One of the most time-consuming house-gutting tasks is shoveling up plaster and lath after it's been knocked down.
NEW ORLEANS — Seeing firsthand the devastation of this city at the hands of Hurricane Katrina and the resultant breached levees, says the Rev. Bonnie Orth of Mayfield, NY, “you almost feel like you are in a science fiction movie. It’s so surreal it’s hard to wrap your head around.”
When several of the levees protecting New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain failed, more than 80 percent of the city flooded. Upwards of 300,000 homes filled with water. Thousands died and nearly all of New Orleans’ residents were forced to flee. Eighteen months later, maybe 40 percent of them have returned.
“There’s nothing there,” Orth said after touring some of the hardest hit neighborhoods as part of the 2007 social justice biennial conference sponsored by the Presbyterian Health, Education and Welfare Association (PHEWA), Jan. 11-14. “There is street after street after street of bare, empty houses.”
If New Orleans is to recover from Katrina, it will happen one house at a time. And so 18 PHEWA participants remained here for three days after the conference concluded to gut houses — one each day — so they can eventually be restored.
One house at a time: PDA volunteers gut a New Orleans house in preparation for rebuilding. Click image to play video.
This group of Presbyterians is one of many that have come here to work on the rebuilding of New Orleans. Most PC(USA) groups are coordinated by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) and stay in nearby Luling at a temporary PDA tent village.
“We’re here at the command of Jesus Christ and PDA,” said the Rev. Paul Rodkey, a pastor in Spokane, WA, and newly elected treasurer of PHEWA.
The Rev. Paul Rodkey of Spokane, WA, and treasurer of the Presbyterian Health, Education and Welfare Association, takes a break.
It’s hot and humid this January day in New Orleans, and the PHEWA crew that is gutting a bungalow adjacent to a noisy expressway frequently pauses for a water break. “It’s hot up there,” says the Rev. David Hicks, a Phoenix pastor who has spent the morning in the rafters of the house, knocking down the ceiling.
“The house is a good house, real solid,” he says. There’s nothing wrong with it except the water damage [this house took on seven feet] and lots of mold.” The crew is removing everything from the house, all the way down to the beams and studs.
“It’s great — very cathartic,” says Gayl Knox, a pastor’s spouse from Corvallis, MT. “Most of us don’t have any construction experience at all,” she adds, “but they just put the tools in your hands and say ‘put this there and pull that there and carry out the refuse and knock these walls down’ and that’s the way it goes — anyone can do it.”
The Rev. Charlene Heaton, a volunteer from Baton Rouge, LA, hauls rubble out of the house.
Knox, who’s helping tear up the floor, proudly shows off her protective knee pads. “This is a different way for Presbyterians to be on their knees, don’t you think?” she laughs.
Rich Cozzone, PDA’s new “work site coordinator” in New Orleans, has just started his second stint in New Orleans. Last spring the Ohio native served for four months as camp manager out at Luling. “This work got in my blood,” he says. And in his heart.
Cozzone was on his way back to Ohio after dropping his son — then a sophomore at Tulane University here — off at school when Katrina hit. “He called me from a bus that was evacuating him to Jackson, MS,” Cozzone recalls. “From there he hitchhiked to Tennessee where I picked him up, safe and sound. “I figured that I owed something back and this relief work has become a passion.”
Rich Cozzone, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance work site coordinator for New Orleans.
Cozzone says PDA has only three requirements in order to gut a house: “they have to own the house, they have to intend to return to live in it, and they have to ask us to help.” When those simple requirements are met, the person’s house is added to PDA’s list, Cozzone says.
The work, says Orth, “makes me a little tired, a little dirty and a little dusty, but it’s good work.” It can also be a little heart-wrenching.
“I was working in the bathroom on a closet back in the corner,” she says, “and when I broke through a cabinet, there was a toothbrush.” Her voice catching a little, Orth continues: “It makes you wonder who’s been in this house and where are they and how are they surviving. Then you come out onto the street and there’s row after row of empty houses …”
Knox wonders, too. “The other thing is there’s no children anywhere,” she says. “The public schools are closed and the streets are empty. “If there are any children, I don’t know where they are and it’s really eerie.
“I’ve brought toys and stuffed animals to give to a child and I haven’t seen any yet …”
Finding hope in such total destruction is challenging for this hardy group of Presbyterians. “It’s just one house at a time, one day at a time,” Hicks says. “That’s a lot of labor.”
But it’s labor that Cozzone has seen pay off. “Last spring we adopted a whole street,” he says. “It started with a whole bunch of Presbyterian college kids who could have been on the beach at spring break but came here instead. We started with one family. Then they called their neighbors, who were scattered all over the place and they came running back and at the end they had a big block party to celebrate.
“That’s the idea here,” Cozzone said. “If we can help one family back in, it gives hope to others.”
Rich Cozzone, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance work site coordinator for New Orleans, adds to the pile of rubble.
Not just rebuilding houses, but rebuilding community, and not just in New Orleans but in other places, too.
“It’s going to take a long time here,” Knox says, “and we need to look ahead and ask ‘what kind of community are we going to build here?’ What’s going to happen when they come back? Will they have neighbors? Who will they be? Will there be schools? It’s just an overwhelming task.”
“I’m real aware of the old saying that when floods happen we can either deal just with the victims of the flood or we can ask ‘why do the floods keep happening?’” Rodkey says. “Presbyterians historically have done a good job of being sensitive to both: how can we help victims in their time of need but also see what’s causing this to happen all the time.”
In New Orleans, the issues are pretty clear, Rodkey says. “But it’s also clear that we don’t have a good sense of emergency services or emergency needs and if some major disaster happened elsewhere, I’m not sure what those communities could do.”
In New Orleans, at least, PDA continues to welcome and put to work Presbyterian work groups from all over the country. “There’s always something for everyone,” Cozzone says. “We’ve had people from 12 to 86.”
Orth is certain there will be a work group coming soon from Mayfield. “I tell my folks all the time, ‘you can’t be a Sunday Christian — you gotta take it out into the street and be a Christian every day and be the light and love of Christ to everyone you meet' type of Christian.”
