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Walking Through New Orleans: As Katrina Survivors Return Home, They Often Must Rely on the Kindness of Strangers

Posted on: Sunday, 18 December 2005, 21:00 CST

By Lara Weber, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune

Dec. 18--IT'S CURIOUS WHAT PEOPLE WANT when they've lost nearly everything. For Gayle Butler, it was a hat.

But a very particular pale-green hat, perched safely atop an armoire in the bedroom of a house that Hurricane Katrina had turned into a cesspool of black muck and mold and filth.

She'd bought the hat during a vacation, just before hurricane season, at a little store in Alabama called Shop Till I Drop. It matches her Sunday suit, she says, the one she took with her when she fled her house in the New Orleans East neighborhood, never in her life expecting all of this.

"Do you think you could reach it?" she asks.

There are six of us standing on Butler's front lawn on this bright October afternoon: four Peace Corps volunteers, including me, and two firefighters. Our two cars are packed with prepared meals, coolers of ice water, blue tarps and stacks of brochures about the health hazards of mold.

I had arrived in New Orleans two weeks earlier with Tina Borgeson, Lauren Herzer and Leslie Noa, part of a contingent of Peace Corps volunteers who had answered a call by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for workers to bolster the miniscule FEMA staff in the hurricane zone.

The Peace Corps, which had never in its 45-year history deployed volunteers to work within the U.S., agreed to supply up to 400 experienced hands for 30-day assignments. Like the other volunteers, the four of us had completed at least two years of service overseas (I had coordinated HIV programs in Zambia from 2000-2002).

We first were assigned to FEMA's Individual Assistance group and spent several days at the agency's Orlando, Fla., regional office, where a parade of instructors struggled to explain how to process claims and navigate the tangled maze of benefits and services available to disaster survivors. We were stunned that FEMA would put a group of experienced, Third World-hardened workers behind a bank of computers for a month. By the time we arrived in Baton Rouge to get our assignments from the Louisiana FEMA office, we had decided that claims-processing, essential as it is, was definitely not the kind of disaster relief we were there to do.

We met a group of equally frustrated firefighters who were threatening to drive home to Ohio if they weren't put to work immediately. Some of them had heard of another FEMA group, Community Relations, which was sending workers to New Orleans to help returning residents as parts of the city reopened the next day. Together, we orchestrated a bureaucratic defection and got assigned to Task Force 83, a team of more than 300 firefighters traveling by convoy into New Orleans that night, Sept. 29.

By dinnertime, we'd thrown our sleeping bags, backpacks and extra cases of water into our rental car and filed onto Interstate 10, the traffic-bogged highway south to New Orleans.

At a checkpoint on the edge of the city, we flashed our FEMA badges-our hall passes to anywhere-and drove into another world: Pitch-black highways, a blank skyline, chunks of tire-puncturing debris on the road, the Superdome almost lost in the night. Emptiness. When we crossed over the Mississippi River into the Algiers neighborhood, the eeriness evaporated and fresh signs directed us to our new tent-city home, New Orleans Base Camp.

ur assignment is simple, but not easy: Trek out each morning along the desolate streets of New Orleans and offer help to anyone who looks like they need it.

In some neighborhoods we walk door-to-door, calling out to anyone who might be home. In New Orleans East, where Gayle Butler lives, there is no point in walking. Virtually no one is home because few homes are livable. That isn't immediately obvious, because the houses are still standing. But then you notice the high waterline, the mark along the walls that looks like a bathtub ring and shows how deep under water a house had sat.

We meet Butler's brother-in-law first. Kenneth Brigalia lives in the house across the street from hers. Her twin brother lives down the street. The three came back together, just for a few hours, to see what they could salvage, to take care of things.

In particular, they are trying to satisfy their insurance company's demand for serial numbers of all the electronics they lost. As if.

"Can you imagine?" asks Brigalia, a hulking man with defeat hanging on his face.

We offer bottles of water, lunch.

"No, thanks. We're all set," he says. People almost always say no at first. So we linger a little, ask about the damage, ask if they have somewhere safe to stay.

Brigalia says he isn't sure what to do next. Gut the house and start over? But it would never be the same. Sell the house? Maybe, but he'd feel guilty thinking that a new owner might get sick from the mold.

At Butler's house, the waterline makes a stripe across the top of her front door, above her head as she steps out to greet us.

"You have cold water?" she asks, sweating in her plastic hazmat suit, rubber boots and a shower cap. Tim Reazin, a volunteer firefighter from Eudora, Kan., pops his trunk and starts handing around bottles. Butler peels off her blue rubber gloves and takes one.

"They used to call me the clean-up woman," she says, waving her arms at a front lawn full of mud-soaked furniture. "Woo, Lord! I never saw cleaning up like this!"

