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No one dreamed that the little bit of hurricane that they had in Florida would do what it did to Louisiana.

And when the busses started coming on that Tuesday, they just kept coming.

They did not stop.

Those busses were on their way here.

The Cajundome Arena in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Floodwaters following Hurricane Katrina had forced thousands of weary, overwhelmed New Orleans residents from their homes.

Many found themselves 120 miles west in Lafayette, a city of 115,000 people.

The Cajundome, designed to seat 12,000 for an event, would soon become home to 18,500 storm victims.

A massive influx equal to 16% of the city's population.

At the time, our first evacuees started arriving.

There were no supplies.

We didn't have any cots or blank or pillows.

Dr. Azar served on the Cajundome Commission.

So I called him and I told him, I said Doc.

Here's what we've got.

We've got a serious medical crisis here at the Cajundome I was expecting the worst.

But again, I did not think in my wildest dreams that this thing would go 58 days.

I knew that it was a bad hurricane, but it looked like it was going to go east of New Orleans.

Perfectly symmetrical storm.

This is now the fourth strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin.

Here you're seeing the eye of Hurricane Katrina bear down on Biloxi, Mississippi, and it continues to move to the north at about 15 miles per hour.

And so I didn't think that Louisiana was going to receive the brunt of the hurricane.

We were awaiting the turn of Katrina to the north.

And all of us, from the instep of Florida all the way to the Texas Panhandle, were trying to determine when it was going to make that right hand turn.

And as we were watching the storm and as it started turning more towards the New Orleans area, kind of in the state, our planning got a lot more rapid and a lot more intense as to exactly what we would probably be dealing with I go on Rampart because they got like a little community church around where we go and we play basketball.

That's where I was before the storm.

Probably saying it ain't going to come this way because, you know, that's what we used to in New Orleans.

Is they say's its going to come But it always another way.

And everybody has this look of panic on their face like, why are ya'll still here.

Those were people who lived through Hurricane Betsy.

So those people knew that danger was imminent when it made that last swing and pushed over to the east of New Orleans.

Initially we thought, great, we've missed it.

We dodged a big bullet because immediately after the hurricane went through, the streets were dry.

There was no problems.

It wasn't until about 8 hours later when the levees broke that we knew how bad this could potentially be.

The day after, it was like dry outside.

There wasn't no water.

And then next thing.

You know, you.

Day after, they got water, water everywhere.

One of the levees was breached in some areas.

We reports of 11 feet of standing water, people being forced out onto the roofs of their homes.

Monday morning, the hurricane had passed.

I am on the outside of the building We were operating out of our emergency shelter.

And I'm on my cell phone.

I'm looking at my car and I'm talking to my wife.

She said, What's wrong?

I said, water's coming up the street.

Where we were was the highest part of the post It shouldn't be coming up.

Water should be going down.

I said my car is floating.

I got to go in an hour and a half.

We went from no water to 8 to 10 feet.

We was at home and we normally ride the storms, the hurricanes and thunderstorms out.

The water didn't go down after several days.

We just pretty much thought about, hey, we need to get out of here.

You couldn't hear a thing.

There wasn't even a cricket nor a light in the whole city of New Orleans The only thing we would hear is if something moved the water lapping.

We end up creating a little raft with a piece of fence and a swimming pool.

And we put the babies in there and our little personal items, such as ID, phones.

We swim to the bayou.

Once we got to the bayou, we discovered they had helicopters taking people away.

We didn't know where we were going.

We just know that they brought us to, I believe it was the causeway, where they had a line of busses.

This is not a test.

This is the real deal.

And we're seeing gusts of about an hour.

It's just so massive.

It's so awe-inspiring.

We are facing a storm that most of us have feared.

If you have a boat, bring it here.

Help us.

These are people who do not have the wherewithal to get out of town.

They stayed in their houses because they had to.

And then the water came up.

We were notified by the governor's office to prepare to receive people from New Orleans to shelter them.

The Cajundome was chosen to be a shelter after Hurricane Katrina because we had been a shelter several times before.

Was maybe looking for something similar to what we had experienced in the past.

A thousand or less people for maybe three, four, or five days.

Faith based areas who set up shelters are great.

and other, small shelters are great, but they can't accomplish what needed to be accomplished.

With the numbers that we knew we were going to see.

We would get them out of water, get them to temporary high ground, and we would push them forward to high water vehicles.

After that.

We wound up people you know, the people wound up coming to get us.

They rescued us.

