Bucknell Katrina Recovery Team

Tomorrow is the big day! I am so anxious just to get on the plane and find out what flying is like. Plus I am wondering what New Orleans will look like since the hurricane last year. We already know that 100% of Saint Bernard’s Parish was flooded and only 10% of the population has returned.

Well, apparently the end of classes and exams does not coincide with the end of my procrastination habits. This is why I'm writing my first blog entry 3 and a half hours before we'll be boarding the bus for the Baltimore airport. Despite lack of sleep, however, I am so excited for this trip. I remember being shocked last year in Waveland, MS at how little work seemed to have been done since Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast. I am hoping that a year later, much more will have been done.

Hi, my name is Mina. I’m a sophomore at Bucknell and I’m majoring in Management. I’m really excited to go down to New Orleans to help out with the Katrina recovery effort. What motivated me the most to look into helping out was the fact that my brother goes to school and lives in the city. Although my life was not nearly as affected as those who lost their families, friends, homes, jobs, and ways of life, Katrina did have an impact on me, however minor in comparison. Having this connection to New Orleans, I became aware of the need to help rebuild the city and aid businesses and residents to get back on their feet.

Greetings all. We've made it safely to St. Bernard Parish and are settling in at Camp Hope. Everyone is pretty fried because our connecting flight from Atlanta was delayed for over two hours (after a scheduled two hour layover and several gate changes). We tried to deal with the situation as best we could and considered that many Hurricane Katrina victims had been stranded in much worse circumstances for a much longer period of time after the storm.

This was our first day of demolition. We boarded our bus this morning at 7 a.m. What we saw was a bit overwhelming. Our house hadn't been touched since the hurricane. This is the case with a lot of the houses here. Not sure why. Our crew leader told us that some of the people just can't deal with this disaster. Once we moved out all the furniture it was time to tear the inside walls down. The walls are covered with black mold. Once the drywall is taken out then out comes the insulation. For over a year a variety of insects have lived in these walls. Some of us were freaked out by the cockroaches! Man, they are big down here! By 3pm what once was a front yard turned into a mountain of debris. Leaving now for the French Quarter. More later.

Barb

First Impressions

Last night we flew into New Orleans. I was a little disappointed since we didn't get in till night time, so I didn't get to see the city in day light. After we landed we went straight to Camp Hope, settled in, and rested up for the next day. On the ride to the camp I was taken aback. We drove through the lower ninth ward to get to Saint Bernard’s Parish. The lower ninth ward was very unsettling. Block after block was abandoned, and only a few lights could be seen in houses here and there.

Today was our first day on the job here in St. Bernard’s Parish. Yesterday was a long, tiring day of traveling. We left Bucknell bright and early at 7:30 in the morning and didn’t make it to Camp Hope, where we are staying while we are volunteering, until after 9 pm! We are staying at an old elementary school with other volunteers who are helping with Katrina relief efforts. Everyone was exhausted by the time we got here, but we had to get situated with the camp before we could finally go to sleep.

Greetings to y'all from Louisiana. The Bucknell volunteers just returned from an evening in the French Quarter of New Orleans after a long hard day of work.

We began with breakfast around six am. Yes, parents, your children are actually capable of getting up that early. After a hearty breakfast, we had a safety orientation and picked up our PPE- personal protective equipment. Each of us wore a hard hat, goggles, a respirator mask, work gloves and boots for our day of gutting. We worked in two different teams at two different houses. One group worked in home that had been somewhat cleared out. They were involeved in taking out dry wall and insulation, base board, etc. The other group worked in a house that Habitat for Humanity declared had 0% work done on it since the hurricane. This means we cleared out furniture, clothes, appliances, and all kinds of other belongings. As you can imagine, the work was dirty, and hard. We used shovels, crow bars, push brooms and lots of elbo grease to move out arm chairs, beds, tvs, rugs, and more. Many wheel barrows full of debris were taken to the curb for pick up and we built an incredibly sizeable mountain of things to be hauled away. Some personal items, a few photos, a child's baseball mit, an Elvis Christmas ornament, and some ceramic items and china were salvaged for the family. Most of us discovered muscles we rarely get to use in our comfortable lives at Bucknell.

