Evacuees, friends gather at Salt Lake event

It was not a memorial for the some 1,500 deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina. Nor was it a celebration of the hundreds of thousands of others who survived, or even the hundreds who eventually found new lives in Utah.

It was, quite simply, a remembrance.

"It's a time to look back and, hopefully, to help those who are among us to come together and remember what happened a year ago today," said the Rev. France Davis of Calvary Baptist Church, which hosted the Monday evening event marking the one-year anniversary of the devastating storm.

More than 600 Gulf Coast residents evacuated to Utah in the days and weeks following the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane. Some 300 eventually stayed, and many of them found a home at Salt Lake's Calvary Baptist Church.

"There is room for all of us in this community," Davis said. "Our cultures and our heritage can be shared, and as we live together we can make better our community."

Monday's event allowed dozens of Katrina evacuees to reunite with state workers and community members who helped them make the adjustment from life in Louisiana to life in the Beehive State.

"To all of those who helped us along the way, a heartfelt thanks," said Ernest Timmons, a former resident of the Ninth Ward who learned he was headed for Utah shortly after take-off from Louis Armstrong New Orleans National Airport.

"I didn't even know where Utah was," said Timmons, a social worker who now does crisis counseling for Utah Reaching Out, a nonprofit organization formed to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Now a homeowner and student at the University of Utah, Timmons said he has found in Utah a caring and loving community.

Others, like Billy and Sandra Stalbert, have found the same. The couple, who married last October after being evacuated to Utah, even persuaded their nephew and his family to move to Utah.

"I love it down here. It's peaceful, the people are nice," said Ernest Trimble, who, with his wife and children, had stayed in the Gulf Coast after Katrina hit. Trimble's wife is now pregnant with the couple's sixth child.

"We needed a new environment and a new change. Coming out here was the best thing that ever happened to us," he said.