And so wound up taking a bus to the Cajundome when we finally did get out, we ended up on the I-10 bridge around Saint Bernard exit.

We probably stayed on the bridge for about maybe.

Five or six hours in the blazing sun.

How do you get out of a city that's underwater?

The only high ground on roads were the overpasses, but you can't get to the overpass.

And when the water started rising, a lot of people parked their car up on the overpass to save their car.

That then blocks the overpass when the water goes down.

We were then taken to Lafayette.

Taken to Lafayette, Louisiana.

So when we got to the Cajundome, it was kind of a happy feeling.

But a sad feeling too.

at the same time.

For me it was depressing But I didn't let it show.

Many arrived by bus.

Others made the harrowing journey from New Orleans on their own, stretching the already crowded Cajundome to near its breaking point.

The first set of evacuees arrived here at the Cajundome starting the Tuesday after Hurricane Katrina.

By Tuesday at 1:00.

Jill and I were here.

I can speak to personally setting up the volunteer table, registration table.

I can speak to personally setting up the exit plan for the evacuees.

The first day, we had a very slow trickle of evacuees.

Whatever the second day was was a lot busier.

And the third day was probably the busiest day we had of evacuees arriving.

And it just got crazier and busier as the days went on.

We just got a steady flow and as they were coming in.

We would be waiting for them at the front door and then taking them to where they can settle down for a few days.

And it grew to the point where the needs of the evacuees were far greater than our ability to service those needs.

And then that's when we knew we had a major problem on our hands.

We were just woefully unprepared for this.

Thursday night, we had gotten a call from a state trooper on I-10, and he said that there were about 17 or 18 busses and that they needed to bring the evacuees somewhere, that they had gone to other shelters in Louisiana, but none would take them.

And I told them that we had a policy that that we would not turn anyone away.

Don't be driven by fear, but by compassion.

That was Greg Davis's mantra.

And it set the tone within the Cajundome and throughout the entire community.

I got a call at one in the morning and it was a director of the Cajundome, Greg Davis.

He said, I need your help.

We have 19 or 17 busses that have come in that need to be triaged and sent into the Cajundome.

I called every medical student doctor.

I called the emergency room at UMC, and I said send me every available nurse, medical student, because I think we're going to have a mass casualty.

And it wasn't a couple of busses The busses just kept coming.

The individuals that were on the busses that were coming here, a lot of them were still wet.

There were hungry and they were thirsty.

Many were still in the same clothes that they had been in, on the roofs of houses in New Orleans We had people that were diabetic that hadn't had their medicine in three days.

Just about anything in medicine that you could imagine was on those busses.

They were also exposed to a variety of things wading through water as immunocompromised patients.

They had cuts and bruises.

They had all these things that really needed immediate attention that we had to figure out a way to treat pretty quickly.

And I figured we need all the physicians and probably just going to need somebody triaging all these people, first of all.

I don't even know where they're coming from.

I think they were kind of help me decide what's going on.

I have no idea.

Where they are at this point.

They're saying things like, they're from the airport.

God knows.

Which airport, but it's an airport.

Here we are now, day seven.

And still the Red Cross has a real problem communicating with evacuees coming in.

There's just the whole communication issue has been has been a real problem.

And some of that and actually a lot of that has to do with the phone lines being down all over the place.

And it just makes it tougher to know.

We have 117 evacuees scheduled to come here and to be triaged.

And we don't know what the plan for them are.

We know this shelter is open, but they don't know whether they're going to be staying here or not.

It's just chaos, kind of a kind of an organized chaos still, because it was it was lines for people to get in and people getting screened.

But away from the line, congregating And people were still kind of taken aback by what what was actually going on.

When I got to Lafayette, I had the clothes that I had on my cell phone, and my wallet.

That was it.

I didn't have a change of underwear, any of that.

toothbrush...

Nothing.

I can remember having on my gym shorts, flip flops, undergarments were all soaking wet.

I can remember feeling dirty, confused, shocked, scared.

Pretty much everybody pretty much lost everything.

So it was just a lot of us, with what we had on and stuff like that.

So, you know, good thing The people in the Cajundome, you know, had some stuff that we could at least wear The first person I saw was a young mother who had her baby with her, and that's about all she had with her was just a couple of things.

You can imagine.

They just were picked up, brought here with a bag, whatever they could grab or whatever they had.

The baby was screaming and crying and she was crying.

And I saw her come in and I went to her and I said, How can I help you?

And she said, My baby's hungry.

