Saturday before last (January 28, 2006), I went with a few people from South Baton Rouge Presbyterian to hurricane ravaged New Orleans Louisiana. We worked with
Desire Street Ministries and a group of people from a
PCA church in St. Louis who came down to help. Our mission was to help prepare some houses to be rebuilt. As such, my main job was to tear down sheetrock, pull nails, and dump garbage into a big heap in front of the houses. I tried my best to get some pictures along the way. All of the pictures are clickable to get a higher resolution.
THE TRIP DOWNThe trip from Baton Rouge to New Orleans is not a long one. We met early in the morning (that's about 7:00 AM for me on a Saturday), and headed down I-10 to the former largest city in the state. I did not get any pictures until we got out at DSM, but I did take pictures from the van on the return home, as you'll see later. The first sign of serious damage that I saw was a large billboard that was laying down on it's side. I think that it was just north of US 51. (As you read this, you might want to open a new browser window and look at the
google map of New Orleans - the location of DSM is highlighted). You never really get a feel for how big these huge billboards are until you see one up close. The pole that this thing stood on was very big in circumference. I knew that this was only the beginning of many terrible sights.
Once we passed the 310 exit, I started seeing the real damage. House after house had blue tarpaulins on their roofs. But these were the houses that were not in too bad of shape.
We bypassed the downtown area by taking the 610 loop, after which we got back on I-10 East until we exited onto Louisa Street. When we exited onto Louisa, I saw some white busses. I'm pretty sure that these were some of the NORTA busses that caused a lot of trouble for Mayor Nagin, but I'll talk more on that later.
Once we got onto Louisa street, I knew that we were in an area that was very badly damaged. The power is still off here, after more than 5 months. That means that every traffic light is a 4 way stop. This caused a lot of problems when it happened in Baton Rouge, but here in New Orleans it's not too much trouble because hardly anybody is driving around.
We made our way to the former headquarters of Desire Street Ministries. DSM (and the area where we worked) is located northeast of downtown New Orleans, just west of the Industrial Canal. All of the buildings in this area of the city have these codes spray painted on them. Most of them said "TFW" on them. I have no idea what the codes mean.
You can tell that DSM suffered quite a bit of damage. The water line is clearly visible in this picture where it's about half way up the side entrance.
Right next door to DSM is a house that had a huge "OK" painted on it. Seeing that the water was at least up to the top of the cute picket fence around the front porch, I myself would only classify this house as "OK" in comparison to houses that had water up to the ceiling.
**UPDATE 2006-02-20 08:25 CST**
My sister-in-law emailed me about this. She herself went to
Pass Christian, Mississippi soon after the hurricane. She said that the "OK" painted on houses just meant that a national guard unit from Oklahoma inspected the houses. It didn't mean that the houses were themselves "okay".
To the First HouseWe spent very little time at what used to be DSM. A quick hello to the project leader and a prayer and we were off. I'm not exactly sure where our first house was, but I took the opportunity to snap a few pictures along the way.
Here's a house that suffered tremondous roof damage.
We passed several abandoned gas stations. You can clearly see a power line or communications cable dangling down toward the street.
Many churches were destroyed. In the left hand corner of this picture, you can see a church steeple leaning over.
There were lots of houses that had messages spray painted on them (besides the coded messages I spoke of before). Many of these messages involved pets. Some of them said "Dogs Misssing" or "2 Dogs" or "Dog Dead". I guess that in this house, the person had found some stray dogs and was taking care of them. I think this was the first time on the trip that I wept. I thought about how awful it would be to have to leave your pets behind as you ran for safety yourself.
Even more than the number of houses that were destroyed or damaged by the hurricane and the floods was the number of cars. I caught a glimpse of this pretty blue first generation Mustang and realized that this antique car would probably never run again. Indeed, it is probably destined to be crushed and sold for scrap. This really hit home for me because my dad recently got his pretty blue
first generation Camaro running again.
**UPDATE 2006-02-20 08:25 CST**
My sister-in-law told me that when my brother went down to Pass Christian one of the things that caught his attention was a Corvette that had been overturned and now served as a landmark for giving directions.
This house clearly shows how the water came right up into the front door, a most unwelcome guest.
