Hurricane Katrina: A Disaster Relief Volunteer's Perspective
David Wilde
Researcher/Independent Scholar
University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research
Albuquerque, New Mexico
E-mail: wilded@hotmail.com
My task was and remains to record the passage of time, perhaps like Camoens, the famous early 16th century Portuguese explorer, and to try to evoke the historical past without offending. To give a fair and equitable account of this journey to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina that in some minds never happened and to others should not or could never have happened in the way that it subsequently evolved or in the way that it actually did.
I went to New Orleans as a volunteer, and from a Katrina disaster relief perspective, set myself the task of asking the question of how I might evoke the historical past without offending those whose sensitivities provoke my own insecurities and proclivity to vulnerability?
Almost sixteen months to the day of the disaster, I arrived in New Orleans. Unprepared for what was about to then become my life—existing day to day in the morass of caked mud, the detritus of a powerful flood—I see humanity struggling to make ends meet and somehow crammed into FEMA trailers, still reeling from this horrific blow. I was to work with church groups who were taking crews from everywhere in the US to clean out empty and often abandoned homes.
The rich, subtly aromatic scent of roasting Farmer’s coffee beans floated unseen but strongly sensed through the Louisiana night air. We negotiated our way home via poorly lit side roads and sometimes obstructed lanes or cluttered highways back to Faith Church from the meeting recently held at the Carrollton Avenue Church of Christ, which fed several neighborhoods (congregation members and visitors, like ourselves) every Wednesday evening around 6:30.
The meeting came with a sermon usually on a topic reminding us of our mortality and our sinfulness in the light of Hurricane Katrina, a visitor now in distant yet hauntingly familiar memory.
New Orleans is where I became a volunteer and freedom fighter (strictly speaking, neutral) in the notion that it is better to volunteer than to read about disaster-ridden catastrophe after the fact and via the modes of media not always abiding by the rules of honesty and fair play.
The preacher, the mild mannered director of Building Better Communities, and I both lived (a useful term here but slightly exaggerated) at the complex where several disaster relief groups were housed (a more accurate description), an abandoned facility discovered shortly after Hurricane Katrina had ripped her monstrous way through and beyond this scene of apocalyptic mayhem by an enterprising helicopter rider looking for a place to plant a huge seed—a church-planter.(1)
The genesis or ‘trigger’ for my visit to New Orleans was in part due to an unforgettable yet inauspicious meeting in a bohemian coffee house in the Nob Hill area of Albuquerque, New Mexico in September of 2005. This was destiny in the making; I met with a Katrina victim, refugee, artist/painter, student of psychology who was looking for a place to rent, hauling a U-Haul with 3 dogs, her 14-year-old son, Pablo, and two box turtles.
In January 2007, the refugee was pregnant again and possessed the usual accompanying emotional mixture of joy and anxiety. Her baby was safely delivered in February. The baby boom in response to the death and obliteration of the Crescent City was never announced: it just happened!
Global warming was becoming a dominant issue at this time. Climate change 101 is here to stay, and Hurricane Katrina was merely a hiccup in the introduction to those whose claim is that they “just didn’t know.” Ignorance is no excuse. The current political language inducing a climate of fear has turned a nation sour, and when we hear those words of justification we understand what is meant by “collateral damage”. This is NOT a movie; this is real!
I was in New Orleans to help support my refugee friend through her pregnancy and the birth of her new son. As an artist she was and still is mostly drawn to the visual as much and even more so than the audio. Being of Basque origin she is always aware of the importance of language, so her baby, born in the chaos of adversity, was to be one of the founders of a new dynasty of French speaking post-Katrina citizens of New Orleans. He will carry with him the profound and the profane of a lost citizenry yet hopefully to flower and bloom in the years to come.
The mixed reaction to volunteers ranged from a mass hysteria kind of evangelistic euphoria to the blind though genuine appreciation of a desperate people who had been shamefully abandoned by the government and who were willing to do just about anything to put the clock back. At a baby shower I attended people came up to thank me for my presence once they discovered I was an outsider there to help rebuild their homes and city.
Volunteers came from local, national and international sources whose roots stemmed mainly, though not always, in church based outreach as well as college based student groups. They came from states such as Ohio, California, Indiana, Utah, Kentucky, New Mexico, and as far away as Canada, England, Scotland and Wales.
