Hop’s Blog

I can’t believe this place will ever be back to normal.

We all saw the pictures of the days following Katrina on TV, but they didn’t do the true story justice. The magnitude of the scope of this disaster in incredible. I truly had no idea what it was really like.

Eighty percent of the city was under water at some point. Thousands and thousands of homes are damaged and still untouched by cleanup workers or their owners…many of whom remain living outside the area to wherever they fled.

If it weren’t for the work of some charitable organizations and volunteers, it would seem that the world has forgotten what happened here. The cleanup job will take years to complete. If you ask the Catholic Charities workers, they believe the government at all levels has forgotten them and has abandoned those they promised to help. Monies that are supposed to arrive haven’t. Insurance to rehabilitate homes is running out or nonexistent in many cases. The levels of red tape are mind boggling. FEMA has gone away for the most part. They see massive organized U.S. efforts overseas and wonder why that can’t happen here. And local government has failed them miserably.

The city has spent much of its efforts on the high profile places like Bourbon Street, downtown, the Superdome, and a new wireless Internet system. It’s all very nice (if not totally necessary), but New Orleans is down to 270,000 residents where there used to be around a million. Many parts are a ghost town, full of houses that haven’t been touched in 17 months, but without citizens to do anything about it. And for those that remain, the suicide rate has tripled from pre-Katrina days.

It’s easy to overlook if you keep your eyes on the fun parts of town, or go whizzing by at 65 on the freeway. But when you slow down and drive the neighborhoods, or walk and talk to the few souls remaining, you see a far different city.

You can see the water lines on buildings everywhere, so it’s easy to imagine how rough life was in the days following Katrina. I’m still amazed that they were able to pump all the water out.

Catholic Charities has gutted over 1,300 homes so far, and has hundreds more remaining from those who’ve applied for help. Not many are calling these days…they’ve either given up, done it themselves, or are being helped by other agencies. Still, they think they can finish gutting the rest on their list by June and then shift completely into the construction phase.

Before beginning our work, we visited a home our group did last April. It still remains as they left it…gutted, but with very little reconstruction work done other than a new roof. Some in the group were discouraged that all their hard work hasn’t resulted in a returned family, but they soon jumped in to the new job at hand.

We gutted the home of a 70-year-old woman today. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could smell the squalor from the street. Our masks didn’t help much. We opened the door and mice scattered among piles of refuse. After a quick walk-through, we all started in with shovels, crowbars and hammers to take everything down to the 2×4s. Everything. Unless something had real or sentimental value for the homeowner, it went in a pile by the street to be picked up later by the city.

After one day, I’ve had my fill of seeing cockroaches, mice and rats. There were thousands of roaches in one house alone where we worked today. But by the time we were through, there weren’t many places for them to hide.

Still, in the face of all this, life goes on. The only renovated and occupied home on the street had its garbage picked up by a shiny new garbage truck. And a U.S. Postal Service carrier wove his vehicle between trash piles and broken glass to cheerfully deliver the mail on his sparsely populated route.

Pat and his fellow blue-coveralled workers are known as “The Blue Man Group”

And our group returned to our gymnasium full of satisfaction that we had helped make a small dent in it all. These people, ranging from college students to those in their 80s amaze me with their fortitude, camaraderie and good cheer. Just getting to know a few of them has been worth the trip.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 7:36 pm and is filed under New Orleans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.