[StBernard] A Story of Gutting

Westley Annis westley at da-parish.com
Tue Aug 15 01:18:25 EDT 2006


In New Orleans, Empty and fulfilled: One man's story of work in the Crescent
City, nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina

By Ken Ringle, Special to The Washington Post

NEW ORLEANS - The way you attack one of the thousands of flood-wracked New
Orleans houses still untouched since Hurricane Katrina is to open all the
doors and windows. Then you rip out the screens and wrench out the interior
doors hanging crazily ajar in the ghastly hallways.

You want to get as much air moving through there as possible, and also let
in light, because by this time you're usually up to your knees in leaking,
mold-covered debris, often still soggy 11 months after the storm, and God
only knows what you'll uncover there in the rank and reeking darkness. The
occasional rat isn't really a problem, nor are the cellphone-size roaches or
the spiders as big as your face mask. And though they're still finding
bodies here, that's rare and less disturbing than you might think.

What's really unnerving are those acrid objects you're standing among -
slimy, plastic-wrapped bundles of bed linens and Christmas decorations and
rotting rhinestone shoes; powdery photo albums with peeling pictures of
parents and grandchildren; anniversary mementos, rosaries, china figurines
and hemorrhoid medication: all the heartbreaking and very private detritus
of somebody's shattered life. You're eerily reminded constantly that it's
none of your business. But if you're gutting houses in New Orleans, it
becomes not only your business, but your daily life.

You feel like a mortician washing a corpse. You try to do it with both
efficiency and respect.

Gutting a Katrina house - which costs at least $6,000 if you have to pay for
it - is the first step toward rebuilding it. Homeowners who haven't taken
that first step by Aug. 29, the hurricane's looming first anniversary, face
the prospect that the city may order their flood-damaged house bulldozed. A
city can afford to look like a war zone for only so long, and though far
more questions than answers remain about New Orleans's post-Katrina future,
even those New Orleanians who haven't returned yet from Houston or
Pittsburgh or Atlanta are usually desperate to keep their options open. And
so the gutting crews do their work, moving in vans and pickup trucks through
the silent, empty streets of the flooded neighborhoods, where windowless
houses gape like death masks mile after mile after mile.

The crew This is the story of one of those crews - a pickup collection of
volunteer college kids from around the country, augmented by the occasional
geezer-writer - marshaled with cheerful efficiency and heartening
nondenominational purpose by the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.

Plenty of other church groups, of course, are laboring on behalf of Katrina
survivors as well. Indeed, the stressed-out homeowners will tell you
churches are the only ones doing anything, that they themselves will never
again look with confidence for help from any government agency at any level.
But the Episcopal group recruits even unaffiliated stragglers. If you're
even a single individual out there in Nebraska or Connecticut or Texas or
somewhere, willing to work maybe harder and more fulfillingly than you ever
have for a day or a week or a month or more, they will put you to work. All
you need to believe in is New Orleans.

Volunteers rotate weekly through the St. Andrews crew, but about 20 or so
hard-core veterans remain. They are black and white, male and female, from
all over the country. Most are students or recent graduates of Grinnell
College in Iowa, Kenyon College in Ohio or Ohio Wesleyan University. Very
few are churchy or outwardly religious; even fewer are Episcopalians. But
these young and veteran gutters are superb team leaders, gentle and
empathetic with homeowners, firm but politely patient should some of the
older volunteers patronize them and try to take over.

They party off-duty like any college kids, and are noticeably devoid of
political posturing, save-the-world-itis or the far too common arrogance of
the self-righteous. In fact they don't talk much about their beliefs at all.
But they shake your heart with their untiring sense of purpose.

"Our chief principle in everything we do is that it's not about us, it's
about the homeowners we serve," explained Katie Mears, a 25-year-old white
former Grinnell history major who developed most of the St. Andrews program
over the past seven months.

"And that has taken some getting used to. Many of the homes we work on will
probably never be rebuilt. But they are tremendously important emotional
symbols to the individual homeowners who have lost so much. They want
desperately to leave them cleaned out and tidy.

"We're not just gutting their house, we're helping them hold a funeral for
their former life."

The group works out of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church on Carrollton Avenue,
uptown near Tulane University, and they can probably even house you, which
is really an achievement, given the shortage of affordable beds these days
in the Crescent City. Then they will baptize you into the mold-choked,
sweat-stained, exhausting world of the house-gutter, and in the process
introduce you to some of the most memorable people you've ever met.

`You are my miracle' Chief among those people are the homeowners: people
like Dorothy Ward, a sweet-faced, sad-eyed black woman of 62. Nine months
before Katrina, she and her fiance bought a little three-bedroom, two-bath
house in Fillmore, a lower-middle-class neighborhood of identical tan brick
bungalows south of Lake Ponchartrain and east of City Park. They worked
together on fixing it up. She bought new sheets and linens; he was
refinishing a cabinet for her china collection. They were starting a new
life together. Then Katrina arrived.

She evacuated to Dallas with her daughter and niece. He was going to come
later. But she lost track of him in the chaos after the storm. She was
trying to keep up with the rest of her family and somewhere along there one
of those family members died and she had to deal with that. She never filed
a missing-persons report for her fiance: She thought that cost money, and
she had none.

