NEW ORLEANS — On Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, Alexandra Wheeler stood outside the New Orleans Convention Center with about 30,000 other desperate people, stranded for five days in the all-encompassing destruction of Hurricane Katrina.
Wheeler was clutching her 5-month-old twins. They were dehydrated and weak after a harrowing trek from their Uptown home through pitch-black flood waters, two days atop a highway overpass, and finally, two more days in a sea of humanity that she described as “like being in a third-world country on United States soil.”
Still, Wheeler said she never really feared for her life until the military arrived…