This story is one of five stories in The Lens’ Embracing Katrina Narratives project.

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, Alice Craft-Kerney was still commuting back and forth to the city. The city’s recovery seemed painfully slow. In the Lower 9th Ward, where she grew up, few residents had come back. Even fewer schools, health clinics, churches and small businesses had returned.

Her Katrina narrative starts with the Craft family home, on a block that is now dominated by overgrown lots, where weeds are as high as trees. 

She and her six brothers and sisters grew up in the Lower 9 on Lamanche Street a few blocks from the Florida Avenue levee, during a time when the community’s streets were still paved with oyster shells. When Hurricane Betsy flooded the neighborhood in 1965, her mother, Hattie Mae Craft, became the secretary of Betsy Flood Victims and tapped away on her typewriter to pelt officials with detailed reports and demands for assistance. 

“They were like a dog with a bone. Typing up letters,” remembers Craft-Kerney, now 67. “And they made enough noise that the federal government did pay attention to them.” In November 1965, the so-called “Betsy Bill” provided some of the first formal federal aid for disaster survivors.

After Katrina, she, too, was motivated to help her neighbors. In 2007, she helped to open the Lower Ninth Ward Health Clinic. Sometimes, it’s painful for her to talk about this part of her Katrina narrative, because she only could keep the clinic open for two years.

Last week, as she stood in front of the closed clinic, she felt troubled about the gaps its closure left here. She has an intense concern for Lower 9 residents’ current lack of access to health care, she said. In particular, she worries about the health of women, noting that the nearest delivery ward for expectant moms is not just across the Industrial Canal but all the way across Canal Street. 

Even today, neighbors still recall the importance of the Lower Ninth Ward Health Clinic, while it was operating. “Alice saved my life,” said Robert Green Sr., who was also profiled by The Lens as part of this Lower 9 story. He arrived at the clinic, gasping for breath from an asthma attack. “I felt like someone was choking me,” he said. They stabilized him until an ambulance could arrive and take him to a hospital to be treated.

Craft-Kerney had worked in the trauma ward at Charity Hospital, which was shuttered after the storm. She actually had finished a night shift hours before Katrina hit. But a few years after Katrina, she saw that people were overcome, mentally and physically, by the storm. As she testified later in front of a Congressional committee, the city was in the midst of “a public health crisis of enormous proportions.” 

She and a medical colleague of hers, Patricia Berryhill, a registered nurse, “decided to confront the crisis head-on.” In February 2007, they opened their clinic in a house that stood on St. Claude Avenue at the foot of the St. Claude lift bridge over the Industrial Canal. It was a “little bitty mom and pop clinic,” she said. The living room converted to a waiting room, bedrooms converted to exam rooms. And there was a sign in front of the building. Once the state relaxed licensing for visiting volunteer doctors, they were set. “We got a doctor in the house!”

Despite the small scale, the two were serious about their undertaking. “This was a humanitarian mission that we have undertaken at the Lower Ninth Ward Health Clinic and it is informed by the United Nations Guiding Principles of Internally Displaced People, a standard of care that is supported by the U.S. Government to ensure the recovery of people around the world who have become displaced by a disaster.”

The day the clinic opened its doors, city inspectors shut them down, contending that they hadn’t obtained the proper permit. They ironed that out. But when they re-opened, the first patient through the door collapsed.  She had been trying to rehab a house where mold covered the walls, Craft-Kerney said.

The intensity of need did not dissipate. Soon afterward, a patient brought her elderly mother to the clinic. While Craft-Kerney was examining her mother, her adult daughter started sobbing. “She’s always crying. Every time I look she’s crying, crying, crying.” The new clinic quickly incorporated mental-health evaluation as a critical part of intake. 

Residents across the city were traumatized and unraveling, she said. “The person you think is going well may not be doing well.”

She could relate, because she also felt enormous loss. She had weathered Katrina itself – stranded above floodwaters – at her brother’s three-story house in the Holy Cross section of the Lower 9, a few blocks from the Mississippi River. The home’s top two stories became a refuge for nearly three dozen people, including his next-door neighbors, who climbed in on a ladder suspended between the two structures. “That baby was only a few days old,” Craft-Kerney recalled, who watched the family arrive in the worst part of the storm, as waters rose.

From her role in the clinic, she saw how neighbors who felt fragile didn’t want to go elsewhere for help, she said. The Lower 9th Ward had always been a “self-contained community,” she said. “We had people who were roofers and bricklayers. If you needed something done to your house, you didn’t have to go anywhere,” she said. “Our roofer was our neighbor.”

Then, at some point, it was no longer feasible to keep the clinic open. Community-healthcare money was hard to get; insurance money took months to pay. Donations kept them open at some points. But about two years after it opened, she and Berryhill ended up closing the clinic’s doors for good.

The reasons were complex. Bureaucracy. Inspectors. Healthcare funding. Also, only a fraction of Lower 9 neighbors were back, because Road Home payments in low-income areas didn’t cover actual rebuilding costs and were instead based on pre-storm property values.

Craft-Kerney’s brother eventually sold his house; she too moved out of the Lower 9, to New Orleans East. And though she didn’t want to speak on behalf of people who still live in the neighborhood, she does see a stark contrast between the neighborhood she grew up in and its current, post-Katrina landscape. 

The neighborhood has many more people than the first years after the storm. Even by 2015, 10 years after Katrina hit, only 37% of pre-Katrina households had returned, much lower than the 90% city average at that point. 

But the streetscape still has a “jack-o-lantern” effect – with empty lots creating gaps where houses once stood, side-by-side. Across the Lower 9, she has seen other businesses and nonprofits falter. Not enough neighbors have returned to support them. It’s a lasting loss, she said. 

“It was like Mayberry — like country, but you’re in the city. You have a front yard, backyard, side yard,” she said. Kids could run free and play outside safely. It was really a nice place. “What we lost after Katrina was that sense of community.”