The Police Department helped people evacuate in an orderly way. During a previous disaster, we learned that we had to do a better job of evacuating people who did not own vehicles—so this time, we were in constant communication with the Riverbend City Transit System to make sure there were enough buses on hand to get people to shelters. In my neighborhood, officers did a great job helping a nursing home evacuate its residents—which can be dangerous, but they managed to move all the residents without any injuries. In addition, the police helped maintain order for the people in the city who did not evacuate. Thankfully, looting has been minimal, but we’ve done our best to patrol the neighborhoods. We’ve also tried to check in on residents to make sure they have what they need, and we’ve provided people with information about available resources.

The Red Cross set up several shelters in the city, including our largest shelter here at Beck University. For the most part, things ran smoothly. A few years ago, we had to set up shelters after a chemical spill, and things ran better this time because we learned from our mistakes. For one thing, we did a much better job this time of making sure the medical needs at the shelter were met. We communicated better with local clinics and the hospital to make sure we could get medicine and supplies quickly. We also worked with the police department and the Riverbend City Transit System to get residents to the shelter.

I’m so proud of how the city has come together to maintain order and help people out! My staff and I worked with the county and the state to make sure we had the resources we needed. State troopers worked with our police officers to control traffic and get people evacuated safely. We also worked with the Red Cross to get the shelters everything they needed—like translators. We coordinated with local community groups to put translators at the shelter who spoke Arabic and Spanish.

My family has been doing our part to try to help. Our house wasn’t damaged, thankfully. My cousin’s house was flooded, so she and her kids are living here for now. She could go to a shelter, but my wife and I wouldn’t let her do that—they’re family, and we need to care of them. My wife has been making food for people who don’t have power—actually there’s a whole group of women on our block making food and taking it over to people who need it. We’ve also been checking up on our elderly neighbors. The police have been by to check up on people too. Everyone’s doing their part.

When are the buses going to be running in this neighborhood again? Many people around here do not have cars, and the only grocery store in the neighborhood is flooded.We need those buses! On the news, the mayor keeps bragging about how much progress they’re making on the roads. They interviewed this mom in her minivan, who said she was able to take her kids to soccer practice. For real! So that’s the city’s priority—making sure that middle-class white kids in the Lindner Hills neighborhood can get to soccer practice?

The cops are all over this neighborhood. Supposedly they’re stopping looters, but all I see them doing is stopping young black and Hispanic men who aren’t doing anything. You’d think they’d be checking up on elderly people, but that’s not why they’re here. Meanwhile, do you see how empty my shelves are? My little bodega is pretty much the only place to buy food in the neighborhood. The grocery store is flooded out. People have been coming in here all day and they’re angry! There’s no food and no buses and the cops are acting like this is a police state.

People around here are furious about the Reverse 911 call – you know, the one that was supposed to give people important evacuation information? They sent the Reverse 911 call in English only! Can you believe that? So a lot of the people in this neighborhood didn’t understand it. People who do speak English took matters into their own hands—they knocked on doors, made phone calls, and tried to get the word out to Spanish-only speakers that they needed to evacuate. This is a tight-knit community, and we look out for each other. Which is a good thing, because apparently the city does not!

One challenge with evacuating our neighborhood had to do with cultural values. Some of the more traditional women in the neighborhood—not all of them, but some—they didn’t want to evacuate without being escorted by a male relative. And it was the middle of the day, so a lot of men were at work and women were at home with their kids. The police who were helping with evacuation did not show cultural sensitivity. They just stood there and kept talking about the risks of staying, and some of them got very frustrated and starting yelling at the women. They needed to do something different, like trying to get a male relative on the phone or something.

We had to evacuate three nursing homes during the flood, and the residents were all brought to the shelter. The evacuation went well for two of the nursing homes, but the third did not go as well. That nursing home did not have a comprehensive evacuation plan. There were several patients with advanced Alzheimer’s in that facility, and they should have been transported to the hospital during the evacuation, but instead they were taken to the shelter, which was not equipped to meet their needs. We should have had better communications with that nursing home before the flood to prevent these kinds of problems.

It’s a sad reality, but disasters bring out the worst in people—especially in poor neighborhoods. Poor people are desperate and will take advantage of any bad situation. We need to be on the lookout for looters 24-7, and be aggressive. Look what happened in Katrina! If someone looks suspicious, we have to stop them. Public safety depends on that.

