Day 9 – A time to tear down

Dawn on Friday found me at the Celebration Church Disaster Recovery facility.

It was located in an old shopping center, which had been converted into a church, which had then been converted into a dormitory and mess hall.

Every day, for the past 13 months and counting, dozens or even hundreds of volunteers would sleep, eat, and work out of this makeshift facility. Groups would come in vans and buses and planes from Dallas and Birmingham and Shreveport and places even more distant or close in. They would stay for a day or two, a week or two, or a year or two. Some would serve free meals. Some would operate a free store. Some would perform the overwhelming task of cleaning up New Orleans—-literally. Physically.

They would each provide their own transportation, and pay $20 daily for room and board. Room was, well, literally one huge room. Tarps were hung from the ceiling to subdivide it into several dormitory corridors, each containing long rows of narrow cots. Bathrooms and showers had been added by putting up plywood walls supported by a metal frame. Additional showers had been added in the parking lot, along with rows of port-a-potties.

On this day, a group of mostly single 20-somethings had come down from my home church in Dallas in an all-night charter bus caravan. Our group, 96 strong, was joined at breakfast by a smaller group of high school students who were just finishing their NOLA stay, and another church group from Alabama would be joining us in the evening.

After breakfast, a devotional time was held in a tent out on the parking lot. The pastor for Celebration Church, who was introduced simply as Lance, gave a short talk. Lance did not look like your stereotypical church leader, unless perhaps said church leader had been stranded on an island for a couple of years. His shoulder-length hair and pectoral-length beard, along with his humble street clothes, made it easier to picture him as a homeless person than the pastor of a multi-campus church.

One of the high school boys in front of me joked to his friend, “Is that Jesus?” He had a point. Lance did come closer to fitting the stereotypical picture of Jesus than the stereotypical picture of a church pastor. (And yes, I do get the irony that Jesus would look out-of-place at a church pulpit.) I didn’t fully get the joke until a few minutes later, though, when I headed back to the dormitory and noticed the large painting on the wall above the door. The picture showed a man, of apparent giant size, stretching his hands out over the downtown New Orleans skyline. Taking a cue from Godzilla, I nicknamed the painting “Jesus vs. New Orleans”. I automatically assumed that the man in the painting was Jesus, but at second glance, I realized that this particular artist’s view of Jesus looked extremely similar to the hairy Lance.

As if to complete the picture, Lance mentioned that, in his spare time, he has been walking up the Mississippi River, carrying a large wooden cross as he prays for America.

After the devotional by Lance the Jesus, we were split into rental van groups of 12 and given our assignments for the day. For my team, team 6, we were to go and finish stripping out the inside of a particular woman’s house.

When the homes of New Orleans were flooded, the water, mixed with toxic chemicals from the city’s industries, rendered useless anything it came in contact with. This includes not only clothing and furniture, but also sheet rock, plaster, and insulation. Only the frames of the houses affected were worth preserving.

So, thousands and thousands of houses have to be stripped down to the bones, and the huge piles of resulting trash have to be disposed of. This is not, you might say, a quick fix. The Celebration Church Disaster Recovery leadership fully expect their work to continue for another 5 or 10 years, and they are fully committed to seeing the work through.

Fully committed to doing our job for just 2 days, team 6 set out to find our assigned house. Each of us had brought along the recommended gloves, safety glasses, hats, professional-grade dust masks, and clothing that we wouldn’t mind getting more than a little bit dirty. The floor of the van was covered by the various tools we had borrowed from Celebration’s armory of donated items.

Our platoon of Young Urban Professionals really didn’t know what the heck we were up against, as we reached the house and each grabbed a tool from the selection of brooms, rakes, shovels, sledgehammers, and the like. I picked up a 3-foot-long crowbar, which I soon learned was the Excalibur of tools for this particular job.

The house was a shotgun-style duplex, with a furnished garage out back. A previous work crew had removed all of the furniture and had demolished part of the inside wall of the house. After getting clarification on what we were supposed to tear out—everything—we got to work.

The ancient house had been built with plaster walls on top of wooden slats. This is why the crowbar was so useful; it could bust up the plaster, all the way up to the ceiling, and break or rip out the wooden slats 4 or 5 at a time. Each swing covered me with dust from the plaster, and sent wood shards flying at my safety goggles. Still, I continued on with nearly a frenzied gusto. I mean, this was fun. I got to beat the crud out of every non-human thing in sight and make a giant mess, which I didn’t even have to clean up because other people had chosen the brooms and shovels.

