Mary writes:
Being not long home from the storm ravaged areas left in Hurricane Katina’s wake, we’re left in shock and awe on so many fronts.
Everything familiar changed for these folks some 16 months ago. Everyone we spoke to had a horrible story to tell, yet they still hang onto the hope that some day they will get their community back, their lives back, their businesses back.
That process is painfully slow, and I mean painfully slow. We were astounded to see that much of the area is still in ruins, massive heaps of peoples belongings still piled up on ravaged front lawns, littering streets, bayous, parklands. Many upper middle class homes (brick and mortar), destroyed, still abandoned since the floodwaters receded. Chandeliers still hang from collapsing gabled ceilings. Cars left. Boats still perched on fences and rooftops.
Traditional clapboard homes sat saturated in the salt water for 3 weeks, salt water that left in its wake structural damage and mold. Most of the homes took a greater toll by sitting in salt water for weeks, than they did from the hurricane winds and the over 300 tornadoes that were generated in the storm. The insurance companies are calling the majority of the damage, flood damage and it is not insurable in most cases.
Over the past 16 months the rats, snakes and spiders have moved in, making clean up that more dangerous.
With the storm, almost all of the jobs were lost. The community tax base has all but disappeared, hence few funds to repair infrastructure. Pumper trucks today still draw raw sewage from the lines and directly dump effluent into the Gulf and surrounding bayous.
While the powers that be, try to figure out where they are going with this mess, the desire from the community is still to hang onto what they have and rebuild.
The situation is desperate. Never in my life had I imagined that I would see such destruction especially 16 months after the fact.
We are all connected to New Orleans and the surrounding parishes by a few interstate highways. In less than 24 hours of driving from this continent's worst weather disaster in New Orleans, we can be at ground zero. We made the events of September 11th our business - like it or not the social genocide that may come from Hurricane Katrina is our business too!
While we were at Habitat for Humanity’s Camp Hope and in the surrounding communities the citizens there pleaded with us to, send as many people to help as possible, to plead with others to send funds if they couldn’t volunteer, and to ourselves to return, soon and often.
Habitat for Humanity and Camp Hope has a job for any one of any skill level.
We went down with the mind set that we would be on the tail end of the clean up only to find that the clean up and the rebuilding is just beginning.
To learn more about how YOU can help please visit: http://www.camphopeonline.com/howtovolunteer.html
To see the photo above in a larger format please click here.
Note the dentist's chair - washed out and still sitting on the street.
No comments:
Post a Comment