Voice of Witness is in the process of conducting and transcribing interviews with the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Below are excerpts from some of the raw transcripts. These versions are unedited, and often include the interviewer's questions. Eventually, interviews will be edited to form clear and linear narratives, while maintaining the integrity of the speaker's story and voice. We hope that these transcripts will serve as both a valuable resource for studying this disaster and as a point of reference with which to eventually compare Voice of Witness's book on Katrina.

Anthony – “So I look down and see the kids in the water, so I pulled off my pants, and in my under clothes, jumped right in the water, and I start swimming towards those kids. I don’t know, I can think about it now, but at that time I wasn’t thinking. It was reacting.”

Dan Bright – “You can see the water... And the water is constantly rising. You gotta remember, we stuck in these cells. Guys on the first level, on the bottom level, man they hollerin’ and screamin’. No one comes.”

Daniel Finnegan – “You’re seeing people coming by with things—tennis shoes, designer shirts, and food and water or whatever. We thought none of that was necessary. Only just now am I realizing that, you know what? Clothes? Fine, man. ’Cause these people were on their roofs… If you stopped to put on a pair of pants, you drowned, so you had people up there with nothing. You need some clothes, take some clothes. You need food, take food, because the help never came.”

Jackie Harris – “I mean, we use this music to celebrate life, we use it to celebrate death, we use it to celebrate good times, bad times, football games, parties, mourning situations, I mean, it’s a necessity of life for us.”

Ashley and Daniel Hinton – “I can’t go to sleep until then, so I just sit up because if I go to sleep I have bad dreams.”

Rachel Jones – “And then by the time [the sheriff] realized that he had to evacuate, by the time that there was a mandatory evacuation, it was already just such mayhem. The prison had already flooded, there were already people breaking out for survival. It was such a disorganized mess, and you had all of these guys who hadn’t been fed, who had been in sewer water, essentially, for days.”

Renee Martin – “We didn’t have water to drink. We couldn’t use the bathroom. We didn’t have no food. And I started dehydrating real bad. And it went on for three days, four days at the most ’til when we did get food, we got those MREs, the military-ready food. It was good, but I couldn’t hold it down because I had been without food for so long.”

Asna Rooshi – “If you think, ‘What does “beyond imagination” mean?’, go and look at New Orleans. Or go look at Chalmette. So when you go look over there—the houses—then you can understand. That’s it.”

Kermit Ruffins – “I was real eager to have the world hear this music. It was killing me inside not to have the world hear this music.”

Rhonda Sylvester – “We was told to go across the Mississippi River Bridge and they was gonna pick us up. When we got there, we went under the bridge, and we stayed there about seven hours. People was fightin’, it was all kinds of stuff, with little kids and… it was devastatin’, somethin’ I never experienced in my life.”

NEW: Patricia Thompson – “They tried to keep us there. They wanted a few more of us to die. And I’m telling you, I will die believing that. I’m not telling you anything somebody told me.”