She said, We've been on the on the highway for however many hours.

And she said, can't find my momma.

And so I called a friend who had some baby supplies and we started bringing things.

People sort of bringing things to help take care of those who didn't have anything.

The Red Cross had to provide the bedding, clothing it necessary, feed evacuees, provide any medical attention that was required.

But very quickly, by that Tuesday night, everyone saw that the Red Cross a serious problem, did not have the resources, the personnel to meet the needs of the evacuees that were coming in.

We made a a call out to our community for them to bring us things that the evacuees needed.

And they responded.

Couple of days later, people started to actually come to the Cajundome.

Lines of vehicles like people from Lafayette really showed us a lot of love.

we ended up with distribution centers in both buildings, kind of an area in the back portion where you could get to a loading dock and receive all the stuff and then set it up in an area where it's kind of like a store, and people didn't have to pay for anything.

They just went and picked up what they needed from those supply areas.

Acadiana has always been there.

Their hearts have always been open.

They've always been willing to help.

We had a group of ophthalmologists that showed up and said, We've got all these glasses that we'd like to donate right around the same time that we had a group of a couple of school groups that came in with with small children that had lost glasses and lost everything they had and said, Hey, is there anybody that we can give these to?

We really want to we really want to donate this.

Providing showering facilities was probably one of the biggest challenges.

At the very, very beginning, because most people coming had not bathed in several days, had been in the elements all of this time.

So we had to provide instant necessities of life.

And the most important from day one was hygiene.

We have about ten showers in our locker rooms for basketball teams and concerts and that kind of stuff.

So there was no way that's going 7000 people at one time or even 3000 people.

Our operations director for our public works department, Joe Mansicalco, and those guys just came up with the idea to basically build and construct the wooden showers And within 24 hours they built a magnificent showering facility right behind the Cajundome Above ground shower system.

There were men stalls and women's stalls and ramps to get up into them and they built a complete package of showers in the back of the building.

And it provided just one of those important components that made people's lives a little bit better at a time when it was really the worst day of their life.

The Cajundome shelter was different than any other emergency shelter in US history.

The number of residents and their substantial medical needs overwhelmed the Red Cross.

It seems unbelievable, but no other previous emergency shelter had ever provided extensive medical care.

In fact, it was against the Red Cross rules.

But the Cajundome shelter changed those rules.

We started out with a quarantine area that was smaller than the size of this room.

We were going to curtain off a few little areas and now we've commandeered a much bigger space.

And that's obviously not going t big enough.

You know how many physicians we.

Have out here?

Two.

That's all I have.

We had three.

One was needed down in special needs.

And he he left.

So I need another physician.

Yeah, I'm.

I try and round up a few more docs.

We have lots of people in the Cajundome and more coming that were in desperate need of medical care.

We also knew that that meant there would be people with chronic conditions and exacerbated chronic conditions because of what they had been through already.

This gentleman arrived and we took a blood sugar on him and it was very high, critically high.

And, you know, I instructed one of the E.R.

doctors, he said, this guy needs insulin now.

I said, let's give it to him.

Red Cross comes with the basic formulary of maybe Tylenol, ibuprofen and something for an upset stomach.

They had no doctors aboard to do what we do.

They told me.

Insisted.

the Red Cross does not give shots.

The Red Cross has a very specific job and they do a really, really good job.

But doctors and medical clinics have their own specific things they need to do.

We went against the grain of the Red Cross and we opened up our own medical clinic.

That was one of the best things that came out of it, that they backed down and it made them a better Red Cross.

The initial medical clinic for the Cajundome was the closet that the EMTs use for sporting events.

Big enough for one bed tucked down on the bottom floor.

And it wasn't going to be adequate for very much.

We help recruit doctors.

We had a pharmacy going and we started a clinic.

We got the equipment.

We drained the coffers of the hospitals and the private doctors to get medications and exam tables and lighting.

The Cajundome was certainly not set up as the ideal place for a medical clinic, but it was amazing how quickly this group came together.

Within 48 hours, we had several hundred thousand dollars of medications that doctors had had donated.

To the point where we had to take an entire separate room and two pharmacists that became full time pharmacists for the for the Cajundome Clinic.

What physicians would do is they would take their entire supply closets, clean everything out, and just arrive with large bags and say here use this for whoever you can use it for.

Physicians and practices showed up and brought with them what they thought would be useful.

I had a backpack with a pulse oximeter, my blood pressure cuff, my stethoscope.

