Continued disaster in the south
I got back from volunteering in Biloxi, MS about 6 hours ago, and I'm still vaguely shell-shocked. Not that there were any dramatic events (or more to the point, major storms), thankfully.
While we were making plans for this trip, people kept trying to say how bad it still is down along the Gulf Coast. Even while I acknowledged their comments, though, I thought to myself, "how bad can it be after a full year of work and improvement?"
The answer is horrifying.
The thing I didn't really account for in my thinking about a year of recovery efforts is just how bad things were before along the coastline. Whole buildings were swept away by Katrina, bridges collapsed, and roads were utterly torn up and/or covered with debris. A year later, the roads are repairs and cleared of building bits, but there are still unbelievable piles of rubble and the region has a certain "ghost town" feeling. Just as striking as the junk piles is the evidence of the buildings that simply no longer exist--dozens of businesses still have signs along the coastline, but the buildings themselves were swept away so completely by Katrina's storm surge that you would almost think they were never built.
We started off small on Thursday by building pieces for Habitat for Humanity houses in the morning and then participating in an afterschool tutoring program. In the grand scheme of nonprofit projects, these were fairly common things that could be done anywhere. The only thing setting them apart was that we traveled past hurricane wreckage to do them.
Then on Friday we went to New Orleans, but that was enough to make a permanent impression on my psyche. We gutted a flooded house with Hands On New Orleans, creating our very own pile of wreckage as we emptied the house of the occupants' now-ruined possessions and started stripping the walls for mold abatement. Fourteen of us were able to get about halfway through the gutting process over the course of a day. Hands On New Orleans currently has a 6-month waitlist for similar work, and that's just for the houses that are in salvageable condition.
After the gutting project, we drove over to the lower 9th Ward, site of the infamous levee break. We saw houses in that area of the city that were half-collapsed, but when we came to the place where the levee actually broke, there was a kind of decrease of that manner of wreckage. The houses in front of the breach were simply swept away completely, leaving only the concrete footprints and stairs leading to nonexistent doors. A few of the remaining houses were lifted by the flood waters and set down several yards from their original foundations. My understanding is that the basic utilities still haven't been returned to that neighborhood.
We saw a separate nonprofit organization that seems to be working just to help the residents of the neighborhood, but fighting an uphill battle doing so. There are some exceptions for the lower 9th ward, but most of the property owners in the city are expected to show initiative in performing mold abatement (at the very least joining a wait list to have an organization do it) by August 29th, or else the city will start bulldozing their houses. From a distance, it seems like a sensible enough policy, but when you actually see the neighborhoods and houses in person, it feels more like shooting a beloved family pet just because it's been injured and you can't be bothered to help it heal.
After touring the devastation, we decided to take a brief sampling of New Orlean's culture as well. Dinner was excellent, and the famed Burbon Street was distinctly interesting, but the city clearly isn't healed. Even though most of us in the group had been in New Orleans before, we could tell that the streets were far too empty for a Friday night. A group of nine people in one of the South's (former) foremost tourist hotspots really should have had a harder time staying together, but all we really needed to do was look around for each other periodically.
On Saturday we returned to Biloxi, where we worked on a park project. Kaboom will be installing a brand new playground on the anniversary of the storm hitting the coast, so Hands On Gulf Coast has been working to prepare the park for that activity. To be honest, my group from Chicago wasn't entirely sure how our tasks for the morning were contributing to those plans. In the afternoon, though, we were sent out to distribute flyers about a garden project for the park, and that was a surprisingly fun activity. It was the group's first (and really, only) deliberate interaction with community members, and while we were cautious at first about approaching the ramshakle houses and the FEMA trailers (in most places, after all, debris in the yards indicates an "iffy" neighborhood), the residents were broadly thrilled to hear about the project and showed genuine appreciation for all of the work volunteers had put in.
After distributing flyers, some of us attended something that had been billed as a Katrina remembrance concert. It turned out to be a song-intensive service put on by the Baptist church, with a 600+ member choir from over 50 churches singing. After spending several days surveying the problems of the region, it was absolutely awe-inspiring to see so many people joined together to praise God. Part of me even objected at first, angry that God had allowed so much damage to be done that even a year later the region looks like it was only just recently struck by disaster. Eventually, though, it got through to me that the damage was mostly just to earthly stuff (which God doesn't generally care about), and that any blame for the current state of the region should be directed at the rest of the country, for so blythely neglecting the region after the first few weeks. As someone at the remembrance said, recovery only lasts a few weeks or months, but real rebuilding requires a lot more time and attention.