At the First HouseI didn't take any pictures at our first work site until after most of the work was done. Right outside the house were several vehicles that had probably been completely submerged with water.
The inside of this car contained what looked to be broken plates. I'm pretty sure that this car's windows were open the entire time of the damage, and all the stuff in there drifted in when the water rose and when it receeded.
Here's a van that was right in front of the house. For some reason, the tires on the car above made it through the ordeal alright, while the tires on this van did not.
The tools inside the van were rusted and unusable, and they'll probably remain right where they are for months to come.
Just a few feet away from the totaled van was the remains of a lawn mower. This looked like it used to be a pretty good machine. I got a picture of it juxtaposed with two working vehicles of some of the relief workers.
Here's our first house. See that big pile of garbage out front? Those were in front of many houses. It's all the ruined stuff from inside the house as well as sheetrock etc.
This SUV was in the front yard of the house. That black stuff on the hood is some sort of sediment that settled on there as the water receeded. It looked like asphalt.
This was the entrance to the house. We had to walk on the front door to get in.
Here is the first room that I worked on. It had hookups for laundry appliances, but it was too big to be just a laundry room. Maybe it functioned as a play room also. We were tearing up the insides of these houses so the owners could put up new sheetrock and start over. I have my doubts as to whether the studs should be trusted.
Here's a window in the laundry/play room. It let in a lot of light, but somehow even sunlight looked dark in this house.
This little bucket may have once held a nice plant. It was put to use by us to hold rusted nails that we pulled out of the wall. The nails were sometimes hard to get off because the nail head was so rusted that it would come completely off of the nail itself.
Right outside the laundry/play room there was a blown-over tool shed. There's something a little errie about seeing a roof on the ground.
Here's the back door. The water was not very kind to this house. It came up to at least nearly the top of the door.
This is what's left of the kitchen. I was a little scared at first at seeing all of the exposed wiring, but then I thought, they're not getting power back on for a
long time.
The switches were obviously ruined. It was very hard to flip the switch, and it made a grinding noise from inside when you did it.
This alarm system box made it through ok. I guess it was high enough to avoid getting waterlogged.
En Route to House # 2After a quick break, we were on our way to the second house. I tried to snap as many pictures as I could along the way.
I'm not sure what this is. It was in the middle of a bunch of houses, so I guess it used to be a house itself.
Probably the most conspicouous damage that you could see while riding down the streets was the damage to signage. This McDonald's sign was completely hollowed out.
Here, in the middle of the street was a huge hole. I have no idea how it got there, but I know that we would have been in big trouble if we'd gone just a few feet to the left.
At the Second HouseHere's the second house. No, the satellite didn't work.
A big part of my job here was to unload the trash onto this big pile out in front of the house. I wondered how long it would stay out here before somebody came and picked it up.
This second house was at the corner of Roman and Louisa.
We tore up the walls of this house, including some panelling that had been ruined by the water. There were lots of newspaper clips taped up on the panelling. They were all about the recent war in Iraq. Perhaps the former occupants had a son in the military. In amongst the trash was a little teddy bear. Covered in mold and mildew, it reminded me that even the children had to pick and choose what they took. I wonder what the kid decided to take instead of the teddy bear.
The brightly colored fan tells me that this was most likely a kid's room. Probably the same kid who had to leave his or her bear behind.
The blades of the kitchen fan drooped from either direct contact with water or from being in such as high humidity environment for so long. There's no other way to describe it than to say it looked sad.
Here's the kitchen. Complete with cooking utinsels in place on the cabinets.
The clock was resting comfortably in the hanging basket in front of the window. I was surprised that it had kept the right time ever since the storm. It's off by an hour because August 29, 2005 was during Daylight Saving Time.
Here's some of the belongings of the family who lived here. I didn't see things like these at the first house. Seeing video tapes and board games made it more real to me that people actually used to live here. This was their
home. I wept again.
A little boy named Vincent Hayes got a 100 on his project on Sicily. He and his family must have been proud; they kept his project for over two and a half years. I wonder how he's doing right now. I wonder where he is right now.
Up in the closet there was a kind of crawl space where more plastic bins held some Christmas decorations and wrapping paper.
A wall outlet.
The decorative light switch tells me that the house used to be a much more friendly place.
Out in front of the house there were lots of broken electronics. Like the rest of the trash, they will probably stay here for months to come.
