NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans native Christine Vincent just moved back to her hometown from Houston.
She’s five months pregnant, and Saturday, she was one of hundreds, if not thousands, to lose her vehicle to the flood.
Vincent said she had just picked up her boyfriend from work downtown Saturday afternoon, when the rain started coming down harder and got too deep to drive through.
“I started crying,” she recalled.
They pulled onto the neutral ground near the Carver Theater and thought they would just wait for the water to recede.
When it started going into the car, Vincent’s boyfriend said they had to get out.
The two stood on the steps of the Carver Theater for a while, then Vincent eventually remembered that her cousin lives about 10 blocks away from where they were stranded.
They made the 10-block trek to her cousin’s house, through water that was waist-deep.
“It was raining, pouring. We were soaking wet. There was trash all over. Everything floating around,” she said. “My boyfriend stubbed his toe on a brick, because we couldn’t see past the water. Everything was so dirty.”
Eventually, they realized that her car was not going anywhere on Saturday afternoon, so they had to get a ride home to Harahan and leave the vehicle for two days.
When she got to the tow lot Monday, her vehicle wouldn’t start.
“I’m trying to hope for the best, hope that something dries out. That’s the only car we have,” she said.
She said it brought back painful memories of Katrina and reminded her that “we have a lot more left to do.”
“From all that we suffered from Katrina, I thought that we would learn our lesson,” she said. “The city and the people both could have done better. There was trash everywhere. People throw their trash on the ground.”
