Both of us were volunteering with Habitat For Humanity - NOLA, at Camp Hope.
We stayed and worked in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans by 15 minutes.
Isaac & I were on the Black 2 Gutting team during the week of Dec 10 - 15,
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Dated: Jan, 2 2007
Here’s the thing about working in a disaster area. It’s 3D. All senses in effect (especially smell). You’re not constructing the situation while staring at an AP photo on the grainy, inky page of a newspaper, or modeling it based on the sights and sounds of the television. There’s no guesswork, no approximation of experience – when you’re on the ground, you are a witness, and you become part of that reality.
I’m railing about this just a bit because the more I explain Katrina to people over this holiday break, the more frustrated I get at the presumption that somehow, more should’ve been done by now. There’s a lack of attention-span about the whole thing – first it was a disaster, and then it was a blame-game, and once all the interesting, prurient newsbytes were spent the whole situation was supposed to solve itself.
Reality just doesn’t work that way. The affected areas of Louisiana and Mississippi will be a long time recovering. It will take longer than a season of Lost, and longer than a celebrity marriage, and longer than a presidential term in office. We all need to remember that.
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I miss my team.
When you work with people up to, and past, the point of exhaustion, when you’re wearily clawing scraps of drywall off the framing together or shoveling up fiberglass insulation in teams of two or ripping off long strips of wood siding with your hands . . . you connect. The work is hard, more strenuous than any of us expected. It takes your measure, and when you can’t push yourself your group helps push you further than you expected you could go. You get to know yourself, and each other, in a different way than most of us experience the people around us. It’s not about knowing everyone’s age or background or hobbies – I haven’t found the words for it yet, actually. It’s powerful and special.
Our team was “Black 2.” While the other teams in our rotation came in large groups, Black 2 was a more motley crew of volunteers – along with the DFCBers, we had two USAF Firemen (Rob and Slim Jim, a.k.a. Matt) based in Missouri, 2 students from Seattle University (Molly and Alex), a fellow marketer from New Jersey (Janine), an artist from Seattle (Brian), a post-grad from North Carolina (Travis Moore), an IRS regulations lawyer from Virginia (Frank), a retired Navy dentist from Maryland (George), an investment analyst from the O.C. (Susie), and a Hollywood set designer (Wylie).
It took a day before we could crack jokes and say each others’ names with confidence, but once over that initial hurdle we came together like two halves of a zipper. Watching that, and feeling that, was the most special part of the trip.
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The first thing you do when gutting a home is move out the contents of the house. Everything. Jewelry. Ovens. Lay-z-boys. Refrigerators. Books. China. Anything that’s inside has to come out before you start the demo work, and it all ends up in one of three piles.
Damaged goods and the remnants of the house go in one pile by the curb for FEMA pickup. After three hours of work this pile is about 16-20 feet wide and 7-8 feet high. “White goods,” which is anything with wires, varies from home to home – the first house we worked on had the full recording studio, so its white pile was pretty large.
The last pile is for salvageable/sentimental items – generally more the latter than the former. Some items include any and all photos, no matter how water-damaged. Jewelry. Flatware. Golf clubs. Stamps. Stuffed animals. Diplomas. Art. A pornography collection. An old tarnished trumpet. Wedding wine bottles. Determining what goes in is a fairly arbitrary process because so little of the important stuff is truly salvageable, but you muddle through.
Once all the big stuff is out, you go to work on the damaged parts of the building itself. Generally, that’s pretty much everything except the frame and the roof of the house, though in a couple of places the height of the water line means the ceiling can be saved. (In our last house the waterline crested over the roof, leaving junk on top of the house and demolishing the ceiling drywall for us).
So Black 2 would pry the trim and molding out of the walls in long, nail-ridden strips. We’d use sledges to knock off rotten doors, and axes to smash apart ruined cabinetry and soggy pianos. We had crowbars to pop out stoves and ovens and sheets of moldy drywall, and a single pair of wire cutters to sever all the wiring in the naked house. Snow shovels and brooms let us scoop hundreds of pounds of mildewed insulation and piles of powdered gypsum into rickety wheelbarrows for transport to the pile, and we had a single utility knife to slash the mud-caked carpets into manageable strips of garbage.