One thing that I did not expect at all was the five-and-a-half foot tall weeds. With the whole area under water for so long, I guess the ground got pretty fertile. Couple that with the fact that there's no one around who cares one bit about weeding right now (they're more worried about sorting through what's left of their belongings and making their house liveable again), and you've got the beginnings of a small jungle.
Here's the street in front of the house. You can see a fridge out in the middle of the road. Lucky for us, it was already emptied.
One last picture of the second house. Things are not looking too good for this neighborhood.
On the trip Back HomeThere was a church in Pine Bluff that had a roof like this. We called it the church of the Atari. This New Orleans version of the Atari church suffered considerable damage.
Several houses had trees that had fallen over on top of them.
About the School BussesNew Orleans mayor Ray Nagin has received
some harsh criticism for not allowing some dozens of school busses and New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (NORTA) busses to be utilized in the evacuation of the Superdome. I don't know exactly what the whole situation was about the busses, but I'm not aware of any statement by Nagin other than there were no qualified drivers to drive the busses.
An article at PittsburgLive says that the potential libality could have been a factor in mayor Nagin's reluctance to evacuate the city before the storm. It might also have played a part in his not allowing non-CDL licensed drivers to carry themselves and thousands of others to safety. If I myself were in the situation of having to drive a bus without the proper license, I think I would probably do it, but the thought of "what kind of lawsuit might be in my future if something goes wrong" would definitely go through my mind.
During my one-day trip to New Orleans, I saw two places where busses were kept. Actually, I think these two places were part of the same facility, but I saw a different part in the afternoon than I did in the morning. The location is just off of Almonaster Ave., and I saw it on our trip down as we were getting off of I-10 onto Louisa St. I didn't have my camera ready, so I don't have a picture from the morning.
As we were coming down the exit ramp, I saw some 30 or so white NORTA city busses sitting in a parking lot. As I looked at the busses, sporting the green and purple (mardi gras colored) stripes, I wondered if anyone's life would have been spared if they had been used. From where I sat, I could not tell if they had been flooded and were ruined. (By the way, it might seem funny at first to say a vehicle is "flooded", but I feel certain that any humor in that simple pun is long gone in the minds of the people who actually lost vehicles) I suppose that they were, because nearly everything else in that area was.
On the trip back, I caught a picture of some school busses. I'm not exactly sure where I took this picture, but my best guess is that it is the same Alamonster facility. The pictures from Google Maps are reverted to the pre-Katrina versions, and all of the school busses are lower down. I think that the busses were further north in the parking lot, as shown by my scribble on the map. I'm not 100% certain that these busses were indeed at the Alamonster facility, and like the NORTA busses that I saw, I could not tell if they were ruined or not. Whatever the case, the fact that these busses are currently in New Orleans instead of in Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, Little Rock, or somewhere else reminds me that there were lots of unused resources within the city itself. Whether or not Mayor Nagin was justified in not using them, it was a tragedy.
James & I spent the past weekend installing a walkway in our yard. I had Friday-Monday off, and James helped in between doing homework. The walkway goes from the courtyard in the front of the house to the back patio. It is 56 ft long and 2 ft wide. Between us and the doggies we had worn out the grass from walking back and forth from the front yard to the back. There was also a low area that held water. We had tried to fill it in with sand, but Daisy thought it was her own personal sandbox and would play in it every day - which only made the hole worse. It had become a mudpuddle - and the dogs didn't mind that. It was a new way for them to get dirty while outside. Everytime they came inside they would leave a track of little muddy paw prints.
o put in a layer of sand to help level the surface out. We had purchased 12 small bags of sand, and we quickly found out we needed a lot more. We ended up using 18 additional bags and two 70 lb sacks of sand. James helped me get most of the pavers laid, but he left about 6:30 for a class at church. I worked for another hour, and got the rest laid. I might mention that it was COLD all weekend - so I took a hot bath when I got in and tried to turn on our gas log fireplace, but I couldn't remember how, and I was too scared of it to mess with it much, so that just had to wait for James to get back.
n Monday while James was at school. I planted 10 Japanese Boxglove shrubs, and leveled the walkway off. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It's supposed to rain this weekend, so I'm anxious to see if our drainage problem has been corrected.
