NEW ORLEANS — All Rasual Butler wanted to do was find an apartment.

It was the summer of 2005, and he had been dealt from Miami to New Orleans as part of a five-team trade of spare parts.

On the afternoon of Aug. 29, Butler arrived at the airport in Houston — where he had been working out with former Spurs coach John Lucas at the famed Westside Tennis Club — intent on finally getting to Louisiana to do some house-hunting.

He soon found his flight to New Orleans had been canceled.

“I couldn’t get out because the weather was too bad,” Butler said. “That was Hurricane Katrina.”

It has been a little more than a decade since Katrina did her best to wipe New Orleans off the face of the Earth, in the process killing 1,464 people across the Gulf Coast region, relocating a million others and causing $125 billion in economic damage.

Of a more trivial nature, the storm also set off one of the most bizarre seasons in any NBA franchise’s history.

Butler is now a reserve forward with the Spurs. In San Antonio, he has been reunited with David West, another alumnus of the New Orleans Hornets’ displaced Katrina team.

As the two make another return to New Orleans on Friday, for the first of the Spurs’ biannual trips to face the team now known as the Pelicans, Butler and West remain bonded by the storm.

They are connected to each other, and to the beleaguered city they once called home.

Not coming back

“It’s something you’ll never forget,” West says now.

He was 24 years old in the summer of 2005, set to enter his third NBA season and his first as a full-time starter.

Anticipating a heavier workload and greater responsibility, West spent most of the offseason working out in New Orleans.

But Aug. 29 was his birthday. He wanted to spend it with family back home in North Carolina.

West was 800 miles away and watching on television as Katrina destroyed the city he had not long before departed.

“We were bracing for the hurricane before we left,” said West, now 35. “We didn’t expect it to do what it did.”

The news seemed to get worse by the hour, and West kept in contact with Hornets officials.

At first, there was optimism the team might be able to return to the city after some light clean-up.

Those hopes drowned quickly in the rising floodwaters.

“Once the levees broke,” West said, “we knew we weren’t going back.”

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As the muddy waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain overwhelmed the city, the images on West’s television in North Carolina didn’t seem possible.

The roof of the Superdome, right next door to New Orleans Arena, gone. Entire neighborhoods underwater. A population left to fend largely for itself.

The Hornets turned their practice facility in the suburb of Westwego over to the National Guard for use as a staging area.

By late September, the team had arranged an indefinite move to Oklahoma City for the 2005-06 season.

Club personnel — including then-general manager Allan Bristow — personally loaded the team’s gear into U-Haul trucks to ship to OKC for a relocated training camp.

Players didn’t know if they would ever go back to New Orleans, or if there would be a New Orleans to go back to.

“There was a huge sense of loss across the city, and that included the Hornets organization,” said Bristow, who played four seasons with the Spurs in the mid-1970s. “We had some employees who had lost everything. Some never made the move to OKC.”

An unspeakable toll

West returned to Louisiana within a week of the storm. He and other Hornets players convened in Baton Rouge, 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, where many refugees had migrated.

“We had a food truck, a couple of food drives,” West said. “We wanted to be of service to people.”

A few weeks later, after the flood waters receded, West finally made it to New Orleans to survey the damage firsthand.

His home in the suburb of Metaire had taken a hit. He had to throw out almost all of his furniture.

“I was saying this then and I’ll say it now: We’re blessed enough where that wasn’t a big deal,” West said. “You would meet people who lost everything.”

West recalls his first tour of New Orleans after the storm. It was like a water-logged war zone.

“To see neighborhoods — you knew what they looked like before — to be completely gone, stuff was flat,” West said. “Land that wasn’t flat before was flat.”

Butler’s first exposure to the new New Orleans was as sobering.

“You could see the stains of the watermarks on the buildings, how high the water had been,” said Butler, now 36.

The human toll was more gripping.

“It was touching to see what people had to deal with — lose their homes and family history and photos and things of that nature,” Butler said. “You felt for those people.”

The team returns

The Hornets played their first game back in Louisiana on Dec. 21, 2005, losing to the Phoenix Suns at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge. They returned to OKC immediately afterward.

On March 8, 2006 the Hornets played the first professional sporting event in New Orleans post-Katrina, losing to the Los Angeles Lakers.

By the end of the season, the Hornets would become the first team since the 1974-75 Boston Celtics to play home games in four different venues — New Orleans Arena, the Maravich Center, the Ford Center in Oklahoma City and the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

The players who were there recall the games in New Orleans as super-charged.

“We were happy to be a distraction, to be an outlet for people,” West said. “The city was at about a quarter, in terms of functionality. It was barely functioning. There weren’t a lot of people. When we came for those games, it was a release.”

On Jan. 31, 2006, the NBA proclaimed the Hornets would remain based in Oklahoma City for the following season as well, with six home games to be played in New Orleans.

Within the same announcement came better news: The team was committed to return to the Big Easy in 2007-08, with the NBA awarding the 2008 All-Star game to New Orleans as a means to welcome the Hornets home.

With each return to New Orleans during their two seasons in exile, Hornets players spent time amongst the locals, working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help clean up what needed cleaning up, paint what needed painting and reconstruct what needed reconstructing.

“The cool thing about it is, people remember you were a part of that team,” Butler said. “They’re appreciative. It’s noticeable in the community still, 10 years later.”

New Orleans reborn

The city the Spurs return to Friday is a New Orleans reborn.

In the months after Katrina, New Orleans proper lost nearly half its population, down to an estimated 230,172 by April 2006.

By July of 2014, that number had bounced back to 384,320, nearly 79 percent of its pre-Katrina levels.

The eight-parish metro area has reached a population of 1,251,849 according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 94 percent of what it was before the storm.

For Butler, the spirit of regeneration has been palpable each time he returns to the city.

“The city is coming back strong,” Butler said. “It brings you a joy to see a city like New Orleans, with so much history, building itself back.”

The demographics of the area have shifted in the decade since Katrina, with fewer blacks and whites but more Hispanics.

Unlike New Orleans’ NBA team, many people displaced by the storm never returned.

For West, the story of Katrina will always be one of resilience, heartbreaking but inspiring.

It is the story of what happens when people stare down a storm — a literal storm — and come out the other side.

“You learned a lot of lessons about people’s resolve, one way or another,” West said. “Either you understand you got devastated, and you have to pack up your family and move them somewhere else. Or you put your heels in the ground and you decide to rebuild.”

West tells the story of a New Orleans family he knows that owns a small fishing company.

Katrina all but crushed the business, but still the family rebuilt. Then the Deepwater Horizon oil spill poisoned the Gulf of Mexico in 2006, crippling the business again.

And still the family rebuilt.

That, to West, is the lasting legacy of Katrina.

“I love New Orleans, and I love the people of New Orleans,” West said. “I’m proud the city has been able to recover some. The people who stayed and rebuilt have a story to tell.

“I’m proud that people are still proud.”

jmcdonald@express-news.net

Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN