|
March 10, 2007 - The Times-Picayune
A welcome tide
By Bruce Nolan
On a clear, bright morning this week, Kara Huselton, a Boston College freshman from Rochester, N.Y., muscled a dead washing machine out the second-floor door of a vacant duplex on Franklin Avenue and, with the help of two friends, tipped it over a railing to fall two stories with a satisfying crash.
Vile water spilled out of the bent machine. "Cockroach water," declared a disgusted Kristen Dacey, a 19-year-old who hails from New Hampshire.
Visitors to New Orleans for a week, they had been at the house the day before as well, masked and gloved, tearing out its interior in the familiar, sweaty and nasty ritual that prepares a Katrina- damaged house for repair and reoccupancy.
But elsewhere in town, others of the 52 Boston College volunteers were installing wall insulation and hanging drywall under the supervision of Southern Baptists from Arkansas. Those, too, were relatively simple jobs -- but a sign of measurable progress as well, because they lie across the demarcation that separates mere cleanup from the first stages of rebuilding.
In the second spring after Hurricane Katrina, more than 10,000 college students and other volunteers once again have skipped spring break's traditional beachfront bacchanal and instead poured into metropolitan New Orleans to work hard. It's a volunteer wave that will reach its high point in the next week or so and continue into April before tailing off.
But this year is markedly different in the sophistication of the agencies managing the influx of volunteers, and in the work they are being sent out to do.
Once again, the volunteers represent the full roster of American higher education, from the University of Texas to Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, N.C., to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Travis Scruggs, a relief coordinator at First Baptist Church of New Orleans, said he had bookings for 1,000 volunteers in March. Catholic Charities is full, with 1,200 incoming volunteers, said Joan Diaz, director of Operation Helping Hands.
"This is not falling off," said Courtney Cowart, who directs storm relief for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. "If we had more capacity for housing people, we'd have even more volunteers than we do."
Systems fine-tuned
Spring break is the high point on the year-round calendar of volunteerism in New Orleans. Even as the memory of Katrina becomes more distant, thousands of volunteers ebb and flow through the city every month, relief directors say. They follow the predictable rhythms of the school and work year: Numbers spike at spring break, during the summer and, to a lesser extent, during the winter holidays. In between are troughs in which directors say volunteerism slows, but never stops entirely.
Since spring break of 2006, secular nonprofits such as the Common Ground Collective and nearly a dozen major Christian relief agencies have benefited from another year's experience, fine-tuned their goals, beefed up their programs and become increasingly adept at marshaling and directing volunteers.
Now volunteers are housed in networks of long-term bunkhouses established in gymnasiums, fellowship halls or ruined sanctuaries of vacant Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, among others. Often they cooperate; a coalition called the Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership acts as a booking agency that finds available bunks for many incoming volunteers.
Southern Baptists long ago leased three floors of the World Trade Center at the foot of Canal Street to house up to 500 volunteers. The Salvation Army's center on South Claiborne Avenue houses up to 200 volunteers. A Common Ground encampment at the closed St. Mary of the Angels elementary school in the 9th Ward holds 300 or more.
Precise count elusive
For most of the 18 months since Katrina, those agencies have trained their volunteers in the simple skills of house-gutting, then deployed them in the wastelands of New Orleans, St. Bernard and parts of Slidell.
No one knows how many homes private volunteers have gutted across the metropolitan area.
Among just a few of the major groups, Catholic Charities reports having gutted more than 1,600 homes and apartments; Southern Baptists, more than 1,000; Samaritan's Purse, Franklin Graham's Christian relief agency, more than 500.
This spring, FEMA and a number of secular nonprofits and faith- based disaster ministries have joined forces to launch a Gutting Task Force.
Private relief agencies for the first time have pooled their separate databases to estimate how many owners still want their houses gutted, presumably in anticipation of rebuilding.
The task force also is taking new requests from owners who contact the task force by dialing "311."
But even with an expected growth in new addresses solicited by the program, the numbers in the database are plunging, said Mary Sutton, a FEMA official who coordinates that agency's work with private relief groups.
Months ago, homeowners seeking help typically signed up with many agencies to have their homes gutted, happy to have it done by the first organization to get to it. The new, combined database is full of such duplications, she said. In addition, over time some of houses have been demolished or by now clearly need to be demolished.
A few weeks ago, the task force's list of houses thought to be in need of gutting stood at about 4,800. Scrubbing out obvious duplications quickly cut the number to 4,100. More inspections and phone calls to owners will whittle it down still further, Sutton said.
"I suspect the bottom is near 2,000 homes in New Orleans," she said.
After 18 months, she said, "You can see the end of the last chapter coming, although we're not yet on the last page of the chapter."
The economic value of all that work is imprecise.
Sutton said the agency nominally values volunteer labor at a little more than $18 per hour. Early in the recovery process, there was interest in keeping track of the donated hours, perhaps for local parishes to count toward their match of federal funds, she said.
But in the months since then, it has become unclear whether volunteer hours are as valuable to parishes as once thought, she said. And while "there's millions and millions brought in by the faith-based and other volunteer organizations, trying to get these statistics is like herding cats."
Tasks changing
Still, with an end to house-gutting at least on the horizon, major denominations for months have begun a shift toward rebuilding houses.
While Kim and his Boston College friends were gutting their assigned house on Franklin Avenue, another team of volunteers patched the roof on the house across the street.
A few agencies -- exceptions to the general rule -- have been helping homeowners with repairs since the earliest days after the storm.
Arkansas Baptist Builders, headquartered at Gentilly Baptist Church, have specialized for months in hanging drywall, installing insulation and rewiring houses. Operation Noah Rebuild, another Southern Baptist agency, based in Algiers, similarly has been importing teams of skilled and semi-skilled workers to help underinsured homeowners with major repairs. And two weeks ago, a gathering of Mennonite volunteer builders from Canada, Ohio and Mississippi happily dedicated their new operations base on Hayne Boulevard, a former church they converted last winter and will occupy for the next four to five years.
But most volunteer rebuilding efforts are only just beginning. And most will focus first on the neediest cases, helping the elderly, the infirm, or underinsured families close the gap between their depleted resources and a finished home.
They will take different approaches.
The Catholic Church's Operation Helping Hands, for instance, helps applicants negotiate the tangle of the state's Road Home program, Diaz said. As money becomes available, the agency will introduce clients to preferred contractors who have pledged not to soak them at top-of-market rates. Helping Hands will help the clients work with contractors, and pair them with volunteer builders such as the Mennonites, should their Road Home money fall short, said Diaz.
So far, about 100 people have signed up for that kind of help, she said.
Other groups, such as the Episcopal Church's Jericho Road project and the Presbyterian Church's "Build Blitz" seek to rehabilitate badly damaged homes.
United Methodists intend to build or rebuild about 200 homes, said the Rev. Darryl Tate of that church's storm relief ministry in Baton Rouge.
The Rev. David Crosby of First Baptist Church of New Orleans said Baptists hope to focus on the Upper 9th Ward over the next few years. The goal is to build 300 homes and help an additional 1,200 families return to their neighborhoods.
Relief managers say fulfilling that mission will require a shift toward volunteers able to quickly pick up simple construction skills under supervision.
Some said that shift is already occurring.
"Our volunteers are getting more sophisticated," said Crosby. "We're getting repeat visitors who really know what they're doing."
Relief managers say it is not uncommon to see volunteers touched by one trip to New Orleans returning months later, with fresh faces.
"People are going back home and saying, 'This will change your life,' " said Cowart, the Episcopal relief director. "They're right. It absolutely will change your life."
|
