She was an artist, a maker of animated films. He was doctor who dedicated his professional life to treating the poor and disadvantaged. Together, Canadians Helen Hill and her husband Paul Gailiunas were active members of Halifax’s thriving artistic community.

In 2000, Helen and Paul were drawn to New Orleans, attracted to its intoxicating racial and cultural mix. There, in the turbulent and culturally rich world that gave the city the name The Big Easy, Helen continued to make her films and Paul opened a medical clinic. In 2004, their son Francis Pop was born there.

New Orleans, some people knew, was a city living on borrowed time. It had been built surrounded on three sides by water, dependent for its existence on a system of manmade levees constructed to hold back Gulf waters. Scientists like Ivor Van Heerden knew that the levees were inadequate and that one powerful surge of water during a hurricane could drown New Orleans. His warnings were ignored.

In 2005, in a way that no one could have imagined, the lives of Helen Hill and Paul Gailiunas became entwined with the catastrophe that Ivor Van Heerden had warned about. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept over New Orleans, leaving the city awash in death, chaos and crime. The murder rate, always high in New Orleans, turned The Big Easy into the Murder City USA.  

In the aftermath of the storm of the century, murder statistics skyrocketed and, one night, Helen Hill became one of the statistics when she was shot dead by an intruder. Her husband, Paul, shielding their infant son, was shot and miraculously survived. Even in a city devastated by nature’s destructive force and under siege from rampant crime, Helen Hill’s death created outrage and became a rallying cry for change.  

Helen and Paul were a remarkable couple, trying to make a better world. After The Storm explains a great deal about what has gone wrong in New Orleans before, during and since Hurricane Katrina.