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Sunday Journal

Immersed in Katrina's miseries

By MARTY NORMILE
Published December 11, 2005

"How can I possibly describe what we are seeing in east Biloxi?" I asked Father Mike, a fellow volunteer who had come to join in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort in southern Mississippi. None of the extensive TV or news coverage in the past two months could do it. No wide-angle lens is wide enough. No words (including these) are adequate. The best that Father Mike could do was say it looks like a war zone.

The best I can do is this: Picture your own house or apartment reduced to wet rubble, literally blown apart. Technically, it still may be standing, but the roof is gone, or the walls have collapsed, or the whole thing has shifted off its foundation. The contents are shattered and soaked to what remains of the ceiling. The only sign of life is mold. Now, extend that image of your own home to the block where you live. Now, enlarge that scene to your neighborhood. Now, take it to the most distant end of your city, and you start to get the picture. And this is months after the disaster.

I arrived for a week of labor, organized under the auspices of Catholic Charities. We were housed and well-fed at the Dedeaux retreat center in Pass Christian, Miss., miles north of the coast, but not far enough to escape damage. The Dedeaux center was formerly a small, rural school building. Classrooms became dormitories, a chapel, kitchen and dining room. The auditorium/gym is now a lounge/all-purpose room. It had electricity, hot showers and full dining service. I gave it a five-star rating. Our only complaint was a wall-rattling snorer. We found him a private room.

Volunteers stream in from all over the country. Some stay for a week or two, and even months. About 10 states were represented during my week there. They come to help with office work, cook, distribute stuff, do outreach counseling, but mostly physical labor. Our crew's assignment was to gut houses for rebuilding.

The east Biloxi neighborhood where we worked is an older, modest, working-class area, made up of small, mostly single-story wood-frame houses, built in the 1940s and '50s. The neighborhood suffered a triple whammy: Wind and storm surges attacked from the gulf on one side, and rising water swept in from the bay on the other. The result was the virtual flattening of several blocks in from the gulf beach. Gone. Splintered. Leveled. Beyond that strip and back toward the bay, the houses are (sort of) standing, but mostly unsalvageable. Street after street, for miles.

On my first day, we arrived at the ruins of St. Louis Catholic Church, which now serves as a central storage site for tools and equipment. We loaded wheelbarrows with shovels, crowbars and sledgehammers and marched into Kuhn Street. This was our crew's second day at this address, but my first. Lucky me, I missed having to help remove the refrigerator and its months-old contents. I got the easy job, removing still soaking wet clothing and personal effects from closets and dressers, pitching it into the wheelbarrow, and dumping it on a 6-foot-high heap at the curb, eventually destined for the landfill.

We spent two more days gutting the house. We protected ourselves from the stench and thickening mold with respirator masks. It was hot and filthy work. I could not imagine the family that had returned two months before to see and pick through this. Nor could I imagine how the house could be salvaged. But it is all they have left.

During breaks, I was able to take in some of the activity in the neighborhood. The first thing that struck me was that each house had a large "X" painted on the front wall. I figured that designated the structure for demolition, which to me made sense. I was wrong. The "X" was an initial survey report. One quadrant reports the date of inspection; another, the initials of the inspector; the bottom quadrant, the number of dead bodies found; and final quadrant, the number of dead pets. It was hard to look, but I saw only "0" for the body count.

Life is returning to Kuhn Street. The Red Cross and Salvation Army distribute hot meals to residents and workers. Families live in tents in their back yards, waiting for FEMA trailers to arrive.

One particularly industrious Vietnamese family stood out. With help from an earlier crew, they had gutted their house, but one more floor needed to be removed. We arrived on Sunday morning to find the place immaculately clean, and a (cold) shower rigged up in the former bathroom. The wash was hanging on a fence near the tent in the driveway, and the wife was squatting in the front yard, under her native hat, cleaning shrimp with a garden hose and cooking for family and neighbors on a one-burner propane stove. The following days, we moved into houses on the next block, and welcomed new volunteers into the cycle that will have to continue for years.

I left humbled.

- Marty Normile lives in St. Petersburg.

[Last modified December 8, 2005, 09:25:03]