Loyola Greyhound

Issue date: 9/8/09 Section: Arts & Society

Media Credit: Photo Courtesy of MCT Campus The Superdome in New Orleans is typically the home of NFL team The Saints. But during and after Katrina it was the home for thousands of hurricane survivors.

Imagine the worst possible conditions: an overcrowded stadium filled with strangers, a urine-soaked piece of cardboard as your place to rest, waiting for military rations of food for hours on end, and not knowing when you are ever going to leave.

These are the decrepit conditions witnessed by Hurricane Katrina survivor Paul A. Harris who found himself trapped in those stadium walls on the day of as well as several days after the hurricane devasted "America's Most Soulful City", New Orleans in 2005.

In his Diary from the Dome he chronicles two very different trips he took to New Orleans, the first in 1977 when he was a 21-year-old drifter trying to find himself whilst backpacking around the country.
Years later, the California native decides to travel to the city for a fifth time in late August of 2005. This trip however would be less of a vacation and more of a physical, mental and emotional test of his strength and perserverance. A test that would ultimately leave him angry, hurt, hopeful, and changed forever.

It was during this trip that he would find himself trapped in New Orleans as Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf with a projected path headed straight for the city. He tried to find a bus but found that the Greyhound depot was closed, there was no car rentals left and this is after his hotel forces him to cancel his reservations and leave immediately.

He is left with his only option, trying to ride out the storm in the Superdome; a large saucer-shaped building that is typically home the Saints football team.
The stadium is then transformed into a "safe" haven holding 20,000 people clinging to life in the worst imaginable environment. And to this survivor and many news outlets, the Dome would become a symbol of American citizens failed by their own government.

Harris's diary is blunt, eloquent, opinionated, and troubling. He goes in horrific detail about the overbearing stench of human waste, the ceiling tiles that violently rip away in the storm and soaks the field with powerful rain, and the generator that barely lights the field.

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