We had at one time 500 to 600 medical volunteers coming in and out.

It really was gratifying to see the number of physicians and non-physicians, healthcare providers across the spectrum.

All showed up to volunteer their services, however they could be of use.

At one point when I was working, I had an orthopedist, a dermatologist, a neurosurgeon and a cardiologist that were all there to volunteer I said, I can't get these kind of people in my own emergency room.

It was somewhat of a miracle that we always had staffing there.

24/7.

There were other patients that needed more long term care.

They were sicker.

They need to be kept out of the regular population.

And so we expanded again to the second floor of the convention center, So the entire second floor of the convention center, where we are now became a miniature hospital ward And we had patients broken down on beds and on the floor just getting routine medical care in an area.

where we could concentrate health care providers and not have to walk through the Cajundome and not have to have them exposed to general population.

It's good that we're paranoid about what might break out because our goal is to get out of this without a major public health disaster.

In short, I think the two biggest things to worry about would be Norovi— Norovi— Norovirus and shigella.

I think those would be the two scariest things in a place like this.

I think they could rip through something like this in a hurry.

You've got up to 8000 people in here.

You're doing pretty, pretty well right now.

You're getting your job done.

You've taken care of the hygiene issues.

You're really moving a lot of people in and out.

So I would say that at this point, if you can keep that up, It's certainly helpful.

I mean, the question then becomes, can the staff sustain this for I don't know how much longer Aside from hygiene, which was one of the first things we dealt with, medication was the next.

And 6000 people who were not able to evacuate from New Orleans and the surrounding area, suddenly their pharmacy's not available.

Those prescriptions are not available.

And I remember Buddy Azar, looking the sheriff and the mayor in the eye and telling people, if we don't do something about it now, people are going to die.

And we do not want people dying on our watch.

And we've discussed this two or three times before, but we said we would only take care of the people, 6000 in the dome, but there are still hundreds of people out there that need only prescription refills.

I thought I had was maybe we could set up a little independent place somewhere for prescription refills only and let the people who are staying with friends and relatives and what have you come in and just get a prescription refill.

That's all they need.

Why don't we coordinate that through the parish medical society And the Red Cross, we can do that.

That's not a difficult thing.

We're looking for a way to distribute medications to and fill prescriptions for the folks that are not housed here.

And we're standing in front of the ticket windows going, we need a place with where we can put a barrier and deal with the public on the outside needing prescriptions and be in a secure environment on the inside as we're standing in front of the ticket office we kind of turn around and we look, and we're like “look at that window”.

So then we started staffing physicians in the box office to give prescriptions out to somebody that just came in and said, Look, I lost everything in the water.

Can you can you give me a refill for these prescriptions?

I do recall an orthopedic physician that I know saying, well, hell, this is why I went to medical school to help the people, so put me in a window and sure enough, I recognized a number of physicians in that.

I think we had four windows going at one time and a word got and a line formed outside.

Those doctors examined people on site, validated and verified prescriptions where they could with the area pharmacies and when they where they couldn't made diagnoses, kept medical records, and provided the prescriptions that people needed to sustain themselves.

But fortunately, we made the right decisions.

We did not compromise medical care.

And a lot of us look back on that memory very fondly that we're very proud of, of the experience that we had.

I just hate to see a bunch of people come in that we couldn't save.

And that really worried me.

But we did it.

Nobody died.

But it wasn't just medical care evacuees needed.

It was everything from food and clothing to everyday necessities we all take for granted.

24 hours a day for weeks on end.

The federal government was delayed in getting response and very woefully unprepared for this.

If it would not be for the local effort.

There'd have been a catastrophe Many people would have died.

Many people would not have get rescued.

Many people would not have had the care and the caring that they got in the Cajundome and the Lafayette area and many other areas.

We met today with the president and the first lady and other cabinet secretaries, as well as with FEMA, to emphasize that the burden has been borne by local communities in the relief effort, and we can't sustain it for long because we don't have the resources and we're going to need federal help.

The federal government, you know, it was kind of funny.

They were overwhelmed.

They had never dealt with this kind of thing before.

The first person that showed up with a FEMA shirt was a young person who was contracted.

Three weeks after a FEMA guy comes in with his FEMA shirt.

I'm from FEMA and I happened to see him.

I said “I wouldn't wear that shirt in there”.

And this poor young man, I think he had a guy with him.

They were just overwhelmed with the size of what had to happen and the number of questions people had for them.

You know, when you say FEMA has arrived, well, that one person was not FEMA.