When Ward finally got back to New Orleans in March, she found a disaster
zone, her house flood-soaked, locked and muddy, with no sign of her fiance.

The china cabinet he had been refinishing for her under the carport was now
perched askew on one corner atop a six-foot fence abutting the house next
door.

She tried contacting public and private agencies for help in cleaning out
her house, but she wasn't feeling well. A medical checkup revealed cancer.
Finally, 10 months after the storm, she paid a neighbor to start cleaning
the house. He found her fiance's body under the moldy horror show inside.
The flood-soaked linens around him were still folded in the packages from
the store.

After that nobody would go near the house. The St. Andrews crew heard her
story, and we were there in three days and had her house cleaned back to the
studs and rafters in two more. She was so grateful she wept. When the
volunteers wouldn't take money, she brought us all fried chicken she had
cooked in her daughter's FEMA trailer.

"God sent you all to me. You are my miracle," Ward told the grimy workers,
smiling through tears in her white church outfit as she left for yet another
funeral. "You can't know how much you've done for me. I feel so blessed."

About the people "Stories like hers are more the rule than the exception in
the flooded neighborhoods," said Holly Heine, who coordinates volunteers for
the diocese's Office of Disaster Response. "You can easily get overwhelmed
if you focus on the enormity of the city's needs. What do we have - 100,000
houses like hers? But we can't let that enormity stop us from reaching out
where we can. So you could say we're working to save New Orleans one person
at a time."

The work starts at 7:30 a.m. each day and ends at 2:30 p.m. to dodge as much
of the city's famously suffocating summer heat as possible. You really don't
want to be in an attic full of insulation dust here much after noon, if
ever, and swinging a sledgehammer after lunch tends to make the world swim a
bit.

Gutting a flooded house is a four-step process. First comes the removal of
the contents, all that life debris that talks back to you. You cart it out
in armloads and wheelbarrows - closets of mildewed suits and dresses,
delaminating dressers filled with muddy makeup bottles and soggy underwear
and hair curlers and videotapes; tangled Venetian blinds and shredded
curtains, sour stuffed animals and corroding clocks. You dump it all in the
street in front of the house until the pile is eight or 10 feet tall, and
you hope the FEMA pickup contractor with the Bobcat and the dump truck will
haul it out of there before you begin knocking down walls.

Once the house is cleared of contents you start removing trim - baseboards,
ceiling molding, door frames, built-in cabinets. This is levered out with
wrecking bars in a banging, screeching process that yields piles of long,
nail-studded boards that snag the overalls and scratch the skin. Tetanus
shots are an obvious prerequisite.

With the trim removed, you can get at the wallboard, almost always soft and
spider-webbed with mold. Depending on how high the floodwaters rose in the
house, you either crowbar it or kick it down to be shoveled up and
wheelbarrowed out. Then some brave soul climbs into the searing, suffocating
attic and begins kicking down the ceiling, sending clouds of insulation dust
to needle your sweaty skin with a million itchy motes of fiberglass.

If you're working in parts of the 9th Ward or Chalmette, you don't need to
take down the ceiling - the water there was so high it took it down for you.

After the first few days, the workers tend to gravitate toward
subspecialties. Those wary of roaches, for example, tend to avoid kitchens,
while others positively live to shatter cabinets, pry out sinks and dolly
away putrid appliances. The women, for some reason, tend to like trim
removal and avoid bathrooms, but one 17-year-old volunteer claims the
greatest therapy in her world is sledgehammering tile and bathtubs.

Yet ultimately it's lives you're working on. The other day the crew was
working near the failed levee on the London Avenue Canal. A rangy black man
named Charlie Brown walked over with his cane to tell us about the people
whose house we were gutting. They were good people, he said,
Italian-Americans who had lived there a long time and evacuated to Houston,
where they still were. Fellow named Tony. Tony's father was the neighborhood
Mr. Fixit, famed for being able to do anything from carving toys for
children to rewiring your stereo.

We thought Charlie might have been exaggerating until we started cleaning
out the little building in back with the carved wooden sign that said "Dad's
Shop." Table saws, drill presses, routers, plumbing snakes, welding tanks,
wrench sets, soldering irons, levels, screwdrivers, a dozen different
hammers - there was no end to the tools, some of them of them obviously
treasured antiques accumulated over a lifetime. They were all organized in
some highly personal fashion, hung from walls and ceiling, squirreled in
drawers among hundreds of jars of nuts, bolts, electrical fuses, hose
clamps, nails, screws and staples of all sizes, never mind all the paints
and refinishing waxes and brushes and rollers and sprayers.

Clearly Tony's dad had both the tools and the skills to rebuild New Orleans
all by himself. How could we throw away his very means of recovery? Most of
the power tools were ruined, but many of the hand tools could be easily
cleaned and refurbished. No one has the time or resources to recycle what
the house gutters remove, but some things can occasionally be put aside in a
corner, awaiting the homeowner's return.

And so we saved what we could for Tony's dad. If and when he returns to New
Orleans. If Dad is even still alive.





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