Katrina Relief - Our Trip to Mississippi

Follow our blog as we volunteer on the gulf coast

From: David Logan
Posted 1/13/06

The Final Day

For the first time of the trip, all 32 volunteers set out this morning for another home in downtown Biloxi. After a good week of nothing but sunshine, we woke up this morning to the rain coming down heavily. A little discouraged due to heavy rain and loads of lightning, we packed up the bus and headed for the detour to downtown Biloxi. After hearing the possibility of flooding and my bus driver talking about poor driving possibilities, I called Paul at work coordination. He basically told me that we would be fine and that residents would be working so we should too.

Of course, as soon as we reached Ms. Thompson's house it stopped raining and the storm system passed. When we arrived she walked down to her house from a friend's house she had been staying at for the last few months. She took me on a walk through the house, which had received about three feet of water. Only the first four feet of drywall had to come out but houses are always more work than you think. There was a lot of flooring in different rooms that had to go as well as all the doors. Because of the way doors are manufactured these days, four feet of damage on the frame and door means the whole unit has to come out. Additionally, all the hard wood flooring and sub floor had to come up.

So I spread the crew out and got them working in different rooms. Once again, there were cleaners, drywall removers, and door people. The pain with this house was there was an enclosed front porch and steps to the back porch. This made it nearly impossible to get wheelbarrows in to clean out the mess we were making. After everyone got rolling, I took Diego and Len with me to go back to the Parkers to do some final tidying and spray some bleach. As it turns out, this took us a long time because the ceilings were so high and the floors were wood. These factors made for many refills and a slow pace.

We made it back to the Thompson residence at about lunch time. We decided ahead of time to take a half day to rest and shower before another long bus ride back to College Park. So after we got back to the Thompson house; we cleaned up the mess we made and took out a pesky tile floor that gave us some major pains. Even though we took a half day, I estimate the rest of the job can be finished by a crew much smaller than ours in no longer than a day. We made it back to the church by about two o'clock to clean up our sleeping area and eat some grub. We departed Ocean Springs and the gulf coast some time after seven o'clock.

We would like to once again thank everybody who had a hand in raising money for this trip. Without donations, this trip would have not been as affordable and accessible to our contingency. I would also like to thank the 31 people who came down with me; you were intelligent, respectful of those in need, and hardworking from sunrise to sunset.

They need to get some street signs up in this back neighborhood

Today we started our first full day of work in north Biloxi. Off the major highways, we spent 20 minutes looking for a street that was pretty sizable on the map. Our bus driver, Edward, had to go into a hardware store to find the main drag to the neighborhood. Once we got into the neighborhood, the first two turns were marked and the rest were not. So we were lost again and we ended up getting a guy who was working on his mom's house to guide us to the Williams residence.

When we got to the Williams house, I noticed that the bus was suddenly hushed and our crew was pretty stunned. This neighborhood was on the back bay of Biloxi and every house we saw closer to the bay than the Williams home was leveled to the foundation. Whatever belongings that could be saved were stacked in piles next to trailers on top of foundations. One of the more shocking sites was a foundation with only the chimney and fireplace attached. Mr. Williams was well into his older years, yet he had been up since 3:30 a.m. working on the house. He said he had had many days like today and he definitely spent the entire day working by our side.

Throughout the day, Mr.Williams would stop and tell me the stories of the neighborhood. He pointed across the street at a vacant lot where a house used to stand and told me how a young military man attempted to hold out on the flood. The man's body was found days later after he had drowned in his attic. Mr. Williams's son, who is terminally ill and is the actual owner of the house, also waited out the flood. When the water was high enough, he crawled out a window and was hit by an 8 foot wave. He grabbed onto a floating hubcap and was rescued on his roof.

The water at the Williams residence got about 15 feet high. When the water had receded, it appeared that the William's backyard had become the drain in a bathtub. In the backyard there was a thick layer of debris containing personal items from the house, a telephone pole, pieces of neighbors' houses, a shed, and anything else that could have been floating around. On the inside of the house, everything had to go. All of the walls, ceilings, and fixtures had to make their way to our pile in the front yard. I split up a team of 5 each to shovel, wheel, and carry debris from each side of the house. The remaining 20 got to work on the inside of the house. With a crew this large, we had the ability to move pieces of broken roof without any trouble. Who needs a FEMA bobcat when you have 30 sets of hands? To make a point about the absurdity of debris in the Williams yard, there was a tense moment when people found a large furry thing underneath some of the dirt. Mr. Williams told them to watch out because he remembered his son burying a family dog in the vicinity. It turned out to be a stuffed animal.

