1 post tagged “hurricane katrina”

Thursday, November 10, 2006

New Orleans, Louisiana

Well, I made it to New Orleans! Our hosts, HandsOn New Orleans (a partner organization of Boston Cares), are great. They have energy and they are practical. After we arrived, we received a great orientation and safety lecture, since as you can imagine, there is mold and stuff to be concerned about as well as falling debris.

I found my team leader for the day, whose name was Jess. She's a part of the AmeriCorps group that is traveling and doing community service. After they leave next week, her group will continue onto , where they will help with the Katrina rebuilding there. I got my Tyvek, which is that suit that you usually see haz-mat workers wear only this one is white. I also got my respirator mask and goggles and gloves. Then it was decided since we were doing a "last gut" which required primarily nail removal, that carpenter's face would be fine and so I returned my respirator.

A "last gut" is the finally stage of gutting a house. Once this is done, rebuilding work can begin. The people whose homes are receiving this work from HandsOn New Orleans volunteers contacted the office and requested the help. Usually once the request is received, volunteers go to the property and scout it out. If it poses too much of a risk (unstable floors for example) , then they cannot work on the house and refer them to someone who can.

The house that we went to was on . We proceeded to remove nails, nails and more nails with hammers. I don't think I have ever interacted with that many nails in my whole life. After the nails were removed, we swept up the nails and other debris that was left in the house. The debris was left on the curb side grass by the side of the house. Jess informed us that debris removal is a part of the garbage pickup around here. They come by and pick it up daily.

Jess was a great team leader and guide. She was informative and had energy. She clearly loved the fact that she was helping people in the best way that she could. She drove us around the neighborhood where we completed our morning's work and showed us the houses, some of which had extensive damage. One enduring sight for the day was the FEMA trailers. They were in the yards of people's houses or in FEMA trailer parks.

As we made our way to the now infamous Ninth Ward, we saw that the houses had spray paint on them. We were told that these markings, which have words and/or numbers in either a cross or an "X" represented the teams that swept the properties after the disaster. The upper left quadrant represented the team that went in to do the sweep. The lower left represented the number of dead that they found. The lower right represented the number that were found alive. The upper right represented where they were found. After receiving this information, the markings took on a whole new grim meaning for me since we had prior to her explanation, passed a number of places where I saw totals of anywhere between 1-4 in that lower left quadrant that tallies the dead bodies found. The number dead will also include pets, which are also noted in spray paint. The MSPCA did quite a few sweeps. We were also told that earlier in the summer, a HandsOn team was doing a "first gut"-taking down the wall and ceiling-and they found an older woman under her sink that the sweep teams clearly did not find. There are so many houses to check, but so few resources at hand.

We drove into the Ninth Ward. It was very quiet, except for some green industry crews doing branch removal and some traffic. There is no electricity here so no one in their right mind (or left mind for that matter) comes here at night. In fact, where there would usually be stop lights, there are stop signs and people are trusted to remember the rules of the road. There are also no gas stations so if you are going over there and you don't plan ahead, you are out of luck. As we drove around, it was sobering to see that where what looked like plots of open land were places where houses once stood. The Ninth Ward was densely populated-this you can tell from how the remaining structures and traces of the structures are situated. Jess showed us the now repaired levees and indicated about where they broke. We then took a tour of the more affluent parts of the city that suffered more hurricane damage than flooding. All around you could see contractors working, but if you visited these areas only you would have never known Katrina had taken place.

~Emma Lathan, Boston Cares member since 1998