Editor,
Deluge, flood of rain, tornado - these words evoke a sense of hopelessness and hope at the same time in the city of New Orleans at the beginning of 2007, almost two years since the hurricane season became a nightmare for thousands of citizens. Some lost their lives because of bureaucratic incompetence, and others because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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 Biblical fame.
I arrived in New Orleans unprepared for what was to become my life, existing day to day in the morass of dried-up mud and humanity struggling to make ends meet, crammed into FEMA trailers and still reeling from this horrific blow. I was due to work with church groups who were taking crews from everywhere in the U.S. to clean out empty and often abandoned homes.
The group of college students, family members and individuals like myself volunteering at Hilltop disaster relief, an agency out of El Segundo, Calif., would clamber into a van each day which was to take us to the jobsite previously agreed upon by the organization's staff. My first day of "mudding out" on the job - gutting a sodden dwelling down to the studs - was an experience never to be forgotten, nor was a night spent in a disaster-hit elementary school now fixed up with bare sheetrock. The sight of a dirty wet line 15 feet above the floor hinted at what had once been the level of briny sludge, which still scarred the walls of the school.
On a typical day, we would arrive at the dwelling to be gutted, unload the tool trailer of shovels, picks, bolt cutters, crowbars, wheelbarrows, pliers, scrapers and screw drivers, then get a safety talk by the lead hand, followed by instructions on how to wear the obligatory gas mask. We would set to work neatly placing hurricane debris on the curb in a precise manner, in four or five piles according to the type of material, such as kitchen appliances, electric items and chemicals. Any firearms found - which occurred fairly frequently - were to be handed over to the Environmental Protection Agency posthaste.
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Looters are still an issue, too. You can be arrested for picking up anything from a sidewalk that you are not legally entitled to.
At day's end, a prayer circle was formed to conclude the celebration of healing and renewal before packing up the trailer and returning to base and closure.
Conversation turned around the mission. Each volunteer had paid up to $700 just to get to New Orleans, plus $100 for accommodation and a couple hot meals a day.
Back at base, part of the daily clean up was taking apart the gas masks and rinsing them out with alcohol to get rid of the toxic mold that accumulated around the removable parts. The masks gave wearers the appearance of a fighter pilot. I find this appropriate, because a sense of battle fatigue has set in among the hundreds of agencies in disaster relief still plugging away 18 months after Katrina hit. Many feel the frustration of the bureaucratic machinery taking control away from individual homeowners and putting it in the hands of politicians and distant lawmakers in Washington, D.C., remote but profoundly present.
David Wilde
UNM staff
