One House at a Time: Katrina rebuild project
Clayton Cubitt says:
One House At A Time is a volunteer group that descended on my mom's little adopted hometown of Pearlington MS in the days after Katrina hit. They've rebuilt dozens of homes in the community, including hers, and they're still going strong. It's one of the most uplifting stories to come out of Katrina.Here's an update, filmed by Kevin Leeser (more links on page).
About the video embedded above, Leeser writes:
The recovery from Hurricane Katrina is far from the front pages these days. There were still 30,000 families (over 110,000 American individuals) still living in FEMA trailers earlier this month (feb 2008), when the "news" of deadly levels of formaldehyde in the trailers was finally reported.I began filming this story one month after Katrina came ashore, and I recently returned to the devastated and impoverished town of Pearlington Mississippi. Even though its several miles from the actual coast, the storm surge and the wind brought this place to the brink of its very existence. The waves that came through this town and destroyed everything in their path first had to pass through a few Chemical Plants and Oil refineries out in the Gulf of Mexico. This was not merely sea water that carried these homes away, it was a deadly stew of unknown and unreported toxins.
This story follows the recovery efforts of one group that has been based in Pearlington as soon as the roads were clear enough to get in. One House At A TIme is building homes for people of Pearlington who want to stay in the place where they call home. This video tells a little of their story, but anyone who has been there will tell you, there is no video that can be shot that can express the sort of devastation that has occurred on our own soil, to our own people. So go see it for yourself, and bring a hammer.
the latest
latest episodes
not that i oppose efforts to rebuild the homes of millions of displaced citizens, but i do suggest that the effort may well be futile. serious consideration should be given to the idea of rebuilding a city in the delta of a massively diverted river (one that lacks deposition) that is already below sea-level! Where was the Army Corps of Engineers three years ago when they could have razed the ruins to raise the city?
woah! Sheer destruction reminds me of Solmolia. Hard to believe that this happened in the US and still very little has been done to remove the debri and trashed houses. I was in Phi Phi a year after the tsunami and you'd never know it even happended.
RAMPANTIDIOCY, you make a good point about the possible futility of it all, and one that I've heard expressed a lot since the disaster. As I've said before in interviews when the same point has been pressed, I think Katrina is a lens through which we all need to look hard at our possible futures.
New Orleans is the canary in the coalmine for a whole range of issues, from coastal danger in the face of global warming, to the environmental impact of development, to the proper role of government versus private disaster response and preparedness, to how well we can hold our government accountable for its action, or inaction.
Don't think that what happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005 is special to the region, or just the fault of poor city location. Most climate models predict this kind of an event coming to a town near you in the not so distant future. So, if you're one of the millions anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard, or in the great floodplains of the Midwest, look at New Orleans as a lesson in "there but for the grace of god go I", and act accordingly.
Don't think that what happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005 is special to the region, or just the fault of poor city location. Most climate models predict this kind of an event coming to a town near you in the not so distant future.
I'm in southern Ontario. If a hurricane is still a hurricane by the time it hits here, then the entire northeast US is well and truly fucked. The worst we get are snowstorms, icestorms, and the occasional tornado.
Right, JARDINE, now greatly multiply the power or frequency of those events that your region has been getting, and you'll get what I'm talking about. On the bright side, one can hope that your disaster response agency will be less likely to be privatized and crony-fied than FEMA was, but never say never.
So The Day After Tomorrow wasn't actually fiction, but rather a documentary that was sent back in time to warn us?
Hey there, i would just like to thank Xeni and Clayton for getting this clip up on this site. The traffic to the clip is huge, so thanks for watching, and debating. There are no right answers, but i can add that Pearlington is NOT New Orleans, and its not below sea level.
