The interview I selected to listen to was from the Narrating Hurricane Katrina Through Oral History Collection, from the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, accessed through this link: Hurricane Digital Memory Bank | Susana Donaghey MT156K.mp3 (hurricanearchive.org). The specific interview I listened to was conducted by Lisa Pruitt on July 25, 2006, nearly a full yar after Hurricane Katrina, and it was a total of 44:26 minutes. Susana Donaghey was the subject of the interview, a doctor born and raised in New Orleans who relocated to live in Tennessee after Hurricane Katrina, and the interview was titled “Susana Donaghey MT156K.mp3”. The interview covered Dr. Donaghey’s experience of Hurricane Katrina, beginning with her thoughts and feelings when the storm was approaching, covering her experience fleeing the storm and returning to her home after the destruction, and ending with her new life in Tennessee. The interview takes the form of an audio recording, seemingly unedited, but there isn’t a transcript, or at least not an easily located one on the website.
I really enjoyed this interview; I think that the interviewer did a great job conducting the interview and it paints a complete picture of Dr. Donaghey’s experience with the hurricane, even ranging to touch a little on her family members and what their own stories are. The first part of the interview that stuck out to me was that within the first two minutes when merely speaking about background, Dr. Donaghey called Hurricane Katrina “the nuclear bomb”. The rest of the interview goes on to provide explanation for why that statement was said, but I think it helps display the size of the impact of such a disaster. Throughout the interview, Pruitt did a fantastic job of allowing the interviewee to speak and tell their own story. Pruitt’s voice is hardly present throughout the nearly 45-minute interview, only heard to ask the initial question, about her thoughts before the storm, and to ask quick clarifying questions. Because of Pruitt’s minimal involvement, Dr. Donaghey is able to go on multiple tangents and explain different memories near-uninterrupted, creating an end result that appears to paint a complete picture of her experience with Hurricane Katrina.
She ended up fleeing her home with her husband, two young children, parents, and pets early Sunday morning, the day before the hurricane made landfall. Dr. Donaghey recalled that in trying to leave before the storm, what was “normally a 3 hour and 15 minutes drive took 18 hours” and resulted in the death of her dog, all to get to her friend’s house where she ended up staying a week to ride out the storm and then live as, essentially, nomads with her 2 and 3-year-old for months. Within the full picture of her whole experience, she ends up telling the stories of an aunt and uncle of hers who stayed in New Orleans later than she did, and a cousin who was turned away from heading North to escape the storm and ended up in Mississippi, which ended up taking the hurricane straight-on.
The inclusion of her family’s stories helps contribute to a wider historical picture of the event, as including more accounts of what people were experiencing helps display how wide-ranging and severe the storm’s impact reached.