It was going to take a lot more ramping up for that group to get ready.

But initially, it was about the local people providing all of the services an that were needed, because that help was not forthcoming from the federal government or state government because they were just consumed, overwhelmed, with the magnitude of this problem.

Volunteerism was a big thing.

Without it, nothing would have happened.

Per day, we needed about 300 to 500 people to run this shelter, and we had no problem getting that number and more from the people of Lafayette.

The local people in Lafayette are just hardworking.

Get down to business and take care of what needs to be taken care of.

We don't wait for somebody else to come help us out.

The volunteers showed up every morning.

You know, they were basically spontaneous.

They were not necessarily affiliated with any organization United Way was a great help in that because their volunteer center helped coordinate the volunteers.

There were people who allowed folks to stay in vacant apartments and rental property for free until they could get on their feet and get leases signed and convert that into a paying lease There were many apartment complexes that provided shelter and space to people and charge for it.

Getting jobs, temporary that potentially turned into permanent jobs.

The professional community rolling out conference rooms and empty offices at their own law firms and doctor's offices and other places for those professionals to be able to resurrect their lives.

And that part of their business.

As hard as the whole event was on everybody who experienced it.

It showed the strength of this community and the people of Acadiana and how giving they are.

Of course, there wasn't enough staff to deal with what we dealt with.

We typically run three hour events.

You know, when you come to an Arena event, you come for 3 hours, you use the restroom once you know, you don't brush your teeth there, You don't change clothes.

You just go in and out.

Mr. Davis decided that we would hiring some of the residents to help keep the Cajundome looking good and clean.

And he thought it was best that the resident do it because they were staying here, so they wanted to be in a clean place.

I remember the second day I was here walking across the arena floor.

I saw a guy with a Superdome shirt on and I said, “You worked for the Superdome?” He said, Yes.

I said, Now you work for me.

And so I put the guy on the payroll.

Within a couple of hours, he was working for us.

He was a security guard named Tim Day out of New Orleans.

Super, Super guy.

He had his family here.

He didn't have anything with him Because I didn't realize until after like months after still having friendships with some of the people who worked in the Cajundome And they were still working there.

I'm like, you know, Did Katrina bring you to the Cajundome?

how'd you end up working there?

They're like “Nah.

I've been working there.” We just had to kind of adjust when ya'll came and like everybody came in like all the workers came in.

We had volunteers came in and we just tried to make the best of the situation.

We went from having a 30 person post-event cleanup staff to having 60, 70 people working 24 hour shifts to keep the building clean throughout the whole process.

We have a great group of employees here.

I can say that because I am the H.R.

director and I know them, but they were very, very willing to help.

It was very long hours, some very trying times, some individuals' mornings and nights didn't end.

They ran into each other.

The days were long.

Not all the news was always good You worked hours and hours and hours to try to accomplish something that didn't happen.

We worked crazy hours.

We've always had you know, this is not an 8 to 5 business at all.

It wasn't unusual to have a long day.

What was incredibly unusual was to have long days back to back nonstop.

Greg Davis, the the head of the Cajun Dome, he was just phenomenal in every sense of the word.

His decision to provide some sense of dignity to the people who were here as residents and not as evacuees or refugees or anything else, really set the tone for how we all looked at what was occurring.

These were people simply trying to survive a tragedy and shame on us if we fellow Louisianians were going to treat them as refugees.

And then once they were registered into the shelter, the Cajundome shelter, they were called residents shelter residents.

Because he said that tone.

It was pervasive throughout the whole time.

They were all treated as welcome into our community.

And I think that a lot of that is attributed to the tone that Greg set.

For events a person takes up about two and a half square feet when they're standing.

They'll take up about four square feet sitting and taking up space, maybe five or six.

You know, you want to set up a building that's doing an event for about seven square feet per person is the average space That you'd allot.

when you have a place to sleep and a place to find for your space and a cot.

It's about 100 square feet per person And so in a 500,000 square foot you know, you set up to handle 12,000 people.

When you're doing sheltering the 500,000 square feet of facility becomes really, really crowded.

The residents slept everywhere.

The fire marshal by the Thursday had serious problems with how we had set up the shelter because we had a policy that we were not going to turn anyone away.

But they worked with us very closely.

They showed a lot of flexibility under the circumstances.

And so we were able to accommodate people everywhere In the Cajundome where someone could set up bedding for their family and shelter for an extended period of time.