I hardly know how I'm going to switch back to focusing on my job at work tomorrow.
While we were making plans for this trip, people kept trying to say how bad it still is down along the Gulf Coast. Even while I acknowledged their comments, though, I thought to myself, "how bad can it be after a full year of work and improvement?"
The answer is horrifying.
The thing I didn't really account for in my thinking about a year of recovery efforts is just how bad things were before along the coastline. Whole buildings were swept away by Katrina, bridges collapsed, and roads were utterly torn up and/or covered with debris. A year later, the roads are repairs and cleared of building bits, but there are still unbelievable piles of rubble and the region has a certain "ghost town" feeling. Just as striking as the junk piles is the evidence of the buildings that simply no longer exist--dozens of businesses still have signs along the coastline, but the buildings themselves were swept away so completely by Katrina's storm surge that you would almost think they were never built.
We started off small on Thursday by building pieces for Habitat for Humanity houses in the morning and then participating in an afterschool tutoring program. In the grand scheme of nonprofit projects, these were fairly common things that could be done anywhere. The only thing setting them apart was that we traveled past hurricane wreckage to do them.
Then on Friday we went to New Orleans, but that was enough to make a permanent impression on my psyche. We gutted a flooded house with Hands On New Orleans, creating our very own pile of wreckage as we emptied the house of the occupants' now-ruined possessions and started stripping the walls for mold abatement. Fourteen of us were able to get about halfway through the gutting process over the course of a day. Hands On New Orleans currently has a 6-month waitlist for similar work, and that's just for the houses that are in salvageable condition.
After the gutting project, we drove over to the lower 9th Ward, site of the infamous levee break. We saw houses in that area of the city that were half-collapsed, but when we came to the place where the levee actually broke, there was a kind of decrease of that manner of wreckage. The houses in front of the breach were simply swept away completely, leaving only the concrete footprints and stairs leading to nonexistent doors. A few of the remaining houses were lifted by the flood waters and set down several yards from their original foundations. My understanding is that the basic utilities still haven't been returned to that neighborhood.
We saw a separate nonprofit organization that seems to be working just to help the residents of the neighborhood, but fighting an uphill battle doing so. There are some exceptions for the lower 9th ward, but most of the property owners in the city are expected to show initiative in performing mold abatement (at the very least joining a wait list to have an organization do it) by August 29th, or else the city will start bulldozing their houses. From a distance, it seems like a sensible enough policy, but when you actually see the neighborhoods and houses in person, it feels more like shooting a beloved family pet just because it's been injured and you can't be bothered to help it heal.
After touring the devastation, we decided to take a brief sampling of New Orlean's culture as well. Dinner was excellent, and the famed Burbon Street was distinctly interesting, but the city clearly isn't healed. Even though most of us in the group had been in New Orleans before, we could tell that the streets were far too empty for a Friday night. A group of nine people in one of the South's (former) foremost tourist hotspots really should have had a harder time staying together, but all we really needed to do was look around for each other periodically.
On Saturday we returned to Biloxi, where we worked on a park project. Kaboom will be installing a brand new playground on the anniversary of the storm hitting the coast, so Hands On Gulf Coast has been working to prepare the park for that activity. To be honest, my group from Chicago wasn't entirely sure how our tasks for the morning were contributing to those plans. In the afternoon, though, we were sent out to distribute flyers about a garden project for the park, and that was a surprisingly fun activity. It was the group's first (and really, only) deliberate interaction with community members, and while we were cautious at first about approaching the ramshakle houses and the FEMA trailers (in most places, after all, debris in the yards indicates an "iffy" neighborhood), the residents were broadly thrilled to hear about the project and showed genuine appreciation for all of the work volunteers had put in.
After distributing flyers, some of us attended something that had been billed as a Katrina remembrance concert. It turned out to be a song-intensive service put on by the Baptist church, with a 600+ member choir from over 50 churches singing. After spending several days surveying the problems of the region, it was absolutely awe-inspiring to see so many people joined together to praise God. Part of me even objected at first, angry that God had allowed so much damage to be done that even a year later the region looks like it was only just recently struck by disaster. Eventually, though, it got through to me that the damage was mostly just to earthly stuff (which God doesn't generally care about), and that any blame for the current state of the region should be directed at the rest of the country, for so blythely neglecting the region after the first few weeks. As someone at the remembrance said, recovery only lasts a few weeks or months, but real rebuilding requires a lot more time and attention.
I hardly know how I'm going to switch back to focusing on my job at work tomorrow.