On Saturday we left New Orleans and Louisiana and headed over to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi where we visited Chris Legarde. Chris is an aid to one of the congressmen in Mississippi and one of the leaders in his community. He first introduced himself and then explained his experience and some history about his community. Bay St. Louis is situated right on the water, but it sits on top of a bluff. This was not enough to protect it from the storm surge that Katrina created. As we drove to his house, concrete slabs could be seen everywhere and steps leading to nothing. In all of these places houses once existed.

Today we went to the house of Chris LaGarde, the aide to Congressman Gene Taylor in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. This area was hit really hard by the hurricane, except the difference here versus New Orleans was that the water didn’t stand, it receded. So the homes were damaged, but I think it was probably easier to fix these homes. All of the houses along the beach were completely gone and only the cement bases were left. I could see plastic bags hanging from the tree branches, indicating how high the water rose! Chris LaGarde talked with us about the destruction and rebuilding efforts in his neighborhood. Many of the historic buildings and houses were destroyed. When we went to his home, we got to meet his family and then we began working on his house. He had been lucky because his house did not get destroyed by the hurricane.

Well, today our intrepid team of Bucknell volunteers got to sleep in until 7 am, before breakfast and packing our four mini-vans to drive to Mississippi. We spent the day in Bay St. Louis, an area where the eye of Katrina passed directly over Hancock County. Unlike the flooding in New Orleans and St. Bernard, the water on the Mississippi Gulf Coast came in with a tremendous force of a storm surge 20- 25 feet high, but went back out within a few hours. So many homes there were not sitting in water for weeks the way that buildings in St. Bernard were, but they were severely damaged by high winds and in some cases, flattened by the storm surge carrying lots of destructive debris inland for half a mile and carrying lots of belongings and homes back out to sea.

Wow! Already two days down!!

We were up bright and early on Friday at 6 am to receive a brief orientation and then head out to work. We split up into two groups. Each group had a house to gut. "Gutting" is a term that basically means turn the house into a shell. Everything is pulled out, including cabinets, refrigerators, stoves, and the walls. Last year when we worked at Waveland, MS, only about an hour away, we were doing the exact same work. It really hit home to me the mind-blowing amount of work that needs to be done here. The house that we worked at Monday probably wasn't touched since the storm. That's a year and a half. How many hundreds of other homes still haven't been touched?? How many more years will it take to not only clear out all the houses, but also rebuild??

Today, Sunday, we went back to the French Quarter where we had the day off in preparation for our 4 day stretch of gutting houses. First we went to a museum next to the famous cathedral where there was a display of photographs taken of the damage after hurricane Katrina. The pictures were very moving and well done.

Well, no more houses gutted, but plenty more memories. We had a day off of work today and spent the day exploring the French Quarter.

There is a museum here that we went to that had a photo exhibit on Katrina. My favorite part was a section that had photos from a group of high schoolers. They were involved in a photography project that aimed to tell the story of the tragedy from youth. And they told some powerful stories with their photos. One caption read, "After we evacuated, I remember staying up with my sister on a school night in our cold bedroom in a house on the bayou. We would laugh so hard, even though the challenges we were going through were so difficult."

Hi folks. The Bucknell volunteers had a "non-work" day today which was great since the weather was so beautiful - blue skies and in the 70s. We began with a 9 am trip to the Louisiana State Museum where we viewed an exhibit on Katrina called "After the Storm." The main display was by a photographer for National Geographic, but there were also photos by high school students taken after they had been displaced. There were some video clips as well and a piano that had been in the home of musician Fats Domino, who lived in the lower Ninth Ward and had to be rescued following the flooding. It was a very sobering exhibit that showed some of the human impact of this tragic storm.

Yesterday was so tiring that by the time we got back to Camp Hope at 10:30, I went to sleep. Yesterday, Sunday, we went into the French Quarter to go to an exhibit at the Cabildo on Hurricane Katrina. It was all photography by a National Geographic photographer. It was very interesting because the photographs were so colorful and pretty, yet they were depicting something so horrible and ugly, the destruction from the hurricane. There was one photograph of a car buried in sand, and it really looked to me like a toy car buried in a sandbox. There was also a part by fifteen high school students documenting life after the hurricane in the New Orleans area. I thought their photographs were especially moving because they included quotes describing their experience or a moment that was hard for them.

