Sixth of 9 emails describing the Christmann family's Katrina story

christmannemail6(nola).txt

I'm not exactly sure where to start. This is pretty long, because Saturday was one hell of a long day. Please remember as you read what I'm describing: I'm not asking you to feel sorry for us. I'm writing to describe what I experienced, as it feels absolutely unbelievable to me - even while I experience it. I'm writing to try and share those feelings with you, my (and Noel's) friends. I enjoy the writing; I've enjoyed the conversations that have sprung out of these emails; I enjoy the time to try and collect thoughts that rumble through my head as I try to make sense out of where we are going next. But through this all, our family is still doing well. We laugh, we cry, we scream at each other (close living quarters tends to wear nerves a little thin), we *live* - same as all of you. Please don't feel sorry for us. As I've said before, if you feel the need to reach out and help, consider the Red Cross and Catholic Charities. Donate blood. Serve lunch at a homeless shelter in your own city. Reach out to needy people wherever you are. I write that preamble because what I'm going to write paints a pretty grim picture. I'm not sure if you want to see a pictures first, or read first. Your choice. You can what our house now looks like at http://dev.priorartisans.com/paul/katrina/katrina1.html. Last week was a tough week for me. After seeing the flooded house, I'd been agonizing over the uncertainty of what would happen. I keep reading stories about houses being lost to mold, foundations being ruined by water surges, the general damages that can be caused by flooding. So I lay awake at night and wondered whether our house was going to be saveable? Would we have to tear it down? Would our flood insurance be sufficient to cover our losses? And, as many of you undoubtebly know, fears and worries are much much more vivid at 2:00 in the morning when you are lying in bed staring at the clock. But - my father-in-law again called on his connections. He has worked with a real estate agent here in Baton Rouge for 20+ years, This is the agent who has found us the home we are in, arranged furnishings for us at a time when furniture and sheets were very scarce in Baton Rouge, and has delivered us a few delicious home cooked meals. But he outdid himself last week - he arranged for a crew of 10 carpenters and laborers to come with us (Noel and I, her parents and her brother) to New Orleans and start working on all 3 houses. After reading up online and talking to a couple of contractors (thanks for the pointers!), we had what seemed like a decent and simple plan: cut out and throw out everything in the house that was wet. Walls, carpets, floors, whatever. And whatever remained - spray it with bleach/water mixtures to kill mold. Sure, nothing to it. So we spent a week going to the hardware store every day to pick up some more supplies - each day we thought of a few more things, went out and bought in bulk, piled it in the house. Repeat the next day. And the next. Pretty soon, we had a nice sized stack of bags, bleach, brooms, mops, towels, gloves. We left at 5:00 am Saturday morning. One of Leon's law partners is also a corporal in the National Guard. Apparently he was the highest ranking officer stationed at the Superdome in the days after the storm; I would enjoy having lunch with him to talk about his experiences. That law partner arranged for a couple of Guardsmen who had to go to New Orleans anyway to ride with us - just to ensure that we'd be able to get through any checkpoints we might encounter. Remember - New Orleans isn't really "open" right now; you need a pass (which we don't have) to enter the city. It doesn't seem like its a tightly enforced ban (we keep talking to friends who return), but sometimes it is enforced (we also talk to friends who are turned away). So we meet the guardsmen at 5:30 in a deserted parking lot, I hop in the lead car with one of them (just a regular car, not a humvee or jeep or anything cool) and our convoy of 9 cars and trucks hits the road. Unventful drive to New Orleans; the guy I was riding with had been back from a 1 year stint in Afghanistan for about 3 weeks before getting sent to New Orleans. I think this was an easier stint for him. We get to the road block to enter New Orleans (the bridge over the dreaded "17th Street Canal"), and he rolls down the window, says "The next 8 cars are with me." The guardsmen on the bridge says "Yes sir!" and waves us through. Nothing to it. Later, I met the son of our next door neighbor as he arrived to begin cleaning up his parents house. He begged and pled, but the guardsmen wouldn't let him across. So he parked his car, loaded a backpack full of several water jugs and hoofed it about a mile across some railroad tracks over the canal and into the neighborhood. So, having a guard escort was certainly a nice perk. We each got the crew for about 3 hours - we' were trying to tackle as much of each house as we could in one day. So the crew started first at our house, which was a mixed blessing. We didn't have time to prepare our house and think about how to attack it. As soon as we pulled up, Noel and I ran in and started figuring out what needed to be moved in order to let the workers get working. It was a very frantic 3 hours while