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The Chicago-Katrina Connection: Ten Years Later

(CBS) -- It was 10 years ago when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and displaced thousands of families, many of whom came to Chicago because that was where help was offered.

WBBM's Steve Miller reported on them a decade ago. Now he updates the stories of some of those forced from their homes.

Woman Returns To An Imperfect New Orleans

Tracey Mercadel walked 5 ½ miles out of New Orleans, which had just been brought to its knees by Katrina.

Sometimes they saw bodies along the way.

"I still have nightmares sometimes," Mercadel tells Miller.

She and her two sons -- now 25 and 27 -- have been back in New Orleans for five years. They are back in New Orleans East, now a block from the rebuilt levee. Right after Katrina, they lived here in Chicago for five years.

"Sometimes I say I should have stayed, you know?" she says. "There's still a lot of places that are abandoned."

"A friend of mine -- maybe four years ago -- they went to clean a house out and they found a friend of mine's uncle under the refrigerator. He was there all that time."

All that time, since Katrina.

"And the crime is so bad, it's ridiculous.  They're worrying about the French quarter, protecting the people in the French quarter. But what about us? We pay taxes, too," Mercadel says.

"But it's trying to come back. It's trying to come back. It know it takes time. But it looks like where we live at, they're dragging their foot."

 

 

 

Pastor Restarts His Career In South Suburbs

It was the day before Katrina hit land in Louisiana when Torrence Sparkman and his wife and their two daughters left New Orleans to ride out the storm in Dallas.

They left with next to nothing.

"Our bank account was probably $113 in the hole," says Sparkman, who was the pastor of a church in New Orleans. "The water had come up to the second floor. (I) lost all of my seminary books."

The Sparkmans went to the south suburbs of Chicago, where they had family.

And he became chaplain at Roseland Hospital.

He applied for jobs all over, even where there was no position available.

"In terms of being resilient and hopeful, I think those are the kinds of things that I learned from Katrina. And I'd like people to understand that there's always something," he says today.

Now Sparkman has his PhD. He's assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Would he ever want to work in New Orleans again?

"I don't think I would go back. I think that people think New Orleans is a place for people to go and have fun and leave. And the way the city is organized would lead one to believe that that's all that's important," he says.

Teacher Relocates To Chicago From New Orleans

School had just started in New Orleans on a Thursday, and Leonard Jones gave his high school students a quiz to jog their memories.

That Sunday night, Katrina hit.

He never got a chance to grade the papers. And he never went back to teaching.  He says he wanted to, but a lot of schools never reopened.

Jones struggles, he says, to be politically correct: "If you want to deny a certain ethnicity -- or if you want to use the term 'demographic' -- from coming back, you close the schools."

So, he moved to Chicago. He had an old friend here -- someone he grew up with in New Orleans.

"When all this happened, I didn't have nowhere to go. I came up here," Leonard says.

"And I was his high school sweetheart," says the friend, Elaine.

He stayed. And they got married.

"We've moved on," Elaine says. "And kind of settled where we are. We don't have any intentions of relocating now. So, everything's good."

"Well," says Leonard, "I'm not sure about that. It gets too cold here."

Leonard Jones is 74.  His wife Elaine is 73.

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