My wife and I just got back from working for a week in Slidell, LA with the Methodist Northshore Disaster Recovery, Inc. It was a good experience- they have helped renovate about 600 homes so far. They are a very well organized and helpful "umbrella"- helping to provide volunteers with temporary lodging, tools, and projects to work on. There is still a lot of work to be done- and it is sobering to see it for yourself.
http://www.northshorerebuilds.com/
The clip was down for a minute, due to all the attention this site has brought to it, the folks at Current felt the use of U2 was a little risky, so i replaced the track with more Of Justin Sullivan's music from his album "Navigating By the Stars", which is a hauntingly prophetic vision that was written prior to the storm. He is also the front man of the seminal legends of Bradford UK, New Model Army, and again i have to thank him for the use of his incredible music here.
RAMPANTIDIOCY, Pearlington is not on the mouth of the Mississippi. It was flooded by storm surge, not by the river.
This town would have had the same destruction if the Mississippi river never existed. It is relatively far inland, but has several channels leading to the Gulf of Mexico.
well then. . . disregard my irrelevance.
There was briefly talk of razing the flooded areas. Then some smart people crossbred Google Maps with satellite images (it was a new thing then), which allowed those who'd been evacuated to zoom in and check the condition of their own houses.
At that point, the talk of razing before rebuilding abruptly stopped. I think we can conclude that if they had done massive impromptu "urban renewal", a lot of parcels of land would have mysteriously changed hands before it was over.
Odd fact: as a rule, cities are prone to disasters because they tend to grow up at spots where major landscape features abut or converge. Very few of North America's big cities are immune to natural disasters, if the dice were to come up all sixes. It behooves us to be generous to the Gulf Coast, because it could just as easily be our area next.
oops, its gone again... so there is actually a higher quality version sitting over, here....
http://captainhookup.com/onehouseupdate.html
i think the kids at current decided to knock it off-line and hit the bar.
oops, its gone again... so there is actually a higher quality version sitting over, here....
http://captainhookup.com/onehouseupdate.html
i think the kids at current decided to knock it off-line and hit the bar.
okay... here is the new current link...
http://current.com/items/88862005_one_house_at_a_time_vers_2_0
thats all, thanks again everyone.
Thanks for your comments, Teresa. I know most people who say things like "We should rebuild it somewhere else" just haven't really thought about what they're saying, but it still hurts to continue to hear this stuff over two years later.
You're welcome, Mr. Gunn. I'm glad to see that Pearlington is coming back. I remember how frightening it was right after Katrina -- the news from New Orleans was awful, but from the towns further inland there were no reports at all.
I think what lies behind most of the remarks about razing Gulf Coast communities isn't so much callousness as poor anxiety management. We're scared when we see catastrophes, and want to imagine that they can't happen to us, so we pretend that the victims should have seen it coming. What we mean is, "I would have seen it coming. I wouldn't have gotten caught like that." And of course that's false, because there are all kinds of risks in our everyday lives that haven't happened yet but could. We don't foresee catastrophe. We do our best not to think about it.
For instance, there's a big geological rift -- the Reelfoot Rift -- underlying a good bit of the Lower Mississippi. It's seismically active. Its offspring, the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ), produced a major earthquake in 1812, and could do so again.
This is theoretically a worry for anyone living along that stretch. It's theoretically even more of a worry for Memphis, Tennessee, which sits on top of thick near-surface deposits of loess, a fine silty soil that has lousy load-bearing properties at the best of times. During earthquakes, loess can undergo liquefaction, meaning it behaves like quicksand.
Do people in Memphis spend their time worrying about this? Not on your life. But if the NMSZ lets loose with another major earthquake, and most of the buildings in Memphis fall down, you'll see people going on about how of course everyone's known the area's prone to major earthquakes since 1812, and how Memphis gambled on their unstable subsoil and lost. Furthermore, I'm morally certain that some of the people saying that would be from Las Vegas, which (surprise!) is also in a seismically active zone and sitting on top of loess.
In the time since Katrina, I haven't seen any of the people talking about razing the Gulf Coast going on to say that Hilton Head or Charleston or Miami also need to be razed and rebuilt somewhere else, even though that would make as much (and as little) sense. They're just not thinking.