we stayed no more than a step ahead of the workers. And what did we all do? Short answer: throw away *everything* in the first floor of our house. Longer answer: Noel and I started digging into all of our furniture (china cabinets, entertainment center, etc.) and throwing out everything. We needed to empty these things so the workmen could toss out the furniture. Everything goes into a garbage bag, and then hauled out to an ever growing pile in our front yard. Trip after trip after trip. Everything was soaked, and slimy, so Noel and I chose to wear rubber gloves just to avoid touching it. That was a good choice, but my hands got so damn hot that sweat would pool in the fingers while I was working, so I'd have to stop and hold my hands straight up to allow them to drain. (Ugh, maybe too much information). But despite that discomfort, it was one hell of a lot better than touching all this junk. Going through a cabinet of tupperware, lunchboxes, and other containers was particularly nasty. All of them were still holding the flood waters, which by now (nearly 3 weeks later) was particularly rancid. So each of those had to be carried carefully to avoid spilling. And they *stunk*. Stench was a very common theme for the day. So was heat. The refrigerator was another particularly pleasant place. The fridge had been opened by the flood, so a lot of the food had already made its way around the house where it found convenient places to sit and rot. But the produce drawers were still filled with floodwaters. I thought the tupperware filled with water was bad - take that same aroma and add some rotten potatoes and lettuce and vegetables. Mmmmm... Soup, just like Mom used to make (I'm kidding Mom...) Meanwhile, Noel tackles the china cabinet. We decided that it would be best to get all of our china and crystal out of the house, so she's trying to find a place to pack it. But of course, every surface is unusable except for a kitchen counter top. So the kitchen counter top becomes the center point of all activity and all attempts to salvage anything. Noel is piling china there, the workers are putting artwork there. I'm crawling around the bottom of the cabinets trying to throw out stuff. Its starting to get crowded. Now lets throw in the sheetrock removal. We've removed enough trash and furniture to create some space for the "specialists" to begin their work. They've fired up the generator and brought in the saws-all and start cutting. Generally, they are removing around 4 feet of the walls, as we had about 3 feet of water. When we started the whole cleanup process, the house was still wet. The floodwaters are all gone, but the floors are still very damp. And each of our attempts to remove trash results in splashing a little more water on the floor. So the floor is wet. And sheetrock and water don't mix real well. As they start cutting the sheetrock, it falls on the floor. As it lies on the floor, it mixes with the water creating a nice slippery paste. So now, we're all falling all over each other around the kitchen trying to salvage, trash and chop at the same time, while trying to avoid slipping and falling on our rear on a surface rapidly approaching the consistency of an ice rink. We manage to get the back door of the house open - under the best of conditions it sticks, so after it had been swollen with flood waters, it took a fair amount of effort to get it open. And of course, it won't close afterwards. But it was open - so I figured that would make trash removal easier - two doors to start unloading the house through. But, nothing is actually easy these days. Every step forward (opening the back door) is accompanied by a step backwards. In this case, the path around the side of the house to the front was blocked by a closed gate which was blocked by my car, which is flooded and undriveable, and blocked in place by a small fallen tree. So, there was no way to move trash out the back door to the front of the house. So we're back to a single way in and out of the house. And for those of you who've been to our house, you may have noticed that the one hallway from the back to the front is fairly narrow. So, now we have 14 people in our house trying to move from the front to the back so we can all pile around the kitchen counters to either salvage, trash or cut while slipping on sheetrock paste. And did I mention that it smells? And its hot? Fortunately (1 step forward), 2 of the people were our insurance adjusters. They were the two people that I was waiting to talk to about our house. One of them we had met the week before at Pass Christian, and he seemed like a nice, smart and reasonable guy - at least as nice, smart and reasonable as an insurance guy can be. He's been a disaster guy for 20 years, doing just this kind of work - particularly with hurricanes. So after he's been looking at the house for a while, I finally ask the question I've been losing sleep over: can we rebuild this, or do we have to tear it down. And, much to my relief, he answers without even pausing that we can fix it. He then describes the issues we'll face - but I don't really care at that point. Just the relief of hearing that we aren't looking at a total loss means I can breathe easy (not deeply, though; remember, it smells...) Pretty soon, the workers have finished the back half of the house and move to the