NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Kim Rafferty remembered the underground World War II bunker she sheltered inside in 2005 while Hurricane Katrina raged around her.
Rafferty, 10 at the time, didn't realize her entire life would change — her school, her house, her city. Growing up as a child in New Orleans, she experienced hurricane evacuations before, even in 2005, but this was different. She watched her parents huddle together and listen to the radio about the floodwaters drowning the city — ultimately killing 1,392 people.
Before she found herself in that bunker in Mississippi, Rafferty was getting a haircut the Friday before Hurricane Katrina hit. Her dad packed everything underneath their home and strapped it down. Then they left on the hours-long ride to Jackson.
"To see all the cars packed and packed on the interstate as a 10-year-old in the car, you don’t wanna be in the car for hours," she said. "That was different than any other time. It was gridlock. There was no way to even do anything about it."
Rafferty said she knows what it's like to be a child in a hurricane-prone area, like kids in Florida right now who have evacuated and are waiting to hear where the wind and water hit with Hurricane Milton.
"You just know it’s something big, and you understand what a hurricane is but you don’t really," she said. "You know you’re out of school and you’re in this traffic. You don’t know it’s going to change your whole life. You won’t ever see your friends again. A lot of kids it does affect them in that way. When you’re a child you’re so impressionable and so drastic of a change happening so quickly, that is the hardest part looking back on it."
Evacuating to Nashville
Rafferty's dad had his work based in Nashville. A couple of days later, the family moved to Tennessee.
Like many others from New Orleans, her family sought refuge in another state and never returned to Louisiana. They stayed in different hotels before moving to an apartment.
"We did have to start our whole lives over," she said. "We had to start over where to live, clothes — the simple things that weren’t there anymore. We had so much help from the community in Nashville to get the items we needed and looking at the reports if we could even go back into our home."
Rafferty's mother managed to find her way back to New Orleans to try to check on her home. Even a city shut down three months from the storm, her mother wove her way back to the city. However, that meant she lost communication with her mom while she went back to assess their personal damage.
"That was so scary to see the reports of the helicopter, the mud, the water, the Superdome," she said. "She flooded her car and didn’t have a way to communicate with us. That was really hard. We were sitting there watching the news in Nashville and wandering where she was for a few days."
Rafferty said she went back six months later to see what was left of New Orleans and her neighborhood.
"Mud was everywhere," she said. "Boats were on the road. There were houses burned and flooded. The thing I remember the most was the Xs on the houses how many lived in a home, someone was rescued and someone died. Xs were on every single home, and I remember seeing the mud caked on. Still six months later, there were 10 feet covering everything. The Xs — it looked like a war zone."
'We had to start our whole lives over'
Growing up in Creole culture, Rafferty attended a French immersion school, meaning she had to relearn everything in English when she arrived in Nashville.
It took three years for her family to recover in Middle Tennessee.
But it also put Rafferty on another trajectory: journalism. She attended the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and she came back to Nashville this fall as a multimedia journalist for us at NewsChannel 5.
"This was the reason I knew I wanted to be a reporter for my whole life," she said. "After that, I always knew my path, and I knew I wanted to be a person who could deliver information. That information was the most important for us to get out of our house."
Rafferty said she considered Nashville her home, and that while she watched the radar down in Florida, she said understood how those families felt.
"Telling stories about flooding and weather is something I am passionate about because it affects people so greatly," she said. "This is my story and my experience. Going through a hurricane changed my life. It made me the reporter I am today. It also made me believe in a community, and it made me believe in people helping others in times of need."
Do you have a story you want to share about flooding or evacuation from Hurricane Milton or Helene? Please reach out to Kim at kim.rafferty@newschannel5.com.
Fostering Hope provides Christmas for kids in foster care. I'm delighted to see Fostering Hope expand this year to expand their reach to now include kids in Foster care in metro AND foster kids in East TN hard hit by Helene.
-Bree Smith