We offer our services again, and she surveys this little invasion of do-gooders on her front lawn. "There is one thing you could help me with," she says. "My hat. It's still in the box, up high. I think it's OK, but I just can't get to it."

Reazin, Lauren Herzer and I follow Butler into the house, careful not to touch the mold oozing from the walls and avoiding places where the muck is ankle-deep. We cover our mouths so our lungs won't fill up with the toxins from the sludge on the floor. Once inside the bedroom, Herzer points a flashlight at the armoire and Reazin carefully lifts the hat box off the top.

Back in the sunlight and fresh air, Butler triumphantly removes the lid off the Aussie Austine hatbox, undoes the plastic wrapping and pulls out the satiny pale-green hat she bought in Alabama. "Jesus, I had a great vacation," she exclaims.

A few minutes pass and she has another idea: "You know, my baby dolls are up on the shelf." Herzer disappears back into the sludge and emerges with a handful of collectors' dolls.

"Oh, you are life savers!" says an ecstatic Butler. She insists on group photos with everyone, including the dolls.

"You all gave us a reason to smile," Brigalia says. "Something we haven't had time for yet."

Suddenly, a HumVee roars up, a harsh reminder of the war-zone conditions we're working in, and four full-gear soldiers leap out with machine guns in hand. "What's going on here?" demands one of the GIs, who wears a we-mean-business expression under his combat helmet.

"You arrived at the wrong time," Butler tells the soldiers, while sitting in an LSU chair in the middle of the street. " 'Cuz these people already got here and rescued my baby dolls."

WITHIN A FEW WEEKS, the French Quarter would begin partying its way back to its pre-Katrina, have-another-Jello-shot-and-pump-up-the-music reputation. A few neighborhoods would start perking back to life and businesses would slowly begin to reopen their doors.

But in early October it is dark and ominous, full of strangers-cops, firefighters, FBI agents and even park rangers from around the U.S..

Some signs of normal life are starting to sneak into the bleak landscape, but they have a surreal quality. A tarot card reader has set up her fortune-telling table on Bourbon Street, but most of her takers are relief workers. A guy hawks "3-for-1 beers!" outside a dance club, but the drinkers tonight are still wearing sludge-covered boots and firefighter T-shirts and they'll be too tired for more than one beer.

Across the street from Jackson Square, a cluster of white tents looks like a VIP setup for the Sugar Bowl or Mardi Gras, but it's merely a place for relief workers to sleep on a cot, grab a shower and eat a hot meal.

Similar tent cities have sprung up all over the region-the one we're sleeping in is just across the river-but this one has good food and it's on the edge of the French Quarter, the one part of the city that escaped most of Katrina's wrath. We can go into the Quarter each evening and scrub away the day's grime at a hand-washing station with clean pumped-in water, then pick up a heaping plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes or whatever comfort food they are dishing out that night.

Curfews are the rule, and there isn't much reason to stay out after dinner. So when word spreads that there is going to be live music at the Maple Leaf-a ratty bar in Uptown where legends like the Rebirth Brass Band are known to show up and shake it down all night-we know we'll be there.

It doesn't matter that most of Uptown is still without power, or that debris and fallen tree limbs are still strewn across deserted streets. Headlights stream into the neighborhood and bring Oak Street to life well after sunset.

Inside, the bar is kicking by 9 p.m., everyone determined to pack in a good night before the midnight curfew. From a small stage, the dancing and singing of a rushed-together blues band almost drives away the nothingness outside.

Snippets of small talk surround us, though, and we soon realize we're in a late-night group-therapy session. Most everyone dancing and drinking and mingling here has lost something. Maybe everything. Or they're FEMA inspectors and relief workers like us, trudging through the muck every day, listening to horror stories. Or they're get-rich-quick contractors. No one in New Orleans in early October is a tourist.

As Peace Corps workers, the scene in the bar feels familiar to us, like a Third World hot spot where distraught locals, cowboy aid workers and cagey opportunists drink and swap "worst-thing-I-saw-today" stories.

A guy introduces himself to us as Harry Connick Jr.'s drummer. He tells us his family has lost everything in the Lower 9th Ward. We listen. His friend is trying to have a good time, offering us beers, but he keeps getting choked up: He found his father dead in his house after the hurricane. That's bar talk in New Orleans.

Too soon, it's almost midnight, and we go home to our tent cities or dark houses or borrowed rooms to sleep hard, rise early and head out to hear more stories of loss and struggle.

IN UPTOWN, NANCY WHITTY is pleading for a visit from the local power company. A neatly written note hangs on the front door of her narrow pink house.

"Entergy: Don't leave! We love you, we want you, we need you! We've been waiting for sooo long," it says in black Magic Marker with bright squiggly lines under random words. The note ends with instructions to find her around the corner, at the Oak Street Cafe.