Many were locked into the television and looking and identifying all the water in their neighborhoods.

And there was a lot of unknowns.

And I don't think that they realized initially that they weren't going back home any time really soon.

It was hard to wrap your brain around that.

The first few days with the evacuees, you could see the shock.

Most people were just in shock.

When you see 3400 people with about maybe ten or 15 walking around and you see everybody sleeping.

You realize there's a very basic human need to sleep.

When you see people sleep?

you see your family, but you don't watch people sleep And so when that happened that night, I was just it was a very surreal moment.

Once we got to the Cajundome, I could just think of like a roof.

It was warm, and I just wanted to go to sleep I just wanted to rest.

We was exhausted.

We wanted families not to be separated.

It's bad enough that they had to be separated from their homes, but if they came with an individual, we wanted to see that they remained with an individual If you and your wife or you and your parents or you and your brother were tog in the same room basically for 24 hours a day for a long time, there's going to be tension ther that's just natural as it relates to human nature.

You pour on top of that the emotions of losing your house, of not knowing where family members are, of learning that you have lost family member It was an incredibly difficult dynamic emotionally inside that facility.

We tried to make it as much a home to them as we could.

We had religious services.

There was entertainment.

They were given newspapers.

We'd show movies.

We had entertainers come through They were able to receive mail.

We came up with the idea as part daily meetings that we really needed to, where we could get people, where it was appropriate out into the community, but they didn't have transportation.

So the first thing we did was issue vouchers to where they could ride a city bus anywhere they wanted to ride.

But we also developed a cab voucher system that we ran for a certain time, but I think it came at it at an integral time when things inside the dome were were very difficult for the people who were there and the people who were managing Most of the time While I was at the Cajundome, I'd always be either cutting hair or standing next to where I cut hair at pretty much all day, a lot of haircuts I gave away, especially to young kids, little boys, like hey man, tell your mama I cut hair and he would go I'm a tell her.

he come back like she don't got no money.

With that sad look.

I be like you know what sit down man I go you.

and the smile on their face is like What?

In our sheltering operation About 50% were children.

And we also knew that they were going to be with us for several weeks, that we needed to come up with something that was going to give them some activities.

We also had to address their need for schooling.

We realized that kids were out of school and we had a lot of supplies we were getting in.

So we set up a little area where the kids can go to get to continue some schooling.

You know.

There were teachers who came and set up classes.

We made one of our staff people, a recreation director.

And this person's job was to find all kinds of activities for the children to do once they would return from school, also have a place for them to do their homework.

We had children who arrived here with no parents, you know, pretty terrified.

And there were people in this community who took those children in.

They didn't know them.

They didn't know where they were from, who they belonged to.

But they took them into their homes and cared for them and helped to locate their parents and made sure that they got, you know, reconnected with their parents.

It was scary enough for kids to go through that and to go through it separated from their parents, not knowing if they were going to find them again.

And to find kind of surrogate parents that would take care of them was really comforting to them.

So all of our evacuees were getting food.

But at some point I know that the nutritional value of what I saw was not going to keep me going every day, all day.

Fortunately, I could go home, but those who were here couldn't When we saw what was being provided through the Red Cross.

We quickly understood that that was not adequate.

The Cajundome had just formed its own catering service, and we had a pretty new brand new kitchen.

And we, Greg Davis, asked them if they were willing to cook all the meals, and they said, sure.

So we went to Lafayette General and asked them to let us use their nutritionist and our and that nutritionist met with our executive chef and they help us come up with a menu plan for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

So at some point, it was transitioned from from the people that the Red Cross had contracted with to one single source of food through us So we went from food that was just whatever you needed to survive with to, well, let's have a good meal.

That's what we do here in the South.

We feed you, you know, no matter who you are or where you come from, you walk into a Cajun home and somebody is going to want to feed you and they're not going to feed you a sandwich.

They're going to cook something for you.

For breakfast each morning.

The kitchen made scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits, and 700lbs of grits.

Lunch and dinner might include homemade Louisiana favorites like red beans and rice or crawfish stew.

With the help of countless volunteers The Cajundome residents were becoming more comfortable and beginning to settle into a routine a routine that would soon be shattered.

Rita is now the third strongest hurricane on record in Atlantic Basin, and residents in Louisiana and Texas should be watching this one closely from a distance This is a major hurricane here.

Category five winds have actually gone up over the last couple of hours.

175 mile per hour sustained winds.

And the forward speed has slowed down to nine miles per hour.

