Welsh tourist recalls horror of Hurricane Katrina

Michelle Andrews (left) and her friend Zoe were on holiday in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina landed

Twenty years ago, Michelle Andrews and her friends were on holiday in the United States when disaster struck.

She was in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, flooding 80% of the city, killing almost 2,000 and displacing more than a million others.

Ms Andrews went from enjoying her holiday to being stuck on the streets of the city, showering under a drainpipe while awaiting rescue.

Speaking on BBC Radio Wales Breakfast, Michelle, now 40, said she had lost hope but was "lucky" when journalists helped evacuate them after five days.

Katrina took nearly 2,000 lives, destroyed or made uninhabitable an estimated 300,000 homes, and caused more than $100bn in property damage

Ms Andrews, originally from Pontyclun, Rhondda Cynon Taf, but now living in Cardiff, after the hurricane hit, she and a group of survivors were moved from a shed to the 17th floor of a hotel.

But two days later, the generator failed, leaving them with two choices, the Convention Center or the Louisiana Superdome.

"We'd heard so many bad stories about the Superdome, we thought, OK, our best bet is to go to the Convention Center, but to be honest with you, it was so poorly managed we had to make our own way there," she said.

"Then they wouldn't let people in, unless you were elderly or frail.

So we just sort of made a home above a train track on a bridge next to a mall, and that's where we stayed."

The city government established several "refuges of last resort" for those who could not leave

"It was five days we were there before we got rescued," Ms Andrews said. "The stench of the mall you had, like the rotten seafood, the bathrooms were backed up,t here was no running water, there was no electricity."

"You just sat there for days thinking 'what are we going to do? What's next?' And all we could see was like these buses coming over the one bridge that was still accessible into New Orleans.

"You can see all these buses coming to take people away, but they're all heading to the Superdome in the first instance. So we could just see all of this happening, thinking 'when are we going to get rescued? When is it going to be our turn to leave? '

"We gave an interview to ABC News in Australia, and they very kindly said 'fine, we can take the three of you out of here now'.

"Well, we've never packed up our bag so quickly to leave. It was good to get away, but as you're sort of going away in the car, you could see everybody else that was left."

She said the experience taught her how quickly "things can change and how important it is to be prepared", as well as how to "be resilient and value community because we had to rely on each other to get through it".

About 300,000 homes were destroyed, an area of land similar to the size of the UK was damaged by the hurricane

Nearby on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, nine-year-old Megan Feringa and her siblings had lived through many hurricane seasons.

But Katrina was different.

Now 29, Ms Feringa said she remembered the disaster "really vividly".

She said: "There was this sense that it wasn't going to be a really big deal. It wasn't going to be that dangerous. It was a category three, which is sort of run of the mill."

Then the hurricane landed.

"We were watching the trees outside my house sort of sway, tip the top of the house, and then sway back, and you were sort of waiting for them to fall on top of you.

"But the thing that will stay with me the most is, is what happened after the storm passed."

Overall, nearly 80% of the New Orleans was inundated with floodwater that reached 6m (20ft) deep while 59 tornadoes propagating from the storm spread further damage across eight states

Her family home was "in the middle of the woods" on a swamp and "there's a one way road in and out that's about two miles long."

This road was blocked with fallen trees which took two-and-a-half weeks to clear a path.

Ms Feringa said Louisiana in August was "devastating" in the heat and there was only one house in the area which had a generator.

Half of the families living in the area had been evacuated and those who had remained "piled into this one person's home where this generator could power one room at a time"

"If someone was taking a shower, like sometimes the refrigerator would go off," she said.

Ms Feringa said in terms of food "you were eating whatever leftover crisps you could get".

"Then the river water kept coming up and up, so if you open the back door, suddenly you'd see like snakes or alligators or things that you obviously didn't want to be face to face with."

She said her family was lucky because their house was saved from rising water due to the land gradient but the six houses behind them were "completely flooded".

She and her mum canoed to the houses and "grabbed as many people as we could" and were "shuttling them to this house for safety".

Ms Feringa said many people they rescued wanted to save things but the canoes could not hold it so they "were just having to abandon their lives".

It was a time before social media and there was no phone signal, she said, so the only contact with the outside world was the "harrowing" news on the radio.

Once out, her family travelled to the airport to stay with cousins in California and remained there for about four months.

When they returned, she said you could "see the scars everywhere".

"You'd see the water lines that were just sort of seared into the buildings, like a constant reminder of how high the water was."

Ms Feringa said: "I don't think things really felt the same at least for another year or two, it was just all everyone kept thinking about it."