Volunteer Tina Borgeson and I meet Whitty and her best friend, Trish Brooks, while knocking on doors in a section of the Uptown neighborhood. Front doors hang open, and it's easy to peer into vacant rooms, some still intact with sofas and coffee tables and dishes left out from a meal quickly abandoned.

"Fire Department!" we yell, rapping our knuckles sore on door after door. We duck under downed power lines that probably aren't live, but you never know. We step clear of abandoned refrigerators and their nauseating stench of rotted food.

The city opened the neighborhood a few days before, but it feels like we're the only people here. There are eight of us this morning in a unit responsible for a 10-block-square area that includes an artsy stretch of boutiques and cafes and the modest wood-frame houses nearby. We leave our cars-trunks full of supplies-at a shuttered gas station a few blocks away and fan out through the streets in pairs, each person taking one side of the street, knocking, knocking, knocking, but keeping an eye on our partner in case something unexpected happens.

Nothing at all is happening until we get to the pink house on Dante Street. A giant cedar tree has crashed across the front yard, but the front door is open, and there are voices inside.

"Fire Department!" I pause and listen.

"Hello!" A woman's voice is nearing the door.

"How are you?" I ask. The question feels abnormally normal, considering the tree in the yard and the lack of neighbors, but it lets people be as open or as silent as they want.

Brooks, a middle-aged woman with straight bobbed hair and a young, sun-tanned face, looks startled to see us.

"Is there anything you need?" I ask.

"Oh! Hang on! Nancy! There are some people out here to help," she says, telling me she's not the homeowner. An excitable woman appears, her disheveled blond hair spilling into her face.

Their words tripping over each other's, Whitty and Brooks tell us how they returned to the house the day before and spent a scary, dark night without power on this dead street. A patrol of New York State police stopped by and stayed outside with them for a while, they say.

They interrupt themselves as they talk, firing questions at Borgeson and me: "Is anyone else around? And you said you have cold water? Yes, that'd be great! It was sooo hot last night, and we can't bathe with this water, right? Oh, and do you think you could do anything to help with this tree? You don't know when they'll get the power back, do you?"

I jot their address on my clipboard. Twenty minutes and a lot of talking later, Whitty and Brooks have invited us to stay with them for Mardi Gras, or Jazz Fest, or whenever we come back after all this is over.

We promise to return with cold water and chainsaw-lugging firefighters for that tree.

For the first week or so, it usually plays out like this: We spend a day in a neighborhood, identify who needs help and keep a detailed log of everything we see. Each evening, the Task Force 83 leaders meet, identify the most urgent problems and deploy eight-person units the next day to deal with them.

Unlike the chaotic, hurry-up-and-wait FEMA systems we observed, the firefighters' approach is efficient and effective. We're able to rotate in and out of neighborhoods, help as many people as possible and track our progress through a clear chain of command.

"We want to show FEMA a system that can work," our task force leader tells us one night at a rally. John Strawn, a fire captain from Omaha, says that in our first week alone we'd knocked on nearly 10,000 doors and covered 48 square miles of the city and suburbs. "We all should be proud of what we've done," he says.

When we head back to Whitty's home, we've got a team of 12-four petite Peace Corps women alongside four burly Blackfoot Indian firefighters from Montana and another group from Ohio and Missouri-and a pickup truck loaded with chainsaws, gas cans and work gloves.

The guys, who went overboard to protect of us when we first met them, step back and let us rip-start the chainsaws-the 24-inch "big boys"-and work until our arms are sore. We trade off cutting and soon reduce the massive cedar tree to a pile of stumps and chopped-up limbs.

By lunchtime, the yard is clear, two firefighters have hauled a rank refrigerator out to the curb and the two women again are begging us to come back to New Orleans, promising places to sleep and pots of gumbo and jambalaya.

Over the next two weeks, we stop by a few more times to check on them. More people are visible in the neighborhood, but, as we discover one day from the desperate note on Nancy Whitty's door, Entergy is still a no-show.

We walk around the corner to the Oak Street Cafe, virtually the only business open for miles around, expecting to find two tired women enjoying a well-earned latte.

But Whitty and Brooks are not sipping coffee, they're working behind the counter, slapping sandwiches together, pouring coffee and keeping track of how much meat and cheese is left.

"Oh, we're just helping out," Brooks says, introducing us to the cafe's owner, Brad Wilkins. Tired of waiting for the electric company to arrive, Brooks and Whitty have been volunteering at the cafe for almost a week.

So we order bagel sandwiches and listen again to the stories of miserably hot nights and the friends who just threw an impromptu party and the frustration of stalking Entergy. We write down the addresses of more neighbors who need help. We also laugh and enjoy a nearly normal New Orleans lunch.