Monday, December 18 and another house gutted. What a great feeling for all of us! As I mentioned before, the 25 of us split into two teams. So, really, two more houses have been gutted. I haven't had the opportunity to meet any of the owners of the houses that we have gutted, but today we did talk to the neighbors next door. How appreciative these people are for any help we can give them. At first the neighbors thought that we got paid to do the work. When we told them that we actually paid to come on the trip they were really surprised! They told us about the evacuation and having to wait weeks till they could even get home.

It's amazing how much volunteering in the Recovery efforts can affect you. It has definitely made me realize how hard life has been for these people. You get a completely different view actually being down here, and interacting with the people than being at home, watching things on TV or reading things in the newspaper. All the locals are so grateful for the volunteers. When I was in the French Quarter on Friday night, the jazz band playing at the club came over to talk to us and then dedicated his next song to us and our efforts! And when we would talk to vendors in the French market, or shop owners, everyone really was impressed and thanked us for doing what we were doing. To me, giving up a week of vacation didn't seem like a big deal at all. In fact, I never looked at it as "giving up" anything. I was excited to be able to go on this trip, and thankful to have the opportunity to participate in it!

The past two days we have been back to gutting houses. Yesterday we started on a zero percent house. This means that nothing has been done to the house and its still how it was right after the hurricane hit. This was the first house like this that I have done. We walked in before starting to work to inspect and the sight was unbelievable. The water picks up all of the items in the house and then drops them randomly when the water diminishes. Everything was thrown about. To us it was all stuff, but to the owner it’s all of her possessions. The work was hard and it took all day to almost finish the house. We even stayed a hour late. At lunch we had the chance to talk to a few residents in the neighborhood. Our talk was very interesting. They said that almost their entire neighborhood was moving back in, unlike most. Also, there was a woman, her son, and her grandson that lived in the house we were working on and they had not been seen since the storm. The most surprising thing was that they were surprised we weren't getting paid and thought we were crazy to be down there.

Another day down, another 2 houses gutted!!

After a rocky start this morning (we were apparently forgotten about and weren't scheduled a house to work at, so instead we watched some of Talladegan Nights), we worked extremely hard for the rest of the day and tore through a couple houses. The work was very similar to what we did on Friday. The house I was at probably wasn't touched for the past 16 months so we had our work cut out for us. The homeowners weren't there and the person from Camp Hope helped the other group, so we were on our own! But no matter, we knew our task and set to work.

Hello from Louisiana. The Bucknell volunteers had a good day today although we got off to a late start. Although our group was ready to go to work gutting more homes in St. Bernard Parish at 7:15, we had been left off the Camp Hope schedule by mistake. Because we arrived on Thursday, not the usual arrival of Saturday, we got left out of the weekend conversion of work assignments. With over 200 volunteers here, and the Americorps staff on their break, it was easy to understand how things could fall through the cracks. The volunteer operation has a good organizational system in place, but you can imagine how difficult a task this could be - to organize teams of 12-14 people to get to a variety of locations with the proper tools, paperwork, and training needed to gut lots of homes. Already Habitat for Humanity and Camp Hope volunteers have gutted over 3,000 homes since June.

Hello from Violet, LA!

Today was a great day. We got to finish our house this morning! It is so rewarding to start with a house that was 0% and finish it completely. What I mean by 0% is that the house had nothing done to it since Katrina. Yesterday some of the girls on my team discovered pictures and mementos of the family that gave us some idea about them. Today Hillary was able to call them with the good news that their house was cleaned up. Unfortunately she got their voice mail. I can only imagine how relieved the family was knowing that their home was ready to be rebuilt. Later this morning we moved on to our 3rd house. This house is going to be a challenge. It is a huge house with two stories. Again it's a house that is 0%. Water marks are still evident on the walls. This home had 10' of water inside. Now it has 6" of mud inside. The mud is caked on the floors like bricks. Our team had to use a pitch fork to loosen it. We were all amazed at the end of the day at how much progress we had made. Already we have 2 of the biggest rooms cleared and tomorrow we'll start the other rooms.

