“We were internally displaced in our own country,” Alice Craft-Kerney tells PEOPLE
NEED TO KNOW
- Nurse Alice Craft-Kerney and her mother, who was in a wheelchair, were escorted onto a plane by armed men when New Orleans was evacuated after Hurricane Katrina
- That same year, she began planning to open a much-needed clinic for the Lower Ninth Ward
- “That left a city that already was medically underserved, really critically medically underserved,” says Craft-Kerney of the exit of health care workers from the city
Alice Craft-Kerney, a registered nurse, has always been a caretaker. Despite her training, she couldn’t have anticipated the unimaginable trials that came after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005.
Unwilling to leave her disabled mother, the family was forced by armed National Guardsmen onto a plane during the evacuation of residents.
“The military, they followed their orders, but that didn’t mean that I was not concerned about my human rights being violated,” Craft-Kerney, now 68, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue marking the 20th anniversary of the natural disaster. “We were internally displaced in our own country.”…