At one point I used my bare hands to rip the globe of a hallway light down, only to feel the cold filthy Katrina water trapped inside pour all over my arms. (Hopefully that wasn’t TFW – Toxic Flood Water. The outsides of numerous Ninth Ward buildings were marked as such, likely contaminated by the Murphy Oil refinery spill).
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We did this for a week, gutting six different homes across St. Bernard Parish. There’s not a method for it – once you’ve done one or two homes you develop an instinct for leverage and pressure and integrity, and things start to move faster.
And it’s not an instinct that fades very quickly. Several days after we finished our work I (and at least a few others I spoke to) could still feel a part of my brain quietly assessing how to raze the rooms I was in, picking out drywall seams and fulcrums for popping door jambs. Our first night out I even dreamed I was pulling apart my hotel room.
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We were lucky to work in December when the days are nice and cool. I cannot imagine what it was like to gut last June – I don’t think it got above 68 the entire time we were there, and hydration management was still a major issue.
But we had our FEMA water. The volunteers used plenty of varied and colorful adjectives to describe the stuff, but the most accurate statement I’ve heard compares it to drinking water straight from a garden hose, yet . . . grosser. It must be drunk cold and quickly – if you can drain a can in 3 seconds your taste buds seems to suffer less. Still, it was less of a gamble than drinking the local water.
It was nasty yet, strangely, I developed a fondness for the stuff. Well, part of me did – my body identified that rubbery flavor with my hydration fix, and it got so I would crave my can of FEMA water at every meal. Several times I even found myself opting for the FEMA water over some of the other, more conventional refreshments in our cooler. If we’d stayed any longer I might’ve ended up with a serious addiction to the stuff.
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This being Louisiana, where pest management is a state pastime AND a source of income, most houses have guns & ammo. On two separate occasions we found ammo ground into the carpet or stowed away in a closet. The guns were peashooter rifles left behind, but the families always left with their handguns.
We also had to be careful of mercury poisoning – an errant sledgehammer blow can punch right through the wall into a thermometer on the other side and splatter quicksilver all over someone in the next room. The protocol for any of this is to contact the Habitat Safety Coordinator and/or the EPA, who will swing by the property to collect the dangerous stuff.
But accidents happen. One member of our team, Rebecca, had a run-in with a nail. And unfortunately, that morning we ended up with the supply bucket that was missing its first-aid kit. Purell isn’t enough to plug a puncture, so Anita and George (the official team dad) rushed her off to a local Wal-Mart hospital – yes, they have clinics – for a tetanus booster and some gut-grinding antibiotics.
Not that it stopped her. Rebecca was out just long enough to get treated, then back on the job the very next day. In fact, she even volunteered for extra duty, venturing out with a few other volunteers to work on another site after hours.
We were lucky hers was the only real serious injury. I saw a springy piece of molding spang off Molly’s hard hat and watched a full sheet of drywall fall on Travis. Rob and Wylie both felt rusty nails slide between their toes. I almost fell through the ceiling while clearing an attic, and also managed to pick up a stress fracture in my forearm. But there were no snake bites, no tool accidents, and no heat stroke. We did all right.
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A further word about safety for potential volunteers. The Camp Hope experience is a fun one, romantic in its sense of roughing it in the name of doing. But this is not a safe philanthropic playground where cold showers and sleeping bags are the worst you could face – there are dangers inherent in what you’ll be doing, and anyone who intends to volunteer should do so with their eyes wide open.
This is a non-profit Habitat for Humanity operation run on a shoestring, with most of the infrastructure provided by AmeriCorps volunteers who, god bless’em, are probably all of 23 years old. They’ve got some training, but they are not plumbers or carpenters or OSHA inspectors. They know how to check the gas, and check the water, and how to flip a light switch.
And when we were in Louisiana, we only had our AmeriCorps team leader (and kitchen and logistical staff) for two days before they left for their holiday break. The camp had 90% of its infrastructure disappear overnight, and the strain started to show very quickly.
