| Page: 1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| |
The city of New Orleans only started letting residents come back to that neighborhood about week and a half ago. Mike flew in on Friday, October 14, to assess the damage and gave me a call in Biloxi to let me know what to expect. The next day, HandsOn USA volunteers Suzi and Tanya volunteered to go along with me and we left at 6:00 AM to meet Mike at his house. It was very eerie to see. The Lakeview district once had 15,000 residents but Mike told us there are only 5 living there as of now. There was relatively little wind damage, mainly the flooding, so the houses look almost normal from outside.
Looking down Canal Blvd. from Mike's house. The "bandit" signs have begun to sprout. After the hurricane, the lamppost on the far left had 27 bodies tied to it to keep them from floating away.
You can see the striations from the flooding on the house. The water remained at different levels for almost three weeks and went back up a bit when the hurricane Rita rains arrived.
The house stayed closed for another three weeks.
They had to leave behind two cars. Both are a total loss.
The floor inside had buckled and was blocking the door. I brought a HandsOn chainsaw to cut the floor so we could open the door. This is the interior of the front room before we started work. The water had reached almost to the ceiling. You can see where the infamous black mold has grown above the water line, all the way to the ceiling. Everything had been tossed about as 40 mile an hour water had washed up into the house whipped by 80 mile an hour winds and then lowered into a sodden, muddy heap as the waters slowly receded.
Here's Mike posing with intrepid volunteers Tanya and Suzi. Tanya is the one in the mask :)
Since there are no services in the city, we brought along some MRE's (military meals ready to eat) and had a picnic. The meals are self heating and are quite good. I recommend the pot roast and the chicken tetrazini.
It took four of us all day to remove the contents from the front room and the kitchen. In the kitchen, water(or some mysterious mixture) still remained in many of the pots and pans and the oven broiler. The refrigerator had floated up, turned over, and opened up, producing many interesting biology experiments. This is the worst, as we know from working in Biloxi. (No pictures of the fridge will be provided here.)
Mike managed to salvage some of his mom's silver and some of her china collection but everything else on the first floor was a loss. Over 100 years of family photos and all of the canvasses Mike had painted were ruined. The picture below shows the results of our day's labor.
The following Wednesday, our day off, I went back with volunteers Suzi, Ron, and Peter to help Mike clear out the garage, which was crammed full of stuff. (Lesson to everyone: Don't save old paperbacks and magazines!) We had to move furniture, boxes of books, and tools outside and across a church parking lot 200 feet to streetside. There was another fridge that had to be duct-taped and wheeled out. Thank goodness this one hadn't opened up. We had a wheelbarrow, two rickety shopping carts, and a hand truck with a flat tire to do the job with.
Here is the Before-and-After on part of the garage.
It took the five of us working all day to finish the job. Here is the heap we made next to the church parking lot.
Mike headed back to Covington, where he was staying with family friends. The rest of us headed down to the French Quarter to look around and have dinner. That area didn't get flooded as badly and many of the establishments on Bourbon Street are open for business.
The clientele in the French Quarter includes some regular tourists and a whole flock of relief workers-- fire fighters, police, EMT's, military, etc. Several Red Cross workers were there, perhaps looking to unburden themselves of some of that $800 petty cash. They had their Red Cross staff car parked under a nightclub sign, a great photo op. I had the picture all framed up when I found I was out of "film". By the time I had borrowed a spare memory chip, the workers had seen me and fled.
There are many hurricane-specific souvenirs available for the relief workers.
