Media Coverage

A year later, still in ruins; Leominster group aided Katrina victims

By Mary Jo Hill TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
mhill@telegram.com

October 30, 2006 -- LEOMINSTER — Hurricane Katrina made home nothing but a memory for hundreds of thousands of people last year, but 21 people from Leominster and nearby communities helped change that a bit this month.

The crew from the local Habitat for Humanity chapter headed down to Louisiana for a week of working on five houses in various stages of being built from the ground up.

It was a trip that showed the storm’s fury could still be felt a year later.

Those in the group who traveled by van saw broken trees along a stretch of highway in Mississippi, said Emery Gaudet of Leominster, a master carpenter who went down.

Piles of rubble are all that remain of houses in parts of New Orleans, said John J. Souza, the Leominster Planning Board chairman, who was part of the group.

Doors stand wide open and vegetation crawls into windows of abandoned homes, the men said. Waterlines reached above windows.

"Home after home destroyed, block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood, wiped out," according to a letter about the trip written by Patricia Souza, Mr. Souza’s wife, who was writing about New Orleans.

Street lights were lying on the ground still blinking in their red, yellow and green light sequence because they aren’t a priority to be repaired since so few people live in the area, the letter said.

"The scope of the devastation is just unbelievable. I’m looking at 10 years," Mr. Souza said about rebuilding the area.

The sight is even worse than it appears on television because you can drive for miles and miles and miles and see destruction, Mr. Gaudet said.

One of the problems in New Orleans is that the city has a lot of construction work to be done but no place for people to stay, Mr. Souza said. He saw numerous three-story brick apartment buildings destroyed, he said.

"How can people come back to New Orleans?" Mr. Souza asked. "There’s nothing for them to come back to."

To help change that, the local Habitat group went to work in and around Slidell, a community located 30 miles north of New Orleans across Lake Ponchartrain.

A 23-to-26-foot storm surge hit and devastated much of the city, which also experienced wind gusts of more than 190 miles per hour, according to the city’s Web site.

The East St. Tammany Parish Habitat affiliate had invited the crew down to help meet a goal of building 100 homes in a year, Mr. Gaudet said. They worked with other volunteers from all over the country.

The houses that they were building were going to families that included a 71-year-old grandmother who was raising two special-needs grandchildren, who are 7 and 11 years old, and a mother of six whose husband was recovering from back injuries caused by a car accident.

Those families have to put in time volunteering for Habitat to get their house and they take out a low- or no-interest mortgage to buy the houses, which are sold with no profit.

The visitors from North-Central Massachusetts got a warm welcome from people in Louisiana, the men said. Other motorists gave the Habitat van a thumbs-up and people would come up and talk to them when they saw their Habitat hats, including one woman working in a store who it turned out was going to own one of the houses they were working on, Mr. Souza said.

"Most people we had contact with were working-class people, very hard workers, very appreciative of the help they were getting," Mr. Gaudet said.

Mr. Gaudet said he has heard people ask why the government didn’t rebuild everything damaged in the hurricane. As a remodeling contractor, he said, he knows it takes at least six months to rebuild a house after a fire, what with dealing with such matters as insurance and permits.

But with so many homes destroyed and damaged by the hurricane the work cannot be done in a couple of years, he said.

It was a trip that brought a sense of accomplishment and even had one college student thinking about a change in careers.

The men worked with some young women attending college in Indiana. Initially the girls’ expectations of meeting young guys were dashed when they found out they’d be on a team with older men, Mr. Souza said.

He was talking to one of the girls who said she was majoring in psychology and he questioned what kind of work she would do with that degree. At the end of a week after Mr. Souza and Mr. Gaudet had taught the girls how to do construction work, the girl came back and told him she wanted to be a carpenter, Mr. Souza said.

Those traveling from the Leominster area to Louisiana by van left on a Saturday, Oct. 14, for the two-day drive, and then worked from Monday through Friday, before leaving on Oct. 21.

The group stayed at Faith Bible Church in Slidell, La., which put up teams of volunteers every week, according to Mrs. Souza’s letter. More than 140 teams had spent time there.

After the Sunday service, church members would stack chairs and set up for the work crews coming in to stay in the chapel that week, Mr. Gaudet said. The following Saturday, they would tear down the living quarters and set up for the service, he said.

Work got started early, with a 6:45 a.m. briefing and the workers usually stopped at 3 or 3:30 p.m., Mr. Souza said.

The crew brought five people who are experienced construction workers and these workers were much appreciated by the Habitat group in Louisiana, according to the men. Those who knew their way around a building site were able to give instruction to others about how to complete different tasks, they said.

And the men already are thinking about the possibility of going back in mid-winter, a time when more construction workers might be available because they can take time off from work, Mr. Gaudet said.