IMO, one of the big lessons we learn in life is that misfortune can happen to anyone. We can learn it sympathetically, from observing others, when we're in a position to give them a hand. That's the best way to do it. The worst is to insist and insist that people deserve no help or sympathy because they bring their problems on themselves; and then, when misfortune hits us anyway, and we're needy and helpless, discover we're living in a world full of people who've repeatedly been told that they don't have to help each other out.
mukashi mukashi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Sinks
Sorry Teresa, but somehow I'm not comforted by an argument of "at least everyone else is as stupid as I am". Bad decisions are still bad decisions regardless of their popularity.
Furthermore, how much of rebuilding New Orleans is based on an emotional attachment to the romantic concept of the city?
petaler; where do YOU live?
how much of rebuilding New Orleans is based on an emotional attachment to the romantic concept of the city?
Who would want to live somewhere for which that statement wasn't true? The next time that SF falls over and burns, do we just move to Fresno?
Fresno? ewwwwww!!!
so it sank, and the next one, and the next one...
but the fact remains that where ever you live,I could quote incipient natural disaster waiting in the wings
All bets are off anyway. Who knows what will be underwater or a desert or a frozen wasteland 20 years from now.
Zuzu, I'm in love with the romantic idea that at the spot where the continental inland waterway (which carries a huge amount of commercial traffic) reaches the sea, there will be a city.
I'm in love with the romantic idea that unless we're prepared to watch the unfortunate die in the street, then when trouble comes, we have the choice of helping people rebuild their lives, or supporting them on public assistance and in prisons and charity hospitals; and that helping them rebuild their lives is much less costly. I'm also in love with the romantic idea that writing off hundreds of square miles of our country plus one of our great cities is insanely expensive.
I'm in love with the romantic idea that hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi have just as much claim on our assistance as hurricane victims in Florida, and that flood victims along the Gulf Coast have just as much claim on our assistance as flood victims along the Atlantic seaboard and the Mississippi and Missouri watersheds.
I'm in love with the romantic idea that a habit of blaming the victims always turns out to mean that those who have clout get assistance when they need it, and those who lack clout don't.
I'm in love with the romantic idea that if we don't tell Angelenos to stop building houses on hillsides that are guaranteed to slide, amidst vegetation that's guaranteed to catch fire, in an area that's guaranteed to have long droughts interspersed with huge unpredictable floods (not to mention the earthquakes); and if we don't tell the Valley of the Sun to rein in its Ponzi-scheme economy based on perpetual population influx in an area that gets less than ten inches of rain a year; and if we don't tell Seattleites to relocate to some spot that isn't so close to Mt. Rainier; and if we don't refuse mortgages and flood insurance to everyone living in the path of the Atchafalaya cutoff; and if we never undertake the construction of large amounts of solid, low-cost housing to replace mobile homes in Tornado Alley; and if we never rein in Great Plains agriculture and ranching's use of the Oglalla aquifer; and if we never, ever tell rich people to stop building their homes on Pacific cliffs and Atlantic sandbars; then we've got our bloody nerve telling a bunch of hard-hit Gulf Coasters that they shouldn't have been standing in the path of an Act of God.
Seriously, Zuzu: where do you live?
Teresa
Why do you believe in mercy?
"there's no point in acting all surprised about it. The plans and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning office in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge formal complaints"
Takuan, have you looked at the specs on what's required in order to dole out perfect justice?
certainty
There is still an important opportunity being missed here. Real Estate is always about location, location, location, but it's clear that every place has it's pros and cons so no matter where anyone (re)builds anything, there is not enough thought going into what is being (re)built.
I see an urgent need for us all to rethink the way we live, something much more fundamental than devising a new economic model or implementing a recycling program or "carbon credit" nonsense. Our infrastructure is fixed, rigid, very heavy, and essential utilities are centralized. The future demands infrastructure that is mobile, flexible, and light, with essential utilities diversified and decentralized (and therefore more resilient).
The only certainty about the future is that the specifics are unpredictable, and as population rises the need to be able to quickly move large populations out of areas rendered uninhabitable by whatever cause will proportionally increase. The infrastructure to support the newly-moved populations will have to be installed just as quickly, as they will likely be unable to return for a long time, depending on what happened. Government officials are certainly aware of these things, and I'm sure they're doing a heck of a job getting ready ;), so I would also suggest taking responsibility for our own lives by learning how to stay alive without needing FEMA to come rescue us.