A group of college students, family members, and individuals like myself volunteering at Hilltop Disaster Relief, an agency out of El Segundo, California, clambered into a van which was to take us to the job-site previously agreed upon by the organization’s planning staff.
On walking by the French Quarter the sounds and smells of some other time and place, possibly European, exuded from the spectacular scene before my eyes. The Mississippi River flows serenely yet darkly reflecting lights of the paddle steamers, invoking the ghost of Mark Twain. Music seeps through the cracks in the sidewalk, and multi-colored beads flash and sparkle at the approach of the visitor’s footfall. Bourbon Street beckons to the unwary and seems to mock the innocent tourist not quite at home in this haven of freedom.
However, words like “deluge,” “flood of rain,” and “TORNADO” evoke a sense of hopelessness and hope at the same time in the city of New Orleans. It is two years since the hurricane season turned into a nightmare for thousands of citizens, some of whom lost their lives due to a bureaucratic incompetence defying belief and some who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was on a mission, hardly planned, to help the people of New Orleans get back on their feet. At least 40% of the citizenry remained, stubbornly clinging to the precipice of a misplaced faith or hope in government help slow in its coming. Perhaps stoically, they face the uncertainty of a distant future rebuilding and putting the blocks of their shattered lives once again on the line.
I witnessed a barely legible scrawled, hand-written laundry sign, yellowing in a dusty window of an empty business along Carrollton Avenue, which said ominously: “Closing early due to bad weather”. It was dated August 28th 2005, evidence of the brief but calm window of urban life hours before the hurricane.
When is a house not a home? When it’s been reamed by a massive hurricane with winds up to 160 mph and drenched in a cataclysmic downpour rivaling the antediluvian Flood of Bible fame.
A large X is painted in red usually front and center on just about every empty dwelling as a source of coded information to let search parties know conditions. The vital information about victims, either human or animal, written in the four “v”s of the scarlet X. On top was the date of the visit; counter-clockwise was the name of the group or rescue organization, frequently the National Guard; at the bottom was the number of human fatalities; and the final “v” contained the number of pets or animals involved, whether lost, dead, found alive but injured or simply starving to death.
A yellow label with a red X let the absent owners and others know that the building was scheduled to be demolished.
My first day of “mudding out” on the job of “gutting” a sodden dwelling down to the studs was an experience never to be forgotten as also was a night spent in a disaster hit Rowley Elementary School now fixed with bare sheetrock exposed to the visitor’s stare. The spooky sight of a smudged, dirty, wet line 15 feet above the gym floor hinted at what once had been the level reached by the flood waters that had remained for three long and heavy weeks. A briny sludge had swiftly filled the vacant space of the gym, still scarring the walls of the school.
I volunteered with a total of three distinct relief organizations. Leapfrogging each time there was a vacancy or a new mission to fulfill as well as helping Fannie Mae by working to complete one out of the total six playgrounds they planned to erect in a single day and taking part in a tornado rescue effort.
After unloading the tool trailer of shovels, picks, bolt cutters, crow-bars, wheelbarrows, pliers, scrapers and screw drivers, we get a safety talk by the lead hand and are told how to wear the obligatory gas-mask before setting to work.
The order of dumping 4 to 5 piles of separated materials on the sidewalk went something like this: white goods (fridge, cooker, dishwasher); electric (radios, TV, irons, CD players, plugs, wiring); chemicals (bathroom cabinets, medicines, cleaning fluid, acids etc), and other items that had been soaked for at least 3 weeks in toxic, briny, oil-polluted water sometimes up to 12 feet or more deep that ruined everything it came in contact with.
Any firearms found, which occurred fairly frequently, were to be handed over to the EPA posthaste. Looters are still an issue. A person can be arrested for picking up anything from a sidewalk which he or she is not legally entitled to.
At days end, a prayer circle is formed to conclude the celebration of healing and renewal before packing up the trailer and returning to base.
Conversation turns on the “mission”, the focus of each crew or group who had individually paid up to $700 just to get to the area, whether by air, car, bus, or as one individual did, by bicycle (all the way from Florida, and who eventually became the chief cook at the base where I stayed).
Back at base, part of the daily clean up is the gas mask or air filter, which has to be taken apart and rinsed out with alcohol and cotton wool swabs to get rid of the toxic mold accumulating around the removable parts.
