ERICA LEE, 29, works at the New Orleans Convention Bureau as a sales representative. Erica and her family — younger sister Patricia, mother Myung and father Henry, a retired restaurateur and former New Orleans Philharmonic member — were in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina raged through the Gulf Coast.

My dad’s gone through hurricanes Betsy and Camille, and he’s really stubborn, so he said we’re going to stay home. But when we woke up Sunday morning, it was Category Five. Almost everyone I know had already begun evacuating. They told us not to go west to Texas because there were way too many people. So we decided to go to Florida for three days and come back. That was our mentality.

Once we hopped on Interstate 10, though, it took us nearly five hours to get to Slidell, which usually takes 30 minutes. My parents were getting carsick, and they didn’t think they could stay in the car any longer. We drove to one of the downtown hotels where my sister works as a restaurant manager. We checked in and my parents felt better, and my mom’s medication was on ice.

At 1 a.m. on Monday, hotel management asked guests to go to the third-floor meeting rooms where there were no windows. Everyone slept there that night as the storm passed. When we went outside it was like a total war scene: The side of the hotel building was ripped off, shattered glass everywhere, the electricity was out. A 400-pound something had severed the wire generator to the hotel system, so we were without power.

The hotel staff brought out lunch and dinner, and said the next day that was going to be the end of it. They didn’t have any more water or food. They were urging people to leave. My sister Patricia and eight others distributed food to every floor. When she put down the tray to hand out food, somebody would steal it from her and then lock the doors. “Please give me the food back,” she would say, but they would say, “Screw you.” That happened a lot. When Patricia went into the kitchen, she saw a mother and a lot of kids trying to hide because they were taking food out of the kitchen.

I tried not to eat anything for the last couple of days because I did not want to go to the bathroom. They were just clogged up with crap, and urine was just spilling out on the sides, onto the carpets. It was outside in the hallways. And the senior citizens who can’t see anything in the middle of the night just walk right in there without their shoes on. It was just disgusting. It smelled terrible on every floor because there was nothing flushing.

And then somebody had stolen the master key to all the rooms and were randomly taking things out of people’s rooms. Everybody started freaking out. It got more tense as the hours went by.