The Leader

Some movies don’t have happy endings. Some movies don’t have endings, period. For the people of New Orleans, LA, St. Bernard Parish and much of the Gulf Coast, their horror has yet to end even 16 months after Hurricane Katrina first spent her wrath upon their homes. During the week of Jan. 2, 2007 to Jan. 10, 2007, I joined a group of 65 disaster relief volunteers in a living hell that’s burnt forever into our hearts.

Imagine for a moment your hometown: abandoned, absolutely lifeless. Every house is empty, windows are broken and on every door you see a large, spray painted X. In one corner of the X, you see the date the house was initially searched; in another corner, you see which National Guard unit examined the house; finally you see a number. This number tells you how many bodies, if any, were found. If you’re fortunate, you’ll see a zero in that corner. Look in some windows and you’ll see many houses that have already been mucked and gutted, and all the carpeting, insulation and drywall have been peeled out, leaving nothing but cold concrete and greasy studs.

Some houses haven’t come so far just yet. Look in a few windows and you’ll see tables dangling from ceiling fans, piles of muddy furniture and other things.

I worked as a wrecker that week. With a team of nine other volunteers, I walked through two houses in St. Bernard Parish, hammer and crowbar in hand, tearing moldy drywall to the ground, yanking nails and nearly crushing a toe beneath a bathtub. With all the dust, mold and crap hanging in the air, we all but needed hazmat suits for our expedition; polyester overalls that didn’t breathe, rubber galoshes that rubbed the flesh from your toes and respirators that refused to let any air in were our constant clobber.

Still, we carried on.

We carried on for the people of St. Bernard’s Parish; for those people who picked up and left, and for those people who chose to stay (or had no choice), we carried on. Anyone with small children who could leave was wise to do so. The soil, the houses, everything touched by the floodwaters was coated in a fine layer of sewage, oil, chemicals and death. Only a fool would try to start a garden in that soil now. Those brave or stupid enough to stay and rebuild were few and far between; over a four block area, two, maybe three houses will have their own little FEMA trailer parked out front. The rest will probably sell their properties to the state for a pittance.

One man who stayed behind, who had successfully rebuilt his house, was one of New Orleans’ finest. Not two weeks after he had redone his drywall, his carpet, his wiring, everything, and refurnished his house, looters swept through and stole almost everything. One of our group leaders, a fellow by the name of Mike, had a house in the Ninth Ward when Katrina hit; when the storm came, he packed up his wife and five-year-old son, and waited. When he was finally able to return home, almost everything he owned had been destroyed- everything except his DVD collection, the fine china, and an inflatable Christmas lawn ornament had been completely destroyed in the floods. He has since moved up here to Wisconsin, but once again, he is one of the few lucky ones.

There is still so much I could say, so much I could tell you about that week in January, but there just isn’t the room. I could tell you about the half-assed replacement levees, the wasteland that is now the Lower Ninth Ward, the 18-wheelers half-sunk in the bayou like they were child’s toys, but I can’t. Pictures, movies, stories do absolutely nothing to bring the horror to life; these people still need our help after 16 months, but it’s so hard to articulate the urgency. If you have a spare week, if you know anything about dry walling or hanging doors, if you know how to swing a hammer, go. Go and see for yourself that New Orleans’ horror movie has only just begun and they’re in desperate need of a hero.

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