While many students packed their bags and loaded laundry into cars to go home for fall break, a group of 18 Harrison Scholars were preparing to spend their weekend helping with ongoing Hurricane Katrina relief efforts near New Orleans.
More than a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, these students discovered that a lot of work is still needed to rebuild New Orleans.
"There is no amount of media coverage that can hammer home how extreme Hurricane Katrina was to this area until you go down there and see it for yourself," said Hays Cummins, a Miami interdisciplinary studies professor who accompanied the students to New Orleans, along with their adviser. Cummins is a native of New Orleans and has been back three time since the hurricane.
The students, Cummins and several other faculty members spent their time gutting houses in St. Bernard Parish, an area southeast of New Orleans. This area was hit hard by storm surges during the hurricane, putting some neighborhoods 22 feet underwater.
"Oh my gosh, you wouldn't believe these houses - they were a mess," said Benjamin Walker, a first-year at Miami who went on the fall break trip.
According to Walker, the drywall was soaked during the flooding, and when the water receded, drywall and insulation fell all over the floor. In addition, the floodwater moved the furniture all over the house.
"Everything was in the wrong place - beds in the kitchen, refrigerators in the living room," Walker said. "You couldn't really save any of it, so we were just taking it all out and making huge piles of garbage. It was just a mess."
Katie Tolle, a senior history and zoology major, did not go on this fall break trip with the Harrison program, but has worked in St. Bernard Parish twice since the hurricane, once during last spring break and during over the summer.
"If you just imagine someone breaks into your house and just throws everything around and then just throws a pile of black muck on top of it as well, that's pretty much the best way to describe it," Tolle said. "The smell was pretty overwhelming as well."
Tolle said it took 16 college students two days on average to gut a typical middle class house. According to her, if there were not volunteers, it would cost a family approximately $3,000 to $5,000 to hire someone to do the work.
Cummins said that when a house is gutted, it becomes less overwhelming for the homeowner. However, according to Cummins, most of the owners have not returned, leaving houses untouched and filled with debris.
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Cummins said a considerable portion of the pre-storm population of New Orleans is missing and many neighborhoods are destroyed.
"A lot of these neighborhoods are ghost towns," Cummins said.
Tolle agrees, and she feels that even the city population is noticeably below the level pre-Hurricane Katrina.
"The most obvious difference is that there were so many people there before, and now, even in the city, it's pretty empty," said Tolle, who had been to New Orleans before the hurricane.
She also believes the attitude of New Orleans is changed. The carefree, music-filled New Orleans atmosphere she remembers before the storm is not the same.
"Now," she said, "it's a pretty somber town."
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