MIKE WOOD WANTS to feed New Orleans.

He lives in New Orleans, he knows New Orleans. And unlike all of these tourist volunteers, he says to me at a French Quarter bar, he could be so much more useful to the Red Cross if they would let him work in the city.

Woody is an old friend who used to live in Chicago. He settled in New Orleans about eight years ago, to the dismay of many of his Chicago friends who didn't understand the allure that working on fishing boats and doing odd jobs for a living might have for a 42-year-old guy with an MBA.

Woody's house is OK, but he's staying at a Red Cross center in suburban Kenner, where he is volunteering, earning a tiny stipend and getting fed.

His family is gone, he says, meaning his estranged wife and their dogs, and many of his friends have dispersed around the country and might not come back.

Woody's world has been ripped apart, and it's a little awkward talking to him now, wondering if he resents me for getting to go home to Chicago in a few days. Full of nervous energy, he drinks his Abita and unloads six weeks' worth of frustrations with the relief effort.

We all had hit that point-a day the bureaucracy and the chain of command and the system just seemed to get completely in the way of doing something useful.

The firefighters in Task Force 83 had felt that frustration when they were rushed into hurricane duty by FEMA and then told to wait-a week in Atlanta and then a week in Orlando-for orders to get them in the action.

"It's like telling a firefighter he has to stand on the curb while a house burns down," said Albert Cherascot, a firefighter from Columbus, Ohio.

Strawn, the fire captain from Omaha, saw morale slipping and requested permission from FEMA to form a task force that would work slightly outside the system. Still sanctioned by FEMA and bound by its rules, Task Force 83 would be allowed to establish its own missions, its own chain of command and its own methods of accountability. "FEMA knew firefighters would go above and beyond," he said.

I tell Woody more about the task force and confess that on a few occasions, our unit had "gone rogue"-left a day's designated assignment because it didn't seem productive and headed to where we knew there was a greater need. Sometimes we had an address passed along by other firefighters-a house they'd learned of that needed a tarp or tree-clearing. Sometimes we just visited people we'd met before, checking in.

The day we rescued Gayle Butler's hat we had ditched our assignment. We'd been to her neighborhood before, knew the devastation, and knew there were people who needed help. We weren't supposed to go rogue. Ever. It screwed up the accountability, messed with the chain of command. Officially, it wasn't tolerated.

It kept us motivated, though. Maybe gave us a little sense of control amid the chaos. So the task force leaders, the ones who had understood our desire to go "above and beyond," looked the other way.

"Yeah," says Woody. "I'm thinking about going rogue."

ON MY LAST FULL DAY in New Orleans,Woody calls around noon. He is distributing food in New Orleans. "Hey! Want to come out and work on the ERV with me?" he says, referring to the emergency response vehicles relief workers use to hand out supplies.

Task Force 83 has released me to pack up and prepare to leave, so I agree to meet him near Jackson and Magazine Streets at an elementary school that has been converted into a FEMA disaster relief center. Woody and a few other Red Cross volunteers are loading coolers of water and vats of hot food into the ERV and figuring out how we'll divvy up chores.

"You work the window," he says to a grandmotherly woman, indicating a service window on the side of the van. She begins telling two teenage boys how to scoop just so much rice, green beans and fruit cocktail into Styrofoam containers.

"You work off the back of the truck," he instructs me, stacking eight cases of water along the bumper. "After they get a meal, they'll come back to you for water and snacks. And hold on!"

Woody jumps into the driver's seat, eager to finally get working in New Orleans.

It's soon obvious he does know where to find people in need. We turn a few corners into the Central City neighborhood and slow down on a quiet street. "Hot food and cold water!" Woody's voice booms from the truck's loudspeaker. Front doors of small shotgun houses open and hungry families spill out and into line at the serving window.

This neighborhood, just blocks from the Superdome and close to where Louis Armstrong grew up, was mostly spared by the winds and floodwaters. But residents, who had little before Katrina, have even less now, as many public-welfare programs have been put on hold.

On a few streets, Woody knows people. "That's a guy who works on my car," he says when we pull up alongside a garage and a man walks out waving and calling for his kids to get some food.

For three hours, we hand out hot meals and water and bags of cookies. Kids ride up to the truck on their bikes, women with babies come off their front steps, men working in moldy homes take a lunch break. We ration the rice and beans so we can feed about 300 people by the end of the day.

"Now you're doing relief work, eh?" Woody asks me, after we've given away the last water bottle.

Actually, the work isn't much different from what I'd been doing all month. But the emergency vehicle and the loudspeaker add a level of excitement, and Woody and his team-held out of the neighborhoods for so long-are getting a rush from delivering direct relief.

"Yeah," I say, "This was a great day."

lweber@tribune.com

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