Twenty years ago, she packed for three days. She never went back.
HOUSTON — Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Kym Adams reflects on her journey from evacuee to Houston resident, describing two decades of healing after fleeing her hometown on August 27, 2005, just two days before the storm made landfall.
Adams evacuated New Orleans with her two teenage sons, ages 15 and 17, packing only what she thought she’d need for a brief stay away from home.
“Three days worth of clothes, and all of our papers school records.. birth certificates.. everything I could think of,” Adams recalled about her hasty departure.
The memories of that night remain vivid for Adams even after two decades.
“I can still feel the raindrops that hit my arm, the night we evacuated, I remember every step along the way,” she said.
Unlike thousands of New Orleans residents who evacuated to the Superdome or later sheltered in Houston’s Astrodome, Adams had enough resources to stay in a motel. Within a week of arriving in Houston, she had found employment and enrolled her sons at West Side High School.
However, Adams carries survivor’s guilt about her relatively fortunate circumstances compared to other evacuees.
“My heart still hurts for them, I still cry over that, I still have tremendous survivors guilt that I worked through for that,” she explained.
About a month after arriving in Houston, Adams returned to survey the damage to her home in New Orleans East. The experience proved emotionally devastating.
“Then driving in the morning to our street…it was eerily quiet… it sounded like death,” she remembered.
Hurricane Katrina claimed nearly 2,000 lives, and Adams’ home suffered significant damage with a foot of water and mold throughout the property. The house held special meaning for her family – it had belonged to her father, who was the original owner, and Adams had lived there for three years before evacuating.
Initially, Adams planned to remain in Houston only until her sons graduated high school, roughly two years. However, she grew to appreciate the city’s diversity and business climate, eventually starting her own successful company.
The realization that Houston had become her permanent home came gradually. In 2020, fifteen years after evacuating, Adams made the difficult decision not to return to New Orleans.
Reflecting on her experience, Adams compared the loss to grief over a loved one.
“It’s like losing a loved one, you remember the last phone call, everything that leads up to that moment plays in your mind, and it does,” she said.