Floods affect poor people the most. The poor people are the ones who live in the areas prone to flooding, and they don’t have vehicles to evacuate. That’s really sad, but what are you going to do? That’s just the way it is. There’s always going to be haves and have nots, and there’s nothing we can do to stop that. I hate to say it, but if people really wanted to pull themselves out of poverty, they would find a way. I know I would.

I wish people helped each other out more during disasters like this. I know there’s shelters and stuff, and on the news they said there were places to drop off food and supplies. But mostly I don’t see people really helping strangers out—like by taking them into their homes, or bringing over meals. Especially people in areas that aren’t affected. I guess that’s just the way things are. It doesn’t seem normal to help out unless you know someone who’s affected. If it were up to me, I’d just walk around with a pile of sandwiches and hand them out to people—but that would seem really weird, huh? People just don’t do that.

We have a problem. The water has been contaminated in the Longley neighborhood, so we’ve been recommending that people boil their water or use bottled water. But there’s been poor compliance. We need to know why this is happening—and, perhaps more importantly, how to get people to comply. I need to communicate better with the media to make sure the message gets out to the public—and I need to contact someone at the local Somali community newspaper to help me out. This isn’t a simple problem—we need to find a way to get different parts of the system to work together to solve this dangerous problem.

We’ve been working hard to get the public health message out to the community, but it’s not that simple. Many of the residents of the Longley neighborhood are immigrants from Somalia. There’s distrust in the neighborhood of authorities, especially after a young man was arrested for having possible ties to a terrorist organization. Residents feel targeted by the police. We can double down on our public health message, but this is a systemic problem, and we’ll need help from the police department and others.

I volunteer with the Longley Community Council, a local neighborhood organization. I think we should contact the public health department to talk about how we can help encourage people to boil their water. Some people around here see government as the enemy, especially after that boy was arrested—but it’s more complicated than that. People around here have always distrusted government, since many of them fled a government that is very corrupt. The Longley Community Council could work with the health department to spread the word about the importance of boiling water. We can go door-to-door, and also get the local Somali newspaper involved. Maybe we could work with bottled water distribution too. We could also get the imam involved.

There’s a lot of distrust in the Longley neighborhood of the police, and that’s had terrible consequences during this flood. People distrust the government in general, and now they’re ignoring important instructions about boiling the water. This shows how poor relations between police and the community can have implications throughout the whole system. I think we should work with local community organizations to distribute water—police, on the street, passing out water to people in the community. And after this is over, we need to make a strong effort to build better relations with people in the Longley neighborhood.

Many houses in this neighborhood were completely flooded, and unfortunately they may need to be torn down. Houses in this neighborhood date back 100 years or more. This has always been a neighborhood of immigrants, who tend to move in and move out when they become more upwardly mobile. Most of the houses are rental units. What all of that means is that updates haven’t been made to houses that would have prevented flood damage, like newer sump pumps. The city has given money for these updates over the years to neighborhoods that were at risk for flood damage, but Longley has largely been neglected, especially since most people don’t own their own homes here.

Since I moved to this neighborhood twenty years ago, economic progress has been… well, non-existent. Backwards even. There used to be good jobs in this neighborhood, back when there were factories here. But they’ve all moved out. Now, people are lucky to get jobs in fast food – that’s all that’s left! My son, he’s signed up for a job training program, but there’s a waiting list of over a year. People are barely making ends meet. That’s why the flood was such a shock to people. People who are lucky enough to own their own homes, well, it’s not like most of them can afford flood insurance. So now they’re going to be losing their homes, most likely. And a lot of people now have relatives crammed into their homes, which is more mouths to feed on budgets that are already stretched. This was the last place in the city that needed a flood!

The lack of transportation around here is a huge problem, and the city needed to address it a long time ago. Poor bus service in this area has always been a problem. Lots of people around here don’t have cars, so they’ve been putting up with long walks to the bus stops and having to make multiple transfers to get anywhere. And now that some of the roads are out, the bus service is close to nonexistent right now. People can’t get to work, they can’t get to the grocery store— it’s a mess! If this flood teaches the city anything, it’s that they have to improve public transportation in this neighborhood as soon as possible.