The next week I spent sitting at a tiny desk in a dimly lit church office. Invoking grant writing proposals convinced me that mudding out was a lot more productive, satisfying and actually more honest than this vain and empty gesture.
The frustration of the bureaucratic machinery taking control away from the individual home owner and putting it in the hands of politicians and the distant law makers in Washington is remote but profoundly present.
I occasionally noticed a rather suspicious smattering of a thinly disguised veneer within each mission of “attitudes” bordering on xenophobic shades of mistrust which sometimes invade the prevailing “Christian” atmosphere of well-being and altruistic intentions.
It was the day of the Saints semi-final game, and the mood was just about as high on Jefferson Davis Street as any could have expected. The air of expectancy permeated the usually squeaky clean atmosphere of religious order. As an outsider, and a nominal Saints fan to boot, I was distinctly a fish out of water in this fishbowl arena, and being a European made me distinctly visible, almost an intruder.
My “suspicious” accent made everyone jump, or at least behave oddly, and even though the local Saints team lost this particular game it was a seminal lesson in volunteer protocol. As any self-respecting Cultural Anthropologist will gladly tell you, cultural taboos exist even between people of the same or similar race, whether black, white or brown.
I took this incident at face value in order to partially share the blame, or at least the fifty percent of it I could account for, as a diplomatic blunder.
Attitudes which one usually associates with any creative task, such as building a better community (incidentally, BBC is one of the better local relief organizations in New Orleans with whom I interacted, though not as a volunteer) is not immune from the crab bucket syndrome.
This well-known feature of crab life reflects the somewhat bizarre actions where an individual is weighted down or held back by the many as an audacious rebel captive crab caught in a bucket will try to leave.
In the case of humans, we tend to act just like the token metaphorical crabs, whether as rebel or as a “committee” member who see themselves as being more important than the rest. The purpose of this peculiar behavior is or seems to be about whether to stay home or not to risk “difference” in the greater scheme of things.
Perhaps it’s a learnt trait or about being a team player and sticking with the program. In New Orleans, on the day of the Saints Semi-Final, the lesson appeared to be about being on the “same” page: “Do as I say not what I do.”
Needless to say, I weathered the genteel southern breeze and lived to tell the tale.
An example of this dual standard was the way in which some of the rescue missions’ grouped skilled labor (carpenters, electricians, AC) over unskilled labor (washing dishes, janitorial cleaning), which took precedence when assigning the daily work schedule. This habit, leaning toward the elitism of a hierarchy of class A and class B workers, neatly dividing the “good” and the “less good” volunteers was subsequently not always such a success in its practical application.
Any volunteer could potentially be asked to do a number of necessary jobs from kitchen duty to putting in temporary power poles at a house being rebuilt. Quite frequently, both vocations were expected of the volunteer on the same day, or night. The expectation went without saying, and it was kudos to expect the unexpected. The paradoxical was the norm in this place.
This was my experience as a handyman cum volunteer who, ironically, was like the new recruit for the military who on being asked what was his job in civilian life and answering “mechanic” was immediately assigned to the kitchen.
In my case, the answer would have had to have been oxymoronic, “writer” or “musician”, and these two occupations being classified as “reserved occupations” I would have been ordered to dig latrines.
Instead, fortunately for me, I got asked to help with domestic electrical installations on top of gutting out the worst of abandoned properties left after the hurricane. This onerous task, gutting out, being the least important on the list of priorities for most disaster relief organizations.
A reaction hard to understand and an attitude not necessarily in sync with the physical realities of New Orleans nor shared by its poorer citizens and yet probably the more important task to deal with in the current era of recovery for the average homeowner; 80% of homes in New Orleans are owned by the residents who live there.
The exception to this hierarchical attitude possibly being the Common Ground Collective based at St. Mary’s in the ninth ward, the commune-like people responding in the most humane manner.
A perspective not necessarily shared by all the participants in the battle for recovery, the game or business of relief. An uncommon value among the legions of would-be do-gooders, both onlookers and spectators, when altruistic principles take a back-seat on the bottom line question of who pays the bills and why.
