St Bernard's Parish, New Orleans

St Bernard's Parish. You've likely heard of it on CNN and every other news organization around. It was one of the worst hit Parishes in Louisiana. (The other was the Lower 9th Ward.) Davis Park had the privilege of being asked to be one of two teams from Hilltop Relief and Rescue here in Slidell to go in and "beta test" a couple of sites to determine if this organization wants to duplicate its efforts in that Parish.

Our task was to clear out a party store. Balloons, Mardi Gras beads, party hats, everything imaginable for a party, and then some. I was told in the planning meeting that the store was 1200 square feet. No problem, I thought. The DP wreckers could do the job in half a day and go help team 2 with the other site, a 3000 plus square foot house that needed to be mucked out.

Well, unfortunately, the information given to me was wrong. WAY wrong. What was supposed to be a 1200 sq foot place ended up being a 12,000 square foot party warehouse!! Man, a factor of 10 is a big mistake...y'think?? The party store had a front entrance with a handicap ramp and the wheelbarrows had a hard time making the sharp turns. A couple of the guys took the sledghammer to the wrought iron gate and railing and pulled it out so we could make a ramp out of plywood for more of a straight shot out to the parking lot and curb. The owner's son, Frank Jackson, made another ramp and he used a large supply of party bells (thousands!) to prop up and support the back door ramp. How very Martha Stewart!

After our crew got settled in at the party store, I drove over to the Roberts' house about 1.5 miles away where team 2 was working. They had a Chevy half ton truck outside blocking the path to the yard for the debris. Our solution? Hook up the puny half ton to Darin Ruskamp's brawny 1 ton, put it in 4 Low and pull the beast out of the muck. Great times. Great times. Wish someone would've taken a picture of that. I'm pretty sure we're going to have to wash and decontaminate Darin's truck before we get it back to him!

Back to the party store. DP wreckers had a problem with the work site. It was as dark as a cave. Because it was in a warehouse style building, there weren't any windows, so there wasn't any light. The team worked for half the day in the dark until I was able to bring back two generators, our stash of 1000 watt halogen lights, and some fuel and about 200 feet of electrical cord. We lit that place up like a stadium. I was also able to recruit 8 more volunteers to the site, bringing the party store team total to 22 people. And we still didn't finish. We were only able to complete about 85-90% of the project. Frank calculated that it would have taken him and his brother 21 straight working days to do what we did in about 6 hours of hard work. What a blessing.

About St Bernard's Parish. It suffered badly in Katrina. Floodwater 20 plus feet, winds to 195 mph, flying debris, crashing buildings. Destruction like I've never seen. I drove around and most people in the Parish had not even come back to claim their belongings. Houses still boarded up, 6 inches to 3.5 feet of muck in the yards and driveways. The only people around were disaster relief workers or official services for the community (telephone, electricity, police, fire, and the like). If you weren't on official business, you weren't even allowed into the Parish; the Sheriff's Dept. checkpoint ensured this. To make matters more interesting, two military choppers flew overhead constantly, "keeping the peace", or something like that. I spoke with two men from the utility company that rode out the storm. These were hard Cajuns, tough as nails. His quote? "I ain't never seen nothin' like that, and I ain't nevuh want to see nothin' like that agin. I was sho' nuf scared! I was." He says he'll never ride out another storm. Somehow I believe him.

Who knows what tomorow will bring? Only God knows.

Gotta Sleep.

Glen