2008 Woodie Awards
New Orleans destruction astonishing
Reid Stratton
Issue date: 4/7/06 Section: Features
I went to New Orleans for spring break with about 40 other Lawrentians on a trip organized by Alison Miller. We went to volunteer at Emergency Communities, an organization that has a kitchen and distribution center set up in St. Bernard Parish.
We're not talking about your typical kitchen. This one is under a tent, and the dining room is in a huge semi-temporary dome. The whole operation is set up in the parking lot of an off-track betting facility.
The kitchen serves three meals a day, and usually dishes out some 2,000 plates of food every day. They also coordinate several projects in the area, from gutting houses to cleaning the riverfront.
While we were at the kitchen there were about 250 volunteers, including ourselves, though there are typically only about 50 volunteers at any given time. The influx came from groups like ours: college students who went to New Orleans over their spring break.
Everyone sleeps in tents in a field behind the kitchen. Because there were so many people there during our stay we had to expand our shanty village into "the back forty," which comes furnished with a beer keg tied to trees, to be ridden like a bucking bronco.
St. Bernard Parish is technically not in New Orleans, but instead just a few minutes to the southeast of the city. This area was covered in water for days following Katrina and the breaching of the levees. Among the water that inundated the city was oil that leaked out from a local oil refinery, and countless other chemicals that came from households and industrial buildings alike. Seven months after the hurricane the area is still considered to be highly toxic.
Our group was actually introduced to New Orleans by way of Waveland, MS, a town right on the Gulf Coast that caught the eye of Katrina. We stopped by the waterfront for lunch before we ever got to New Orleans, and were introduced to far more damage than I had ever considered possible.
As we drove through town and down to the coast one could see the effects of the hurricane get more and more severe. Collapsed buildings, gnarled trees and FEMA trailers greeted us, but as we got closer to the water the buildings became fewer and fewer. This is because many of the houses were completely obliterated, with nothing but the foundation left to show there were ever houses there at all. The closest thing to a house you'll find on the coast is a house that is missing its first floor, taken by a wall of water into the ocean.
We're not talking about your typical kitchen. This one is under a tent, and the dining room is in a huge semi-temporary dome. The whole operation is set up in the parking lot of an off-track betting facility.
The kitchen serves three meals a day, and usually dishes out some 2,000 plates of food every day. They also coordinate several projects in the area, from gutting houses to cleaning the riverfront.
While we were at the kitchen there were about 250 volunteers, including ourselves, though there are typically only about 50 volunteers at any given time. The influx came from groups like ours: college students who went to New Orleans over their spring break.
Everyone sleeps in tents in a field behind the kitchen. Because there were so many people there during our stay we had to expand our shanty village into "the back forty," which comes furnished with a beer keg tied to trees, to be ridden like a bucking bronco.
St. Bernard Parish is technically not in New Orleans, but instead just a few minutes to the southeast of the city. This area was covered in water for days following Katrina and the breaching of the levees. Among the water that inundated the city was oil that leaked out from a local oil refinery, and countless other chemicals that came from households and industrial buildings alike. Seven months after the hurricane the area is still considered to be highly toxic.
Our group was actually introduced to New Orleans by way of Waveland, MS, a town right on the Gulf Coast that caught the eye of Katrina. We stopped by the waterfront for lunch before we ever got to New Orleans, and were introduced to far more damage than I had ever considered possible.
As we drove through town and down to the coast one could see the effects of the hurricane get more and more severe. Collapsed buildings, gnarled trees and FEMA trailers greeted us, but as we got closer to the water the buildings became fewer and fewer. This is because many of the houses were completely obliterated, with nothing but the foundation left to show there were ever houses there at all. The closest thing to a house you'll find on the coast is a house that is missing its first floor, taken by a wall of water into the ocean.