K: Katrina Clean Up

Lesson One in hurricane clean up: Don’t open the fridge.

Katrina hit New Orleans in September 2005. Our volunteer group hit the Seventh Ward in March 2006. Six months leaves plenty of time for rot.

Catholic Charities, of the New Orleans Archdiocese, teamed up Julie and me with fifteen good-hearted students on Spring Break from Mount St. Mary College, in Newburgh, New York.

The Mount St. Mary kids forgot a key step, securing appliance doors with duct tape. The guys lost control of the refrigerator. Mold, mildew, and maggot-covered meat spilled onto the floor. A death smell filled the house. Students ran outside to wretch.The next day, Catholic Charities teamed Julie and I with a slightly more organized group from St. Louis University, supervised by two Jesuit scholastics (the step between novitiate and priest) named Mario and Robert. Robert came from New Orleans and knew the deal. We finished up an elderly woman’s house by the Palmetto Canal (which flooded when the pumps failed) and moved to a second home near Lake Pontchartrain.The owner, her daughter, and son-in-law greeted us. Son-in-Law jumped to work immediately. He commandeered me to ram a crumbling couch through the front door and almost sent me tumbling down the front steps.

The St. Louis kids formed a line and proceeded to haul a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff out to the curb.I grabbed a trash can and started on the pantry – emptying the shelves of rotten dish towels, an unopened carton of plastic Sunbeam bread bags, Hunts tomato ketchup (alarmingly, still red), bleach and laundry detergent, an ironing board, God knows what else. Why the woman owned a box of empty bread bags remains a mystery to me.Fifteen minutes before the day’s end, son-in-law asked for help with the deep freezer. I agreed. We turned the freezer on its side, causing melted waste to spill through the drain. The smell hit me low and deep in the stomach. I breathed through my mouth. We opened the back door, lined up the freezer, and heaved it down the stoop. I grabbed a handful of ruined shirts, mopped up the milky stream tracing across the kitchen floor, and kicked the clothes down the steps.

My boots still stink.

On the third day, Julie and I visited my aunt and uncle across the river. They took us to the Ninth Ward, the worst hit and most televised neighborhood in the entire city. We drove East from the center of town, following the river road with devastation to our left and the levee to our right. Julie and I pointed out the student volunteers, teenagers in white sanitary suits or matching t-shirts, easy to spot in the wreckage. The ruin stretched for miles; each house takes two days to gut. A few homes had white FEMA trailers in front. For reasons unkown, FEMA removed the far more cost effective port-a-sans, where volunteer workers could take a pee.

This is no job for volunteers.

Where is the army? Where’s the National Guard? New Orleans needs physically fit, disciplined troops, led by officers with a "can do" attitude and a plan. Not college students on Spring Break.

The devastation in New Orleans defies words. So too does the government incompetence. A quarter of my annual income goes to federal taxes. Where is that money now?