Still moving on towards the west and looking at.

Well Rita hits the Gulf of Mexico.

And I realize that it's going to hit pretty close to us.

And as this system moves west, it does have the potential for a quite a significant water rise, flooding, rains, severe weather and even places like Louisiana coast with a prolonged easterly flow here.

We were very concerned about Hurricane Rita.

It was another powerful hurricane.

We're not supposed to be used as a shelter during hurricane.

We're below I-10.

It was one of those things that the different departments decided that if you're below I-10, you're not safe enough for a hurricane.

So we realized about two or three days out, we're going to have to take all of our evacuees, move them somewhere else.

One thing you don't want to hear is that you have to evacuate the evacuees.

Working with the governor's office.

They were able to find places for our residents in Shreveport.

The Katrina evacuees were here several weeks before Hurricane Rita was a threat, and they were evacuated north and taken again from a place that they had come to be accustomed and knew what to expect.

First thing I was thinking like, oh, Katrina all over again.

You know, like, man, we just went through this and now we've got to go through this again.

So we just relocated from New Orleans to, Lafayette, and now I got to leave Lafayette to go to try to relocate and do this all over again.

This facility basically had become home for a lot of these people because we're talking it was like 28 days or something and they had to leave all their possessions again because they couldn't put them on the busses.

Rita came in and it wasn't as bad as what they had anticipated for Lafayette, but it was for Vermilion, it was for Cameron, it was for Iberia, it was for St Mary that had a lot of water issues.

So again, we were looking at another Katrina.

During the hurricane, I had the National Guard people with me in the building and we had some leaks and some damage and some broken things and got those things fixed pretty quickly within a couple of hours after the storm was over.

I mean a few hours.

And then we were ready to start taking evacuees in again.

But this time, they're from Texas and Lake Charles area.

And so we ended up, I think, about between 3,500 and 5,000 more people came to the Cajundome.

Got a call from Shreveport.

They want to send the evacuees back.

And they did.

They load them up on Greyhound busses and they sent them back.

After Rita, I went back to the Cajundome and there is even more people people from Lake Charles and out that where Rita really hit bad.

We had to find space for the people that had not been here yet without affecting the stuff the people that had been here before for three weeks already.

They came back here and we filled up the Cajundome with the evacuees, less a few, and then all the Rita evacuees.

So back in business again.

Keeping the Cajundome open as a shelter cost about $100,000 Food alone was nearly $12,000 per day.

There wasn't really a posture in place where FEMA could reimburse the Cajundome because it lost a concert or it lost basketball games or it lost those things.

There just wasn't a provision in federal government to be able to do that.

A lot of stuff was donated, which was good, but we had operating expenses like electricity and the food cost and the transportation cost that I really wasn't sure.

And I think Greg at some point in time wasn't sure if we're going to get reimbursement.

The Cajundome paid for sheltering expenses out of its own pockets.

When their operating funds began to run out, they turned to the only other moneys available, their capital improvement accounts.

By the end of the sheltering operation.

There was virtually nothing left Over the 60 day, 58 day period.

We service about 18,500 people.

About 4,500 were actually from Hurricane Rita, the Calcasieu Parish area.

The other 14,000 were from New Orleans.

We had about 7 to 8000 people in the facility at any one time.

You know, the Cajundome is used to running three hour operations three days a week, 9 hours a week.

That's nothing to keep up with.

When the sheltering started, we ended up with 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because the elevators don't get very often, escalators, the same kind of thing.

So you magnify the use of the building by just huge numbers.

The damage done here was mainly from usage, over usage.

We got 30 years of usage in 58 days, so everything had to be replaced after that.

So it took us a while to recover When we reopened the first week of January.

It took us all of that time to recover from the sheltering operation.

But it was just about being reimbursed for the expenses.

It wasn't about making money at that time.

The state and the government came back and they reimbursed us the operating expenses of $5 million to keep this place running for 61 days.

Over those two months, the Cajun staff and volunteers spontaneously created the nation's first mega shelter.

It was a massive operation that cared for thousands of people.

No shelter of this scale had ever been attempted before.

The experience was so unique that the International Association of Venue Managers asked the Cajundome to document what they'd done.

The result became the operation manual for future mega shelters.

Each disaster, we always sat down and basically looked and reviewed what had been done.

The Cajundome was a big success in a mega shelter set up, which had never been a term used before.

The Cajundome was so big and so popular and I think so successful with its own mail service and, you know, pharmacy and hospital and entertainment that it has its own zip code.