On the bright side it's warm and sunny here!

Today we came back and finished the house in the morning. Quickly we moved on to our new house. We were supposed to work at a home but half the front wall was caved in and it was unsafe to work at, so we worked in a house down the street. The neighborhood was desolate, with gutted house after gutted house sitting there. Very few FEMA trailers were there, which means not many residents are moving back. The house we started work on was a two story house, and it was huge. The inside was a mess and we had to shovel out a mix of the owner's possessions and mud. This was the hardest work of the trip and by the end of the day we had only cleared half of the house. It’s frustrating that we can't do more, but we are all working as hard as we can.

Our group leader today was a young architect from New York named Mike. After taking a three week paid work leave to come work here at Camp Hope, Mike promptly quit his job and came back. He told us that he couldn't stand sitting at his comfy desk while so many people needed help down here. How true did that ring for my own life. In about six months I'm supposed to enter the "real world" and find a "real job."

Yesterday we went to another new house that had not been touched yet, called a “zero percent house.” It was a larger house than the other ones, but it was still one story. We worked hard to get all the furniture and rubble and tons and tons of mud out of the house. The house had pretty high ceilings so we had to get up there and take off the drywall on the ceiling and the insulation up there as well. It was also a pretty hot day so everyone was getting really hot and tired. We started early, when it was still a little foggy, and that kind of reflected the house when we arrived. It was full of muddy, dirty belongings and debris covering the floor; it was pretty dark and gloomy inside. Yet the more we worked, the nicer the day got too!
Each time we got rid of debris or knocked down a new wall, the house seemed brighter and happier. And by the time we had to leave, we had pretty much finished gutting the house (minus the attic, which I think is pretty impressive!), and the sun was streaming into the clean house. It’s just remarkable, each time I go into a house, I look around and just feel so overwhelmed by what’s in there, but as a group we manage to work together and get things done. It’s funny because even though I know we can gut the house, I always have that same feeling like it’s just too much to be able to accomplish.

Today was a disappointing day for the team. It started raining late last night and continued all day. Because of the weather we couldn't go out to the worksite. All of us had hopes of finishing this enormous house before we had to return to Bucknell tomorrow. By far this is the largest house we have tried to gut. Even though we didn't get a chance to finish the house the strides we made yesterday are remarkable. One room in particular was used as a workout area. Not only were the furniture and belongings thrown about by the water, undernearth it all was a huge treadmill. What a great sense of satisfaction in completing that room. Then on to the next one. The most difficult part of this house was the long narrow hallway. It was only wide enough to fit a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow would be filled then backed out the hallway to be dumped outside. Another obstacle was trying to condense the huge pile of debris in the front yard. The guys constructed a ramp made of doors in order to pile the debris. My guess would be that we had gutted a 0% house, one that had never been cleaned since the flooding, to 75%. What an accomplishment for a team that most of us have never dealt with such a disaster.

Today we woke up to pouring rain outside! Everyone was pretty tired from the night before. We went to the French Quarter to go to a concert by Chris Thomas King at St. Louis cathedral in Jackson Square. He played some Christmas songs for about an hour. I went to eat at a Lebanese restaurant called Mona’s Café with a few of the other girls. The rest of the group went to eat at a Mexican restaurant and then came home after I had already fallen asleep because I was exhausted!

Well, the skies opened up last night and graced us with about 5 inches of rain. Yea…muchos rain… And it didn’t stop. So no gutting today. After doing a small amount of inventorying early this morning, we’re just kinda hanging around, trying to occupy ourselves. Lauren had a fantastic idea this morning to go play football outside, so the bold members of our group braved the torrential rains and played a rousing game of football for the ages. Other than that we’ve been playing Dutch Blitz, reading, talking, and anything else we can find to pass the time. The rain is coming down so hard that we often need to scream just to hear one another. Hopefully our roof stays on!