20 YEARS AFTER KATRINA Transformed by the Storm

FOR THESE SIX PEOPLE AND THEIR FAMILIES, THE DEVASTATION OF THE 2005 HURRICANE—ONE OF THE WORST IN U.S. HISTORY—WAS JUST THE START OF THEIR STORIES

- JOHNNY DODD,DAVID CHIU,JANELLE GRIFFITH,ANGELINA LIU,LIZ McNEIL,SUSAN YOUNG

She spent months desperately searching for her mom

EMANI SCOTT, 33

Memories of her ravaged hometown of New Orleans are still hauntingly fresh for Emani Scott. “I don’t want to watch any more Katrina documentaries,” says the educator. “It reopens wounds that a lot of us have worked so hard to close.” Just 13 when she and her mother, grandmother and younger siblings fled to the convention center to escape the floodwaters, Scott found her life upended for years, forcing her to summon strength she never knew she possessed. “It was the first time I saw dead bodies,” she says of the mayhem on the streets. After being separated from her mom, Jerilynn, and baby sister Jermani during chaotic helicopter evacuations, the precocious teen ended up at a West Virginia military base with her grandmother, also named Jerilynn, and little brother Emanuel. She spent months trying to find her mom, who she learned had been evacuated to Texas. “I was constantly Googling her name and telling anyone who would listen, ‘My mom is somewhere in Texas.’” Taken in by a local family and enrolled in school in West Virginia, Scott eventually found her mom, but because of financial challenges it took two years after the storm for them to finally reunite. “Seeing her was overwhelming,” Scott recalls. “My sister didn’t even remember me.” The odyssey forever changed Scott. “I learned I was braver than I ever thought,” she says. As for her beloved city, where she’s raising her two daughters, “we still have some scars and bruises.”