front half. That's where we knew it would be hader. The back of the house is sheetrock, which is easy to remove. The front of the house is sheetrock covered plaster. Plaster is a bear to remove, but lots of people suggest that you may not have to. So, they've take out a sledgehammer and trying hitting it in a few places to see how strong the plaster is - and most of it seems pretty strong and solid (another step forward). So they remove the sheetrock. Now we're starting to run short of the 3 hours allotted for the crew at my house, so they start working faster and faster at demolition and less and less at cleanup. Then poof - the clock strikes 12, and the crew packs up and heads to Treys house to work. Way back in this email, I mentioned that it was a mixed blessing to be first with the crew. We had a lot of work to do, and no time to organize. The good thing, though, was we had a fresh crew. From what we heard, they were quickly tiring throughout the rest of the day. So we got a lot of work done in the time we had them, and we needed it. But now I was looking at about a half-a-house full of sheetrock lying on the floors. So I got a shovel and a trash can and bags and started shoveling. And spent the next 5 hours shoveling wet sheetrock into a trash can, dragging it through the house and unloading the bag at the curb. Meanwhile, what is Noel doing? After finishing packing china, she moves on to tackle the one task that really hurt. We lost a lot of stuff in the house. We lost a lot of crap that I'll never think about again. We lost some stuff that we really liked, but will replace. But Noel sat down to pull out several shelves filled with all of our photo albums (except our wedding album - every time we've evacuated, that album has come with us). That was hard. We had talked the week before about how we might be able to save some of them, but as soon as we pulled out the first, we knew it was a lost cause. They were falling apart in her hands. So, all of them went straight to the trash pile. And, to add insult to injury - soaked photo albums weigh a ton. *Nothing* I have ever done in my life compares to this day in terms of physical exertion. I was spent when we called it a day at 6pm. I drank several gallons of water, and lost all of it (and more) in sweat. And, worst of all, I didn't finish the damn job. So, I get to go back and keep shovelling. Yipee. But, I ramble. In the end, we've thrown out just about everything from the first floor of the house. We've chopped sheetrock out from almost everywhere. We've removed all of the baseboards from the first floor. We've sprayed the growing mold with bleach. We've left windows and doors open (didn't have much of a choice about the doors) to try and keep some air circulating. We've learned some interesting things about our house as we opened the walls. We've found plaster in unexpected places (which means parts of the house are older than we thought), and didn't find plaster in some places we thought (which means it was enclosed at different times, or might have been doorways in a prior life). We've found little hidden nooks and crannys that had long since been covered up. We're going to do some remodeling when we start to rebuild, and now I've got all sorts of ideas bopping around in my head. Last thought: I know I've mentioned that it stunk. And it was hot. But I didn't mention what struck me the most as I stood on the street looking around our neighborhood: brown. Everything was brown. Everthing besides the trees (flowers, grass, shrubs) was dead. And not just dead, it was all covered with a thin brown sludge. Tree limbs that had fallen were covered with it, and their leaves were brown. The street was covered with the sludge. Everything was brown. When I was in the city while it was flooded, it seemed colorful. All you could see them (above the water) were the houses, their paints, the trees which still looked green, if somewhat more barren than before. Now that the flood waters are gone, all you see is what was below. Just a brown, dead, mess. I put up some pictures of the house after we finished what we could: http://dev.priorartisans.com/paul/katrina/katrina1.html. The one picture that still strikes me is the one of our backyard: brown. But - The grass and plants will grow back. Our house will be rebuilt. Our neighborhood will come back. We saw several neighbors cleaning out their house, and not one talked of leaving or not rebuilding. Yes, I'm worried about living in New Orleans; what if this happens again? But it is my home now (sorry, Mom and Dad - Wisconsin is still very very near and dear to me). I really can't see living somewhere else. Lots of steps backwards. Then tonight, Trey came over to dinner. He had went back to his house again today. After visiting his house, he stopped by his parents house. And he salvaged two small photo albums of Carrie when she was born and baptized. After having lost our photo albums, we thought we had lost all of the pictures of Carrie (way back in the days before digital cameras). But Trey came through. One giant step forward to start a new week.

Citation Information:

Paul Christmann, " Sixth of 9 emails describing the Christmann family's Katrina story." Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, Object #37 (November 16 2005, 10:33 am)<http://www.hurricanearchive.org/object/37>