Hurricane Survivor Charmaine Neville Saw Alligator Attacks and Worse After Katrina — Still, the City Endured

Charmaine Neville still feels sick whenever a storm enters the Gulf of Mexico.

“I just panic, the anxiety comes,” Neville says. “It’s never going to go away, because the horrible things that I saw and lived through are something that won’t go away.”

Hurricane Katrina killed 1,392 people. Neville saw some of the victims firsthand as she struggled to escape her flooded neighborhood when the storm hit on Aug. 29, 2005.

She also says she was raped while trying to reach higher ground after the levees broke. Her attacker was never caught, she tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview for this week’s issue.

When warnings came, Neville and several of her neighbors — many of whom didn’t have the means to evacuate — barricaded inside her home in New Orleans’ 9th Ward and prayed.

“I remember a reporter asked me, ‘Well, why didn’t you leave?’ A lot of people could not leave,” she recalls. “And I don’t know how people don’t understand that if you don’t have money, you can’t go anywhere.”

She also felt a responsibility to those around her.

“So I did what I had to do, which was to try to help everybody in my neighborhood that couldn’t get out of here,” Neville says.

With her dogs and cat alongside, Neville and her neighbors tried to ride out the storm. From her roof, she remembers hearing three explosions, including one from the breach of the Industrial Canal. When her roof gave way and water poured in, Neville used her small pirogue — a flat-bottomed Louisiana boat designed for shallow waters — to rescue as many people as possible.

“That’s when we started seeing all of the horrors of bodies,” says Neville, adding that she also spotted animals and reptiles from a nearby zoo and aquarium floating in the floodwaters.

At one point, Neville commandeered a bus to escape with others.

“The police told me I had to say commandeer [is what I did],” she says, laughing. “Just anybody and everybody, whoever it was — if you blew the horn and someone could come out and get on the bus, whether it was with their dog, their cat, their grandmother, their tuba.”

She still carries the emotional scars of the government’s delayed response.

“The worst thing after Katrina was everybody came down here in buses, like we were animals in a zoo, to look at us through these bus windows,” she says, holding back tears. “And that was very hard.”

Neville, a member of one of New Orleans’ most iconic musical families — her father was Charles Neville and her uncles are Aaron, Art and Cyril Neville — also found it devastating to see Katrina silence a city defined by its music.

“Katrina just slapped everybody upside their head and said, ‘Stop the music,’ ” she says. “This is a city that always had music.”

In the 20 years since Katrina, Neville has rebuilt her home, though the process was long and difficult. (She says actor John Goodman helped by paying for her roof.)

“Everything was like patchwork,” she explains. “You couldn’t do it all at one time because you ran out of money, or the contractor ran off and left you holding the bag and didn’t do the job the way they were supposed to.”

Neville says she lost about $40,000 to contractor scams on top of the tens of thousands she spent trying to restore her house. Many neighbors sold their homes cheaply to investors, who repaired and resold them for a profit.

“There’s still some of us who have lived here since we were kids that have come back and made sure that we’re not going to let our culture die,” she says. “So we’re here. We’re still fighting and, yes, it’s a constant fight every single day — but we’re here to fight until the end.”

Through it all, Neville has continued performing. She will appear at several events marking the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“This is my only job,” she says. “Playing music, writing music, singing and entertaining people.”