After running out of things I could destroy inside the house, a few of us moved on to the garage apartment. This had not been touched by the previous group, and still had all of its furniture and other junk. It also made it much more clear to me exactly why we were tearing everything out.

The water had risen essentially to the ceiling of the garage, and had probably stayed there for a while. The wooden blades of the ceiling fan drooped downward like dead flower petals. The dirty walls had patches of black mold growing on them. A clothes dryer lay on its side in the middle of the room, next to an upright washing machine atop which was perched a large wooden wardrobe. Apparently the heavy wardrobe had floated on top of the water as it receded, coming to rest like Noah’s ark after the flood. A smaller wardrobe, its wood doors rotten, lay on top of a pile of junk that included a Christmas tree, children’s books, and a metal patio table. A large iron birdcage sat in a corner, sans bird. Two small file cabinets were rusted shut, while one of those small fireproof protect-from-anything safes had apparently done its job. A box perched atop an upended file drawer contained keepsakes and a couple of photo albums—with every photo reduced to an abstract swirl of colors. A 5-gallon bucket was found to contain about a gallon of leftover jet-black water and 2 gallons of loose change, discolored and corroded by the water.

We amended the toss-everything rule, and left the safe and the money there. Someone would contact the owner about them. Everything else—all of this woman’s possessions—went to the curb, and later to the landfill.

After finishing our job, we still had a little bit of time left in our day, so we went for a tour of some of the areas most affected by Katrina.

New Orleans is possibly the world’s largest ghost town, as huge swaths of the city still lie empty. These were the people on TV—those who had no way to get out ahead of the storm, and who were eventually bussed from places like the Superdome to places like the Astrodome in Houston and Reunion Arena in Dallas. Those who could not or would not leave now can not or will not come back.

With the supply of usable housing much diminished, what is available has jumped in price. Apartments that cost $500 per month before Katrina fetch $900 per month now. The working poor, though, would be coming back to jobs that still pay only minimum wage. They can no longer afford to live in New Orleans.

As we drove down abandoned streets, we saw a few obvious signs of the storm’s damage—the steel repairs made to a section of the concrete levee wall, the occasional house fully intact but moved several feet off its foundation. As we had just seen, though, the real damage usually could not be seen from the street. So, we looked for clues: the filthy high-water mark that formed a dotted line as we drove by house after house, or the rescue signs painted on rooftops that we had all seen from the helicopter TV shots.

Mostly, though, we looked at the messages painted on the front of every house.

When rescuers were looking for survivors, they had to canvass every single house to make sure no one was trapped somewhere inside. To organize the search and keep track of what they found inside, they spray painted a big “X” on the front of every single house. The “X” was just to create 4 quadrants, in which they painted numbers and letters that had different meanings depending on which quadrant they were in. Luckily, one of our team members had a Blackberry with him, and was able to look up what the markings meant.

At the top of the “X” was the date the house was searched. Every building we saw listed a date from sometime in September, and we had to remind ourselves that the paint had been there over a year and was not referring to dates last month.

To the left of the “X” was a code, usually 3 letters, that identified the person or agency that made the search.

To the right of the “X” was supposed to be another code, identifying the kind of damage the house received. We saw one neighborhood where, without any “X”, each building had the acronym “TFW” painted on it. “TFW”, we learned, stands for “toxic flood water”.

And at the bottom of the “X” was a number that was the most telling part of the entire disaster. The number at the bottom was the number of dead bodies found inside. Thankfully, we saw almost nothing but zeros on our trip. Sometimes the number was no longer legible, and on a couple of these I thought I perhaps saw a faint “2”.

One small house had a rather distinct “99” painted there, but I’m guessing that whoever wrote that did not understand the instructions.

A good number of houses had notes painted on them about dogs or cats living inside. These usually had follow-up notes written by the SPCA a week or two later, either stating that the pet had been picked up or, more commonly, something along the lines of “dog missing”. I thought it said something about our society that such comments about animals drew a bigger pitying response from the people in our van than any concerns about the people who had lived there.

© 2006 by Kevin McConaghy. All rights reserved.