University of Virginia, New Orleans Journals

Monday, January 9, 2006

Justin Starr, School of Engineering and Applied Science

Imagine yourself in a far away nation -- preferably somewhere

in the third world, getting extensive news coverage after a war.

Imagine the devastation -- the suffering, the damage, the sheer

numbers of lives that have been affected. Now take this mental

image and apply it to the United States -- to one of America's

storied cities, New Orleans. With that image in mind, one can

begin to understand what things were like in the Ninth Ward

today.

Our day began lightly -- most of us were delighted to have slept

on the relative comfort of our air mattresses on an auditorium

floor, rather than the constant motion of yesterday's Amtrak

ride. We awoke early, ate breakfast and began our day with a

tour of New Orleans, in order to provide some sort of context for

the work we were going to be doing

Intentionally, our tour began in some areas of the city that only

sustained minor damage from the hurricane, and progressed

into areas more and more damaged. The contrast was striking.

At first, I found myself visibly moved to see a damaged roof on

a house, or a water line on a door, not realizing that this was

only the tip of the iceberg. At one point, we drove to a levee that

had failed to look at some of the destruction -- and words

cannot even describe the sight.

I was immediately struck with how the homes surrounding us

had been destroyed -- gaping holes in the roofs, broken

windows, all personal belongings on the street, and the interior

completely gutted, leaving only the broken shell of someone's

home remaining. I just couldn't begin to comprehend the

magnitude of looking down a street and seeing blocks and

blocks of similar devastation, then moving down another street

and seeing more of the same. It was really breathtaking, in a

horrible way.

At one point, while looking at a Volkswagen Beetle, I thought I

could process everything, doing the math and realizing that

about 50 houses that I could see had likely sustained significant

damage. But then when I tried to apply human life to this figure,

I just couldn't. I tried to imagine losing my home and all worldly

possessions, but then to effectively apply this same level of loss

to my entire hometown (which is admittedly small) was really

hard to process. I tried to focus on the good things -- all homes were spray

painted with a graffiti-esque code, indicating whether or not

bodies were found during an inspection, among other things,

and very few things we saw had actual casualties. But on other

homes, a simple spray-painted message -- help! -- quickly

sobered my spirits. Another message, painted by the SPCA

said simply -- dead dog.

We also went on a walkthrough of a damaged school -- St.

Mary's -- a high school which is merging with Xavier University

Preparatory school, to allow students to get a semester of

school in. This school had a watermark five feet up on the first

floor, and was completely and totally gutted inside. A cafeteria,

with a rack of pots and pans sat empty, and math books sat

high on a shelf in a closet, everything below them having been

gutted. In one corner of one room sat some band remnants --

some moldy clarinets, marching shoes, and a toy bass drum. After this -- which believe it or not -- was the beginning and

easiest part of our day -- we went to the Ninth Ward to help a

priest of a church affiliated with the school we are staying with,

gut homes ravaged by mold, and again this was an experience

that is difficult to describe.

We first approached homes that looked undamaged and normal

from the outside -- just like any other homes, aside from the

spray paint and some water marks. Upon entering, we realized

that they had truly ceased to be anything resembling homes.

The floodwaters -- which swamped many of these houses for

days -- had scooped everything up inside, displaced it all,

swirled it around, and then deposited it on the ground upon

receding, along with whatever unpleasant material was hidden

in the waters themselves.

In essence, to imagine this, take everything in your living room,

throw it in a literal blender, add sulfur, rotten eggs and brown

food coloring, shake it vigorously and then dump it all over the

ground. Now try to sort through it all.

An elderly woman -- 80 years old, I think -- had just returned

home to one of the places we were gutting. From her kitchen

vantage point, she watched as we threw all of the remnants of

her life in the trash can -- commenting only, that she could

possibly bleach the china, and save it -- in a way grasp on to a

tiny piece of the life she once possessed. I had a particularly

difficult moment, when breaking through a wall of rotted, moldy

sheetrock, and discovering a closet -- still full of the woman's

clothes -- on the other side. Everything, even the sweaters she

had neatly and carefully attempted to seal in plastic bags, was

ruined. Everything had to be thrown out.

This was indeed overwhelming.

Upon exiting the house, and looking around, it became clear

that this situation was the status quo, in almost all of the homes

we could see in the 9th Ward -- maybe hundreds -- I'm not

really sure. Everything was like what we had been dealing with,

and it was like nothing I had ever seen. One of the other people

working with us commented that they had, as of that morning

found bodies in the homes -- whether true or not, it was

certainly believable. People's lives were just completely

destroyed, and quite frankly, I wasn't prepared to see all of that.

I had especially thought that now -- plus or minus five months

after Katrina struck -- it was astonishing that there was still so

much damage. The news media may not discuss it anymore,

but there is still so much to be done in New Orleans. In one

afternoon, we almost completed gutting two houses, upon which

the process had already begun, with about 10 of us in each

house. We only provided a drop in the bucket, in terms of what

we accomplished as compared to what we was needed. And we

were only demolishing -- not even rebuilding at all!

In essence, I left the day, after working in homes, and seeing

the flooded school, with a feeling that more than lives and

property had been damaged. In truth, with devastation as vast

as that wrought by Katrina, entire communities had been

uprooted and displaced. People talk in abstract terms about

returning to a neighborhood, when essentially, in many cases,

there isn't even a neighborhood to return to.

When it was all said and done, and we returned to our

auditorium floor for the night, the overwhelming thing people

talked about was how grateful they were -- for family, friends,

possessions and a sense of place. Minor discomforts, like leaky

air mattresses and getting stuck with peanut rather than plain M

& M's, just didn't seem as pressing. I think all of us have a real

sense of how well off we really are, and yet, at the same time

are excited to wake up at 6:15 a.m. tomorrow morning, pile into

vans, and get back out there and do some more work -- and put

another drop in the bucket.

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