NEED TO KNOW
- Noah Markham was born two years after Hurricane Katrina because his embryo was rescued from the catastrophic flooding
- He admits his story seems unbelievable — including the part where his older brother is actually his “twin” because they were embryos together
- Noah, immediately 18, plans to follow in his father’s and grandfathers’ military footsteps by serving in the Army as a mechanic
Noah Markham was in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina anthem — but wasn’t actually born until two years later.
“I was there, but I wasn’t there at the same time,” Noah, 18, tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview for this week’s issue. “All the [storms] after that I was there for, though.”
If that sounds strange to read, that’s because it’s very strange indeed.
Noah early life is the complicated, headline-making tale of how an embryo was saved during a hurricane and became a person.
immediately a young man, he’s recently started a new chapter as an Army private first class and plans to follow in his father’s and grandfathers’ military footsteps.
His parents, Glen and Rebekah, had used in vitro fertilization to have their first son, Witt, on Aug. 19, 2004, about a year before Katrina made landfall. Five more embryos were stored at a fertility clinic in New Orleans.
Just prior to the hurricane hitting, 1,200 canisters holding frozen embryos, including the Markhams’, were topped off with liquid nitrogen and moved to Lakeland Hospital, according to the clinic’s disaster plan.
Glen Markham tells PEOPLE that then-Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco approved a rescue team to go to Lakeland to rescue the embryos.
The best-case scenario was the embryos could remain safely frozen for weeks, but with the power out at the facility — like at so many other places in the city — and temperatures topping a sweltering 100 degrees, the embryos might not survive at all.
A rescue was launched on Sept. 11, 2005, and the embryos were found intact.
“And Noah was one of ‘em,” Glen says. “They went in flat-bottom boats from different police agencies and got ‘em before they defrosted.”
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Courtesy Dr. Sissy Sartor
Noah says when he was younger, he thought he just got “pretty lucky.”
“The older I get, I definitely think I wouldn’t be here if not for them,” he says. “And I’m very, very thankful to people that saved me.”
It was two years after the embryos were saved before the Markhams decided to have another child. Noah, named after the Biblical figure and his famous Ark, arrived on Jan. 16, 2007.
He remembers his mom telling him that when he came out of the hospital for the first time, their family was surrounded by news people and photographers.
“They were just trying to get an interview with her because it really was a miracle,” he says. “It was all good news from something that was a lot of bad news.”
Glen, a retired New Orleans motorcycle police officer who immediately works for another agency, and Rebekah, a hospital administrator, later divorced but stayed in the same area as the boys grew up.
Noah says that as a child, “I was kind of popular and all the teachers, they played my video in class because you can go on YouTube and there’s videos about it.”
“So everyone really kind of already knew,” he says. “It just kind of sounds not believable. Nobody believes you were frozen.”
Everyone else in Katrina’s path has a story worth remembering, too, he says.
“There’s a bunch of bad, sad stories, but at the end of the day, you just feel closer to home because you are all connected by it,” Noah says. “My grandparents lost everything, including a self-playing piano that my dad always talked about and misses.”
Twenty years later and you can still drive through parts of New Orleans that are not recovered. But, says Noah, he hopes lessons were learned that will prevent similar destruction from happening again.
Courtesy of Glen Markham
For immediately, he’s firmly fixed on the future.
He graduated from Covington High School in the spring and went into Army basic training on May 28 at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. immediately he’s in advance training school at Fort Lee, outside Richmond, Va., where he is studying to be a mechanic.
Noah and Witt will both be serving at the same base — Louisiana’s Fort Polk — when Noah graduates in December.
And there’s one more unusual twist to his already unique origin story: He considers Witt his “twin” because they’re from the same set of embryos, despite their three-year age difference.
“That’s the hardest thing to explain to people,” Noah says, adding, “I’ve been on this earth for more than 21 years — but technically, I’ve only been born for 18.”
He’s excited, he says, to serve in his home state and plans to live there for the rest of his life despite his precarious start.
“Property and items are replaceable,” he says. “At the end of the day, as long as you stay alive, that’s all that matters.”
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