The tenuous nature of being a volunteer became clear to me one day after a close encounter with a major contributor of large amounts of financial support to one local church for disaster relief support. After discussing the pros and cons of post-Katrina, he turned his pipe-smoking attention to me saying that as a volunteer one does not have to be a decision maker, and that simply was the bottom line.
One day, just about Valentines Day, we were called away from a gutting out operation to aide a tornado hit neighborhood, the second major disaster in less than 18 months for these hardy folk just waiting on the next apocalyptic event to blight their geographical location, wisely or not chosen.
The woman who needed our assistance had been in the direct path of the tornado, taking off her roof and flattening the house next door to smithereens, leaving a green space between her property and the pristine facade of her next but one neighbor untouched and unmarked.
Reporters from the Times Picayune newspaper came to document and take photographic evidence of the disaster. In the middle of all of this the local energy company was attempting to restore order to the power lines and blocked off whole streets for its purpose. Subsequently, it was hazardous to do much except load the unfortunate woman’s belongings of a lifetime into a U-Haul and drive it away.
My experience was not unique by any means.
The main message is to pass on to the world the word of what happened and should continue to happen here at home while the memory is still fresh and alive in the minds of both victims and rescuers alike.
The good people in Chalmette, Center City, Kenner, Mid City, Carrollton Avenue who experienced the bitter wrath of Katrina and by dint of good fortune were able to make the cut of being assigned to the lists of voluntary groups such as Crossroads Missions, Hilltop Disaster Relief, Building Better Communities etc. and in whose good company I was proud to serve as a volunteer can vouch for the readiness and honest attempts rendered in the name of neighborly support that, despite politics, were able to assist those most in need.
Looking back at the shared experience from a relatively safe distance, it seems that the ones affected even moreso than the victims of Katrina are the church groups, among others, who went to assist. In the aftermath, these individuals came out of the blue, literally, to put back the jigsaw puzzle of humanities broken anatomy, head, back and body, and by doing this, glued themselves to each other’s lives.
On a visit to Salt Lake City recently I attended a reunion at K2, a church group out of Utah, itself a relatively new church plant out of Detroit called Kensington, ‘K’ for short. I visited some volunteer friends I met during the heroic struggle in New Orleans. In an attempt to recapture that golden thread of co-existing zealous team spirit and obvious remorse for the hurricane victims and their families, we reviewed the retrospective.
This included photographs digitally preserved on CD, and newspaper articles, such as the Times Picayune which happened to feature on the front page an article and picture about our tornado rescue efforts with volunteers from K2, in which I appeared.
It was on this visit that I ran into the mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, giving an impressive address on the evils of global warming at the University of Utah Student Union, along with several members of the science faculty.
He was quite impressed with the mention of volunteer groups in New Orleans stemming from the K2 church organization and was effusive in his praise of this and other Salt Lake City groups. When asked, he was quite positive in advocating his global warming perspective, even suggesting he be safely quoted in this article.
If there was some positive aspect it seemed to come from the sum of bridges built already or in the process of being built, between team members and individuals. Throughout my brief visit to K2 it was a distinct pleasure to share our experiences.
This group shared the obvious prize for the speed with which they stripped a flooded house, now abandoned, bare to its studs in almost a day. Normally it would have taken this many people at least two full days of a paced but strenuous dedication to the task.
This may have been to do with the propensity of the number of women in the group engaged in the physical labor, relative to the less numerically strong group of men. They attacked the building with such a ferocity, at odds with their very feminine demeanor, and invited the guys to follow suit. We agreed there was no choice other than to do their bidding and follow our fearless leaders.
Volunteer helpers are still desperately needed in New Orleans, and there are plenty of cool and not so cool websites to view on the subject.
For example, on Facebook.com there are tons of people linked to organizers of disaster relief, including the American Red Cross. Craigslist is a great resource, with a special Volunteer section for the potential recruit willing to sacrifice time, money and an internet search
END NOTES
(1) The term Church Plant is something hard to avoid yet easy to define for the fund raiser and is becoming a global term for anyone referencing activity by missionary sponsors and NGO members involved with rescue and relief, whether a disaster or some UNESCO attempt to right the plight of the world’s disadvantaged youth.
You are invited to join AE Extra staff!
Send your ideas and/or writing sample
to the Editor-in-chief:
Elizabeth Haller
Kent State University (e-mail: editoraee@hotmail.com)
Academic Exchange Extra invites reader response to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.
