The Gutting Experience by Isaac - Installment 1

(Please excuse any bad formatting of this post. I don't have time to double
check it. You can stretch the browser screen and the text should auto-format
to some extent)
-brian

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This is Installment 1 of 2 from my fellow Black 2 Gutting team member, Isaac from San Francisco.
We worked together from Dec. 7-15. There were 12 of us on this gutting team, with 2 extra
volunteers at the beginning of the week. (Travis & Barbara)
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Dated 12/18/6

It’s hard to type.

Working with a crowbar for 6 solid hours is a twofold exercise in impact management. First you have to deliver a blow with accuracy, driving the wedge head of the bar into the exact right place that’ll let you lever out the drywall/doorframe/cabinet/etc. Then you have to cope with the jarring shockwaves that travels back up the crowbar, through your gloves, through your soft tissue, and through the bone itself.

It’s a closed system, at times, where every ounce of energy you put out gets kicked right back at you. Initially it leaves your hands numb, but once the work abates they ache their way into arthritic claws while your forearms feel like they’ve been tenderized by the Terminator.

Did I mention this is really fun?

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For those of you who aren’t fully in the loop, the ad agency I work for (DraftFCB San Francisco) is footing a large chunk of the bill to send five employees to Louisiana to help rebuild post-Katrina. Five come this year, and another five may be going next year. I’m part of the first group, and will be here for a week working with Habitat for Humanity at their Camp Hope operation.

What follows is a poorly edited account of the time here so far. I’m hoping to update and revise it as the week goes by, but for now here’s the first, er, installment.

We got to New Orleans on Saturday afternoon, and did all the things you might expect – we cruised Bourbon Street and sampled some of the local fare, including Pat O’Brien Hurricanes (everyone should try one. Once.), Muffaletas, Jimmy Buffet Hand Grenades, Bahama Mamas, Café DuMonde Beignets, and hot chocolate.

As you may have noticed, the list above focuses primarily on liquids of one kind or another. See, New Orleans isn’t real big on the whole vegetarian thing – seems that pizza is just about the only thing I can eat for dinner around here, and that includes the camp. For example, when I quizzed our lunch matron about vegetarian consumables, she had this to say: “There’s tuna.”

Ah. Excellent. I’ll be losing weight this week.

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Camp Hope focuses its support on the St. Bernard Parish. (As some of you may know, Louisiana’s government is built around a parish system – which is basically a county anywhere else.)

SBP was the bottom of the Katrina funnel. The way Wikipedia tells it, the eye of Katrina passed over the eastern edge of the parish and pushed a 25-foot storm surge down the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, which demolished just about every levee in the Parish and eastern NoLa. The water rose to at least as high as 12 feet (that’s just below the streetlights, for reference) in just 15 minutes.

It’s estimated that less than five of the 25,000 homes in the entire parish escaped without water damage. There were 65,000 people living here in 2000; about 25,000 have returned to live here full-time over a year after Katrina.

Of those 65,000 people, 70% were homeowners. 70%, when the average household income in this area is a little over $40,000 (this is disputed by our sources – it may well be lower). “Success” is realized, I was told, when you have a solid job and that makes enough money for you to buy a home next to your parents.

Camp Hope this week is an abandoned elementary school that’s being gradually being converted into a regional relief camp. It currently has four walls, a ceiling, and not much else.

We sleep on cots in old classrooms. Windows have been knocked out and air conditioning units caulked in to make the summer heat tolerable – but it’s the winter right now, so each room has a tiny 6”x6” space heater for about 500 sq. ft. of space. To do any more would blow the 15 amp circuits in the room. They are, however, working on a central heating arrangement – we’ve been experiencing daily power outages while the facility team gets it set up.
But there’s hot water, and camp-wide wi-fi, and all the camaraderie you need for a place to feel like home.

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The buildings of the Parish tell a story in spray paint.

Each building is marked with an X, with further notes in each quadrant. The top notes the date the building was checked post-Katrina. The one on the left calls out the rescue organization that first checked the building – fire departments, National Guard, search and rescue teams, etc. The right and bottom quadrants are harder to decipher – they’re some kind of code that notes if there were bodies found inside. No one I know knows how to read it, and I’m glad – I prefer ignorance in this case.

A lot of homes have pleas sprayed on the side. “Please do not demo” and the defiant “We will return” are written on scores of buildings alongside cell phone numbers and other notes. Many buildings also have details on pets found sprayed on the walls, and there’re a few “Looters shot” signs as well. Pictures will come later.

A yellow sticker with a red X through it means the building will be demolished in 2007. This is either because the building is now unsafe and unrecoverable, or because the owner abandoned it. About half Louisiana’s population has yet to return.

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Then there are the stories you learn inside the homes.

The first home I started gutting yesterday was a duplex shared by two families – a music teacher, and a Spanish-speaking family who was learning English.

The musician slept in his front room. He had a serious recording studio in his second room, and nice, expansive kitchen. He collected vinyl records, stamps, and all kinds of X-rated material. He had ammo for a .44 embedded in the muddy carpet of his bedroom, but we never found the gun. I found his diploma – he graduated in 1986 with a degree in General Studies. He was an avid reader.

I hauled out his bed frame. I used a crowbar to rip out the cabinets where he kept his dishes, and a snow shovel to rip out the drywall where his family portraits hung. I took a sledgehammer to the wooden siding separating his half of the duplex from the other family’s, and ripped out his blackened insulation with my bare hands. I carried out the guts of his entire home in arm and wheelbarrow, and with my team made a pile of his life that was a full story tall.

A short while later a FEMA subcontractor came by with a crane-equipped dump truck and carried the trappings of his life away. The truck alone doesn’t carry everything. We had several scavengers come by while we built our pile looking to grab furniture. After we left a different crowd came through to strip down the pile of electronics for precious metals – copper in the wires, gold on the A/V connectors, etc. Technically it’s all bound for a landfill. But it feels wrong.

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The stream of volunteers through Camp Hope have gutted over 2000 homes now, with just twelve or so left to go before the New Year. After January 1 the gutting and salvage operation will pretty much cease and the Camp will focus on its rebuilding projects.

The main reason for this – I think – is that homes are going to start getting demolished in 2007. This date’s been pushed back a few times already, but the vibe around here is that the camp will be through with gutting soon.

Gutting’s also going to taper off because, after the first, FEMA stops footing the bill for garbage pickup and does a 90/10 split with the parish. Even at 10% per home, St. Bernard can’t afford it – so the homes that didn’t get cleared out in time for rebuilding will be seeing the business end of a bulldozer.

It takes a team of 10-12 people about 5-6 hours to gut the average home in St. Bernard’s Parish – so that’s about 14,000 man hours already to do the work that’s been done by the volunteers, which doesn’t include the AmeriCorps teams or the camp staff.

People keep mentioning how astonished they are at how little’s been done, but I think the truth is that people overestimate how quickly things can happen. No doubt more could be done by the federal and civil governments, but I can certainly say for myself that the logistics of rebuilding an entire county – and the affected regions in Mississippi – requires much, much more than people think. Or have the time or inclination to recognize. I certainly didn’t.

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I’ll have to write about the joys of drinking year-old canned FEMA water in the next installment.

Hope you’re all doing well!