Cajun Dome City 70595.

We were called one here at the Cajundome to join a task force to create an operations manual for a mega shelter.

This was a blueprint, a guide to help other arenas with this type of disaster.

You had the sheriff sitting next to the chief of police.

You had the mayor president sitting next to some of the mayors and everybody working on the same things.

No one is trying to get up and say, well, I am the.

And we would meet and go over what happened the day before, what issues we may have had to deal with.

What we were looking at for the next day.

What were some of the challenges And this was discussed every morning.

Everything was a new a new learning experience.

We ended up with a whole different organizational chart.

Of course, there's a huge evacuation shelter organizational chart now that has all those positions, but at the time we made it up as we went along.

And so this manual became the standard for the industry In the event any of us are called upon to do, to do mega sheltering in the future.

We've had some large shelters for Red Cross, but the lessons that have been learned here, we were able to use in Hurricane Sandy and other big events in California in response to the wildfires that exist there, lots of massive evacuations and people had to be sheltered for an extended period of time.

And yes, they were able to use that manual to refer to that shelter operations manual to get a heads up on how to structure their sheltering operation.

They used a lot of the ideas we had for pre-positioning assets and preparation and communications, and a lot of good things have happened because of the experience we had here.

So it was just a huge change in what we dealt with.

Going from fun, we create fun, it's what we do, we create positive memories in your life.

Definitely was not positive memories in anyone's life in a very stressful situation for everybody involved.

As I approached the busses, I walked in the first bus with these sick people and I realized what it was all about, not about the Cajundome being an evacuee shelter.

It wasn't about the hurricane.

It's about people.

One thing Greg Davis and I always agreed about, it's about taking care of people I don't think there's ever been a time like it Hopefully there won't be the need to have another time like that.

But it's just a testament to who the people of Lafayette and Lafayette Parish are.

In terms of medicine.

And it wasn't something that I said by myself, I've heard it repeated over and over again, in terms of pure medicine, of people doing what we spent years training and perfecting a craft in.

It was the best pure medicine that we'd ever done because it wasn't about insurance forms and it wasn't about making sure that you checked off the right boxes.

and it wasn't about making sure you collected payment.

It was about taking care of people when they needed it and getting them that treatment and doing and putting all of your skills as a healthcare professional into effect as quickly as possible.

And just focusing on the patient there.

What happened at that pharmacy and what happened at that dome was a mirror image and a reflection of what was happening all over Acadiana and all throughout Lafayette Parish.

We were just there to provide a place for them to rest Nobody wants to be here.

Nobody wanted to be here.

They just wanted to get home and find home.

I spent 61 days, 58 days officially.

We kept this clinic open.

17,000 to 18,000 evacuees, 5000 medical visits, and 750,000 meals served.

But as you can see, going through the Cajundome, you can't tell that anything happened here.

It's been redone.

I guess the Cajundome's like Mother Nature.

It just, you know, Storm comes through and they come back the next week and everything's normal again.

But it survived and it will continue to survive.

What happened at the Cajundome mega shelter was nothing short of extraordinary.

The volunteers and the staff gave and gave and gave.

Everyone involved should be filled with pride.

Tragedy can strike at any time, but what the Cajundome mega shelter experience shows us is that the kindness of a small community can make a huge difference in the lives of thousands of people.

And Cajundome City did just that.

Said, I'm going through a change.

Change in my life.

Just ain't the same.

No, no.

Lord I seem seen better days.

Way down in New Orleans yesterday.

See, I've long friends and family.

And all I heard is these memory.

Yeah.

What do I feel?

I feel like a refugee.

Oh, and I'm from.

You want me?

Oh oh.

Whoa whoa whoa.

Yeah.

I'm a long way from home.

You know my memory.

Oh, hey, I'm gonna find my way.

Find your way back somehow.

But you down me, you.

I know what it feels.

Oh, come on now.

Maybe it's just a sign of time.

Hey, no more heartache.

No, no.

And no more crying.

No more crying.

But still I feel like a part of me just died.

From New Orleans Different people.

Different things.

In a different place.

But Lord, I'm so thankful that I found.

I found my way, found my way.

Still my heart.

Still my heart is a nifty place for New Orleans.

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.

I'm a long way from home.

And from my memory.

Memory.

I've gotta find my way back some time.

Back home.

Back down to new us.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I get I'm on my knees every night.

The producers of Cajun Dome City would like to thank the following sponsors, whose generous support helped make this project possible.