Bucknell Katrina Recovery Team

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.