Monday, January 9, 2006
 Justin Starr, School of Engineering and Applied Science
Imagine yourself in a far away nation – preferably somewhere in the third world, getting extensive news coverage after a war. Imagine the devastation – the suffering, the damage, the sheer numbers of lives that have been affected. Now take this mental image and apply it to the United States – to one of America’s storied cities, New Orleans. With that image in mind, one can begin to understand what things were like in the Ninth Ward today.
Our day began lightly – most of us were delighted to have slept on the relative comfort of our air mattresses on an auditorium floor, rather than the constant motion of yesterday’s Amtrak ride. We awoke early, ate breakfast and began our day with a tour of New Orleans, in order to provide some sort of context for the work we were going to be doing
Intentionally, our tour began in some areas of the city that only sustained minor damage from the hurricane, and progressed into areas more and more damaged. The contrast was striking. At first, I found myself visibly moved to see a damaged roof on a house, or a water line on a door, not realizing that this was only the tip of the iceberg. At one point, we drove to a levee that had failed to look at some of the destruction – and words cannot even describe the sight.
I was immediately struck with how the homes surrounding us had been destroyed – gaping holes in the roofs, broken windows, all personal belongings on the street, and the interior completely gutted, leaving only the broken shell of someone’s home remaining. I just couldn’t begin to comprehend the magnitude of looking down a street and seeing blocks and blocks of similar devastation, then moving down another street and seeing more of the same. It was really breathtaking, in a horrible way.
At one point, while looking at a Volkswagen Beetle, I thought I could process everything, doing the math and realizing that about 50 houses that I could see had likely sustained significant damage. But then when I tried to apply human life to this figure, I just couldn’t. I tried to imagine losing my home and all worldly possessions, but then to effectively apply this same level of loss to my entire hometown (which is admittedly small) was really hard to process.
I tried to focus on the good things – all homes were spray painted with a graffiti-esque code, indicating whether or not bodies were found during an inspection, among other things, and very few things we saw had actual casualties. But on other homes, a simple spray-painted message – help! – quickly sobered my spirits. Another message, painted by the SPCA said simply – dead dog.
We also went on a walkthrough of a damaged school – St. Mary’s – a high school which is merging with Xavier University Preparatory school, to allow students to get a semester of school in. This school had a watermark five feet up on the first floor, and was completely and totally gutted inside. A cafeteria, with a rack of pots and pans sat empty, and math books sat high on a shelf in a closet, everything below them having been gutted. In one corner of one room sat some band remnants – some moldy clarinets, marching shoes, and a toy bass drum.
After this – which believe it or not – was the beginning and easiest part of our day – we went to the Ninth Ward to help a priest of a church affiliated with the school we are staying with, gut homes ravaged by mold, and again this was an experience that is difficult to describe.
We first approached homes that looked undamaged and normal from the outside – just like any other homes, aside from the spray paint and some water marks. Upon entering, we realized that they had truly ceased to be anything resembling homes. The floodwaters – which swamped many of these houses for days – had scooped everything up inside, displaced it all, swirled it around, and then deposited it on the ground upon receding, along with whatever unpleasant material was hidden in the waters themselves.
In essence, to imagine this, take everything in your living room, throw it in a literal blender, add sulfur, rotten eggs and brown food coloring, shake it vigorously and then dump it all over the ground. Now try to sort through it all.
An elderly woman – 80 years old, I think – had just returned home to one of the places we were gutting. From her kitchen vantage point, she watched as we threw all of the remnants of her life in the trash can – commenting only, that she could possibly bleach the china, and save it – in a way grasp on to a tiny piece of the life she once possessed. I had a particularly difficult moment, when breaking through a wall of rotted, moldy sheetrock, and discovering a closet – still full of the woman’s clothes – on the other side. Everything, even the sweaters she had neatly and carefully attempted to seal in plastic bags, was ruined. Everything had to be thrown out.
This was indeed overwhelming.
Upon exiting the house, and looking around, it became clear that this situation was the status quo, in almost all of the homes we could see in the 9th Ward – maybe hundreds – I’m not really sure. Everything was like what we had been dealing with, and it was like nothing I had ever seen. One of the other people working with us commented that they had, as of that morning found bodies in the homes – whether true or not, it was certainly believable. People’s lives were just completely destroyed, and quite frankly, I wasn’t prepared to see all of that.
I had especially thought that now – plus or minus five months after Katrina struck – it was astonishing that there was still so much damage. The news media may not discuss it anymore, but there is still so much to be done in New Orleans. In one afternoon, we almost completed gutting two houses, upon which the process had already begun, with about 10 of us in each house. We only provided a drop in the bucket, in terms of what we accomplished as compared to what we was needed. And we were only demolishing – not even rebuilding at all!
In essence, I left the day, after working in homes, and seeing the flooded school, with a feeling that more than lives and property had been damaged. In truth, with devastation as vast as that wrought by Katrina, entire communities had been uprooted and displaced. People talk in abstract terms about returning to a neighborhood, when essentially, in many cases, there isn’t even a neighborhood to return to.
When it was all said and done, and we returned to our auditorium floor for the night, the overwhelming thing people talked about was how grateful they were – for family, friends, possessions and a sense of place. Minor discomforts, like leaky air mattresses and getting stuck with peanut rather than plain M & M’s, just didn’t seem as pressing. I think all of us have a real sense of how well off we really are, and yet, at the same time are excited to wake up at 6:15 a.m. tomorrow morning, pile into vans, and get back out there and do some more work – and put another drop in the bucket.
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