At about 12, we all took lunch and walked around the neighborhood to check things out. After the walk, I realized that a lot of people were conserving in the same fashion that Mr. Williams was conserving. Around foundations, one can find piles of busted brick and wood that will hopefully be recycled to save money. On our lunch break we also met a little boy and girl playing in the street on their scooters. Their mom said they had just moved in after the hurricane and her brother and father were fixing their new home across from the Williams'. About an hour and a half after getting back to work, the mother came home from running an errand and about 10 people from our crew witnessed an unforgettable situation.

As the mother was pulling her Explorer into the driveway, her 4 year old son disappeared on the other side of the car. She stopped the car and got out screaming, realizing her son was rolling on the ground and had been hit by her car. Sam, who has EMT certification in Maryland, ran over to the kid and did what he could do for his substantial head injury while I called 911 and Beth calmed the mother and sister down. Minutes later, an officer arrived into the scene and moved the boy into the car. Several minutes later, an ambulance showed up and the boy was taken by helicopter to a nearby hospital. When talking to the officer on the scene, I brought to his attention that the ambulance was slow in arriving to the accident and that the streets should be marked better. Later that evening, we received word that the boy would live and would be out of the hospital in a week. This news and completion of work for the Williams residence was the cause for much celebration.

Just Do What You Guys Do

After getting in at 3 a.m., we met up with Jim Antonakas, a volunteer coordinator for the ELCA disaster response. They didn't have a place for us to stay until later in the day so we slept in the bus until breakfast at seven o'clock.

Shortly after some fruit cocktail and egg surprise, we attended work orientation and most of our group received tetanus shots from the clinical staff. There was a lot of confusion in the first half of the day due to the church facilitating around 250 volunteers that day. At about 10:30 or so we unpacked the bus and got settled in our new home for the next week. We were all placed in a big room called the blue room in the back of the church that housed about 60 volunteers.

After lunch, I met up with work crew coordinators Paul and Lynn Wessell to figure out what our 32 students from Maryland would be doing. Paul and Lynn come in at 7:30 every morning and don't leave until after dinner pretty much every night. Needless to say, work crew coordination at Christus Victor is quite a task. We left some people behind at headquarters to help equipment manager Ray do things like sort gloves and sharpen tools. We also left some people behind to help out at the distribution center. They did things like fold sheets and organize supplies. After several weeks and mountains of donations coming in, the ELCA opened up a distribution center a mile down Bienville Boulevard to better serve Ocean Springs and the surrounding areas. The distribution center serves about 150 cars a day handing out anything from food to furniture. Apparently, there are few distribution centers servicing the Mississippi gulf coast. This situation forces some families to drive over an hour to reach this supply center on a weekly basis.

After leaving some folks behind, we dropped off a crew of ten at the Baker residence in Ocean Springs. The Bakers are an older couple whose family room ceiling was damaged and needed replacement. The damage was the result of a tree that came through the roof during the winds of Katrina. It was the winds in this area that did the most damage. It's important to note that almost every house in the surrounding area has some sort of tarp rig on its roof. After putting a drop cloth down and taking out the ceiling, the crew walked down the street to survey the damage on the bay shore of Ocean Springs. The houses on the bayside were either demolished, barely standing on stilts, or leveled to the foundation.

I stayed with another work crew of ten that was sent east to the Holly residence in the neighboring town of Gautier. During the storm, the Hollys received ten feet of flooding in half of their house and about four feet in the other half. When I met with Buster Holly, he basically showed me the water lines and said, "Just do what you guys do." Not really sure of what to do, I told my crew to start taking out walls and nails from studs. We spent our half-day shifting around the Hollys' belongings and taking a majority of the drywall and door frames out of the house. We stopped at about 4:30 and left a large pile in the Hollys' front yard. I guess the object of our house gutting work crew is to produce a huge pile in a day's work. In that spirit, a giant pile of moldy drywall, insulation, and framing in the Hollys' front yard marked the day's completion.

Arrival at Ocean Springs

Thirty-two volunteers from the MaryPIRG chapter at the University of Maryland arrived at the Christus Victor Lutheran Church in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, shortly after 3 a.m. on January 7th. We would like to thank all of the sports fans who gave money while we waved buckets for Biloxi, everyone who donated money to the MaryPIRG Foundation for our cause, and everyone who had a hand in planning and attending bingo night. It has been a hard road for financial support, but this ELCA outfit in Ocean Springs has provided us with shelter, food, and the means to put a good dent in the needs of those who have been deemed the ?new poor.? The intention of this online journal is to share the experience of our large crew and relay the personal struggles that we may encounter while providing relief in the Gulf. The days here are long with good reason, so bear with us as we find time to sit down and pass along the details of our trip.