September 4th 2005 at 11:04PM
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