Hurricane Katrina caused widespread, incomparable damage. People lost many of their possessions in a matter of a few days to the water that covered parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The official death toll has reached 1,281 people and the cost of the damage has gone over $200 billion. Many relief organizations like the Red Cross and FEMA and thousands of volunteers have traveled to New Orleans and other relief sites in order to help the cause. Among those volunteers were adults and students from the University community.
"I was on a plane by Friday at Midnight..."
One member of the University community who chose to volunteer was Larry Wilson. Wilson works for SMG, a private management company for public facilities that manages 170 facilities worldwide including well-known sites like the Superdome in New Orleans and the Astrodome in Texas. Wilson, who was just appointed to head the management of the University's new John Paul Jones Arena, received a call Friday, Sept. 2, asking him to participate in the relief effort that SMG was organizing in Texas. Wilson had no hesitations about joining the endeavor.
"You see all these people and you want to help," Wilson said. "I walked up to the airline counter, and I was on a plane by midnight on Friday night. I didn't know what to expect, but I was happy to participate."
The new team's biggest job was to relieve the current SMG staff in Houston that had already been working tirelessly for many days straight. The site was organized and had a command post that included members from government agencies like FEMA, the Red Cross, local police departments, the FBI and the National Guard. They were briefed three times a day on what needs had arisen and what needed to be done.
This particular relief site was 90 acres with four huge facilities and included around 30,000 cots for displaced people. The food effort came out of nearby Reliant Stadium, and the site also had doctors and a full-service pharmacy for those who needed it.
Wilson had a variety of jobs during his stint in Texas. Jobs ranged from walking celebrities like Chris Rock and Matthew McConaughey around the site to fixing toilets. Wilson also helped new arrivals get settled in their temporary homes.
"The first thing we did as new people showed up was to make sure they got a warm shower, food and clothing," Wilson said. "They were very well taken care of."
Wilson said two specific things stick out in his experience.
"The first thing was the lost children section filled with children whose parents couldn't find them," he said.
The second poignant site was a large wall full of names in alphabetical order run by the Red Cross.
"It was used to help families find other family members that they were separated from in the wake of the hurricane," he said.
Overall, Wilson said he was happy with his decision to volunteer.
"It was gratifying to physically help somebody," he said.
"I think I'm going to
take a semester off..."
Second-year College student Daniel Newton followed the news of Hurricane Katrina just like all of his peers. But, unlike most students, Newton took his desire to help with the relief just one step farther. Newton, who has been a volunteer firefighter since high school, had read through a Web site that the relief effort was calling for 2,000 firefighters to work for FEMA.
"I was reading all the stories about how bad it was down there and that they needed help," Newton said. "This was on a Sunday night, and within an hour I had decided that I was going to do it."
As most students would imagine, the process of taking a semester off of school isn't easy. As a student and a son, Newton had a lot of obstacles to overcome before his trip would become a reality.
"I called two people from my department at home and one said yes to being my partner," Newton said. "Then I called my parents and Dean [of Students Penny] Rue and told them I wanted to do it and they were supportive. Thursday was when I got the call to go, and Saturday was when I left."
Newton flew into Atlanta and went on to Baton Rouge five days later. Once the volunteers arrived in Baton Rouge, they lived in one of the tent cities for two days before being moved to Algiers, Louisiana, which Newton said was a somewhat dangerous area of New Orleans.
"We split up, and I ended up staying in a lawyer's office next to the jail," Newton said. "It was pretty dangerous there -- they had had a shooting the day before and electric company workers had been shot at, too."
Newton participated in a number of activities, including canvassing neighborhoods, unloading trucks for the Red Cross and "red-tagging" buildings, among other tasks.
"We started red-tagging buildings, which means condemning them so that no one goes inside," Newton said. "We started that when we started working in the areas that had been flooded. The insides of some of the buildings were completely trashed."
Newton and his fellow volunteers learned pretty quickly that FEMA was not too well-liked in the area of New Orleans in which they were working. Canvassing neighborhoods especially got to be a little nerve-racking, he said.
"It was pretty scary because members of our team had to wear bulletproof vests," Newton said. "One night we ended up driving down a street that was blocked off, and a guy came out of his front porch holding an M-16 and a bottle of Jack Daniels who did not look too happy with us."
Newton said his experience of spending so much time in a hurricane-ravaged city and seeing the change it had undergone was unlike anything he'd ever done before.
"Being in the city was weird because there was no one around and there was no power, all sorts of dogs and cats, everything was gray and the whole place smelled -- there was no escaping it," Newton said.
Newton completed a 30-day stint with FEMA in New Orleans and is still pleased with his decision to participate. Seeing it on the news is very different from being in the middle of the ruins, he said.
"When I signed up, I expected it to be pretty bad," Newton said. "I didn't expect that six weeks later it would still be deserted and pretty much no improvement. When you see it on TV and in the newspaper, you just get a snapshot. When you're actually there, you're just standing in the middle of it and looking around. There's nowhere to go, you can't walk away from it. You're just stuck in the middle of all this destruction."
"I couldn't take my
eyes off the TV..."Although second-year College student Ali Spencer did not volunteer, Hurricane Katrina affected her deeply. Spencer is from New Orleans, so it was the destruction of her own hometown that was being broadcast on TV -- which made her value others' volunteer efforts all the more.
"I respect what they did," she said. "And I appreciate that they took the time out of their school career to go help out."
Spencer recalled her initial reaction when she learned about the impending natural disaster.
"I heard that the hurricane was coming about two days before it hit," Spencer said. "The day before it hit, the news said it was a Category 5 hurricane and I started freaking out."
Spencer spoke to her family a couple of days before the hurricane hit and found out the city was being evacuated. Her family was able to leave earlier than many of the others in New Orleans, which is why it didn't take them as long to get out of the city. It was one less thing Spencer had to worry about, but it didn't change her nervousness about the situation.
"Monday morning it hit, and I didn't go to any of my classes and stayed at home watching the news all day," Spencer said. "It turned right before us, so we got the left side, which is worse."
Her apprehension grew after seeing the levies broken and the Superdome flooded, its roof destroyed.
"I was a wreck," Spencer said. "I couldn't get in touch with my family or my friends because our cell phones wouldn't work."
Because of the difficulty of contacting her family, Spencer had no way of knowing how the hurricane had affected her house until her family let her know they had found pictures of their house on the Internet.
From the pictures Spencer learned a tree had fallen on her house, but the extent of the damage was unclear for some time thereafter.
"We got someone to remove the tree," she said. "One of the walls is leaning into the house and the roof is caved in the room where the tree fell. Luckily, the damage was limited to one room."
Although her home fortunately was not destroyed, Spencer said the entire experience has been difficult.
"It was hard seeing all the people without homes and people that lost everything," Spencer said. "Everyone has to start all over again and there's all this uncertainty about everything. There's so many questions and no one can really answer anything."
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