“Lost my house, lost my job, lost my husband…too stressful for him.”

“ I had a house before the hurricane. Now I have a tree house…My house is in a tree.”

--- two women in Slidell, LA

The vision of human beings lost and property damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita as they hit Gulf Coast states has been thoroughly imprinted on our minds. However, until you actually see it up close and talk to the survivors, you cannot appreciate the awesome force of nature and the human response to it. Everywhere was destruction; everyone had a story to tell.

In mid-October, Operation USA’s Tony Shannon and I drove 1,500 miles in eight days to survey the work being done by our partner agencies to distribute twenty truckloads of medical and hygiene supplies, pharmaceuticals, power generators and portable lighting sets. Nearly 100 nonprofit health clinics in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas became the distribution points for our relief goods. They are the frontline providers of healthcare to most evacuees.

Donated warehouse, Shreveport, Louisiana

After visiting our donated warehouses in the area just outside of the hurricanes’ paths, we saw first-hand the punishing blows taken by an entire region. Entering St. Bernard Parish, adjacent to New Orleans, we passed mile after mile through ghost towns depopulated of over 78,000 residents. Over 24,000 homes and hundreds of businesses were destroyed by 15-foot high storm surges that mixed up a toxic slurry of industrial and human waste. Vehicles, structures and trees were twisted into stark sculptures. The only living things were mosquitoes.

At dusk, the dark streets leading into the Parish seat in Chalmette and to the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness were strewn with debris and the atmosphere was heavy with airborne layers of drying toxic sludge. The Director told us that only four square blocks of the Parish did not go underwater and only about fifty homes could be rehabilitated. It was his hope that in three to five years his community would come back to life and thrive again.

The French Quarter’s Bourbon Street nonetheless was in celebratory abandon from its dry perch, but an occasional waft from the soggy lower realms of New Orleans and the stench of its own sewers jolt you toward reality. The destroyed Ninth and other wards, the inundated downtown high rises and the mansions, grand parks and universities of the famed Garden District, with its curbsides endlessly dotted with burned-out home appliances, reined in some of the Quarter’s exuberance.

"Looters WILL be shot"
--- a nearby sign

Continuing the post-apocalyptic tableau of urban St. Bernard and New Orleans parishes, the dead zones along the coastal waterfront roads of Mississippi were devoid of human beings, except for those taking brief forays in from the fringes of the area to recover personal property from buildings dayglow-sprayed with a rescuer’s markings for those holding survivors or the dead. Some occupants posted defiant sentiments to nature or man. Others left talismanic symbols (or simple reference markers) on the remains of their property, such as a large stuffed bunny nailed by its ears to a once majestic oak tree in a now ruined driveway.

Residence Marker

Mobile, Alabama, from our limited pass-through, appeared a paragon of order and cleanliness, the benefit of being on the outer edge of Hurricane Katrina and what seemed to be a thorough post-flood scrubbing. However, its neighbor communities dotted around the marshy southwest coastal town of Bayou La Batre fared far worse. This major shrimping center in the Gulf was severely damaged and some claim Katrina was the death knell for an already-struggling industry. Shrimp boats were scattered like bathtub toys all over the land and seascape, processing plants were ripped apart and 3,000 citizens were scattered, a quarter of whom are former Vietnamese refugees. For Operation USA, their current deprivation was a return to our own refugee relief roots in 1979 when we aided their own flight on other boats from their ancestral land.

Moving along a remote rural road in the swampy Cajun Country bayous of Pecan Island in southwestern Louisiana, heading for Rita-ravaged town of Cameron near the Texas border, seemed a drive through an endless final resting place. We lost count of those pairings of churches and cemeteries, every last one of which was scraped and scrapped by a 20-foot high/ 20-mile deep storm surge. Headstones toppled and vaults and coffins floated to the surface. There was no one to tell us if the caskets were recovered and re-interned elsewhere by family or swallowed up in the marshes. Animal life was mostly road-kill and alligators, birds, raccoons, turtles, deer, drowned or severely dehydrated by unaccustomed salt water in their habitats.

Cemetery devastated by Hurricane Katrina

We stopped to talk with a National Guard unit from Utah that was cleaning a cemetery of rotting swamp grass, while gingerly avoiding venomous snakes. Work stopped momentarily to celebrate life in the shape of a 6-inch black and yellow-striped alligator and a hand-sized turtle. A small but welcome respite and a reminder of the tenacity of life.

“No, no. My house wasn’t next to the church here.” He then pointed a long way across a flooded field and said, “It used to be there…a half mile away.”

--- Jacob Glen Veazey

The Veazey Home

An unsettling loss of human voices or movement along the way, except for an occasional military or police roadblock, was broken by the spectre of a family retrieving mementos from a smashed house pushed up against a ruined church. Jacob Glen Veazey, the patriarch of the large family whose home was three-feet deep in mud, spoke with something between resignation and wonderment in his voice about the forces of nature that drove him from his homestead for good. We gave him a cash grant on the spot to help his family.

Jacob Glen Veazey & son salvage what is left of their home

Cameron, LA, was a coastal town of 2,510 in the parish of the same name. It is essentially gone, with the exception of its water tower emblazoned with the town's name, a defiant sentinel over the rubble left by 120 mph winds and water. Holly Beach, nearby, was raked clean, leaving only bare foundations of homes, businesses and boat docks. We found no one to help here.

Turning north toward Lake Charles, the footprint of Rita seemed to lighten up, but then we discovered that remnants of communities and commerce pushed many miles across fields, canals and bayous, then backwashed into the Gulf. But soon we began to see the tendrils of civilization in the form of new power lines reaching into the disaster zone to give life support to these communities that will need many years to recover.

In the end, we were struck with the realization that Katrina and Rita had a qualitatively different impact on their victims than previous hurricanes, that a new standard of nature’s erratic behavior had been reached that forever recast our anxiety about future assaults on lives and livelihoods…but, hopefully, will also permanently alter the complacency or wishful thinking of mayors, governors and presidents.