Everything you learn you learn on the job. Your orientation at camp lasts about half an hour, the bulk of which is taken up by an emotional video of the Parish just after Katrina. They don’t teach you how to swing an axe, or remove a sink, or pop off drywall. They give you a hard hat, safety glasses, and a cheap filter mask, and then it’s off to the races.
There was never enough of the right gear to go around. Everything we did with our donated gear we also did with our arms and hands and boots, panting into masks until glasses got too foggy to work.
The need for additional tools at Camp Hope is pretty urgent. There’s a graveyard of about 30 wheelbarrows outside the Camp entrance (there were only 6-7 functionals to go around). The brooms break easily and often, and regularly had to be supplemented by raids to the homeowners’ tool closet. There’s a desperate shortage of pry bars, and plenty of tools we just didn’t have – Allen wrenches, screwdrivers, and flashlights come to mind. A chainsaw would’ve done us some good too.
The brake lights on the tool truck need to be fixed, also.
If you make your own trip to Camp Hope or anything similar, buy your own respirator, steel toe/shank boots, and rebound safety glasses instead of using the camp’s supplies. It’s worth it – black mold, rusty nails, drywall powder, and the chance encounter with unsealed asbestos warrant the investment.
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We met Pam working on our second-to-last house. Pam works for the Post Office. When Katrina hit Pam and her family scattered all over. Then she had a heart attack. Then her husband returned from Iraq and divorced her. This was the first time she’d been inside her ruined home. She’d returned at least once to find that her dog had been buried in the backyard by family members – this was her first time going inside.
What do you say to someone like Pam? I still don’t know how. You just have to be human about it, I suppose – be polite, be kind, and respect the fact that the last time she saw the drawer of cooking implements you’re chucking on top of the garbage pile she was making her mother dinner.
And that’s what Black 2 did. No teary display of empathy, no callous treatment of her stuff, no derision of the ruined items she requested we put in her “salvage” pile. Just quiet, almost professional compassion for the woman whose past we’d come to dismantle.
Pam may move back into that home if the Post Office moves her back to her old precinct. She might sell it. It doesn’t really matter – she needed somebody’s help, and that’s why we were there.
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On our last day we drove through the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. The Ward didn’t just flood, it got torn to pieces – so it doesn’t have the same ruined, swampy feel of the ruined St. Bernard Parish. The storm’s impact there was more savage, more physical, more total.
Whole city blocks were simply gone, leaving behind an eerie landscape of empty concrete slabs. Some homes had been bulldozed away; many were simply washed off their foundations when the storm surge got channeled through the neighborhood. In many cases all that was left of the former homes were the concrete steps that led up to the porch – we saw a lot of these with the address of the plot scribbled on, as they were the only place you could even post an indication of the original geography.
The buildings that remain fared poorly. We saw one house that’d been torn in two, half of it tossed a few yards away from the original frame. There were several enormous churches whose roofs had been staved in, one surrounded by a yard littered with pews. The area looked more like it’d been carpet-bombed than hit by a storm.
Driving through the Ward we dropped the front right wheel of our rental into a pothole so deep the wheel didn’t touch the bottom. All we could do was stand there and watch the wheel spin up geysers of sewer water. But before we could call a tow truck, the people of the Ward came to help. One man tried to tow us out, and another lugged an enormous jack down from his ruined house up the street.
It was astonishing to see these people rally to help, though I suppose that sense of Samaritanism is a way of life there these days. They’ve been treated poorly in the Lower Ninth, a low priority if not forgotten entirely. When asked about the pothole, the man with the jack had this to say: “They were supposed to come fix it, but they’ve never been back. They don’t care too much about this area here.”
Or if they do, it’s only for its development potential. The Lower Ninth has been considered a bit of a boil on the side of New Orleans for some time now, and many predict the area will be thoroughly gentrified as it’s rebuilt.
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And now we’re home, back in lively San Francisco with its bustling commerce and unbroken windows and $5 beers. It’s strange to come back to a place like this with its religion of self-indulgence and distraction. One might almost forget there’s a place in this country where the people live in government-issue trailers instead of $1300 a month studios and rely on the National Guard to keep the chaos under control.
But it’s there, and it needs more help. Follow this link to find out what you can do.
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