Case in point: Some rocks move under water and a wave is generated that kills 115,000+ people; untold millions are made homeless and suddenly forced to relocate. And that was just some rocks shifting, no big deal as far as the planet was concerned and with no blame to cast as far as where all those people had chosen to live. In New Orleans, it just rained a lot and was windy but otherwise Katrina wasn't exactly "Biblical" in scope; it was merely a Category III hurricane when it made landfall, no big deal in the Grand Scheme of things. Watch for this scenario to become more and more common.
Oh, and if you think you're safe from brutal weather because of where you live, do some research on extra-tropical cyclones.
I got up this morning and was amazed that this clip is still pulling in viewers and creating a lengthy debate, but i think its getting a little off topic, so i have to chime in again. The question of whether or to rebuild is a mute point, and one that is only debated by people who have NOT taken the drive from Mobile, Alabama all the way to New Orleans along highway 90. This is a huge section of american coastline, it takes over 2 hours to drive it, now go take a sunday drive across town this afternoon and see hour far you can get in 2 hours. Again, this storm just grazed the troubled city with the levees and all the violence.
It makes me very frustrated to keep hearing the intelellectual/scientific discussion of why it should or should not be rebuilt by people sitting at there homes typing on their computers, in their black mold-free dens. Im sure the few poor bastards that are still huffing fumes in FEMA trailers are not part of this discussion. I wonder what they would have to say?
Yes i realize that the place is not the safestest place to live, hell, thay have alligator gars and poisonous snakes for chrissakes, But the fact is that this is home for some of these people and just need some storm-proof shelter for a while to get their shit back together, and guess what? A lot of people aren't coming back, so that makes the equation a lot easier to balance.
But here is a wacky anecdote about where you come from, and weather or not you may need some help some day- when i was down filming one group of volunteers had to return to their city of Nashville, why? because they didn't think rebuilding the coast (not just New Orleans please) was worth their time? no, it was because some tornadoes had just ripped though their city killing over 40 people. Bad stuff can happen anywhere folks, there is some data for you.
Any way sorry about spazzin out, its just seems like debating the issue to death is not the most effective way to spend a Sunday. Maybe spending the same about of time looking into where all that money went is more interesting/depressing. Or better yet, go take a 2 hour drive and use up some carbon credits.
In reading all of these posts, there is a major point missing...that is how Mississippi and Louisiana have handled the aftermath of Katrina. I grew up in LA but have spent the last 2 and a half years working as a volunteer in Waveland, MS for recovery. Why? Because most of the people that were in NO were sent somewhere else. The people in coastal MS never left, they were not 'shipped out' when the storm came. When we arrived in Sept 05, the folks in MS were living in the woods, under cars, and in the wreckage of the storm. They had no where else to go and nor any way to get there. These people did not get vouchers for hotels, they had no food, water, jobs, shelter, and some only at the end of 2007 got trailers from FEMA. (By the way, there are still people living in tents here and of the 4000, in Hancock County alone, in FEMA trailers, now these trailers are being taken away due to health hazards and again, these people will have no place to live). These people are multi-generational here, their families and livelihoods have been here for decades. To tell them to 'man up' and move someplace else is ludicrous. With that being said, it has been amazing to see all the church and private groups that have come down to help rebuild for these people. The gov't isn't doing anything for these, its own citizens, but there are numerous groups out there like One House at a Time and Rebuild Lakeshore that are making the difference for these people and giving them a chance to have a life again. The media has moved on; the story isn't sexy anymore (or all they ever talk about is New Orleans) but there is a lot of help needed here still and will continue for years. If you can help out, do so. If not, at least get educated on what the real story is on the Gulf Coast, is it not what most people think. Check out this site for another group making the difference here in MS: www.rebuildlakeshore.com
I just got back from working with Glen at OHAAT. People ask why rebuild there. I ask if they would like to live in the Hamptons in NY. When they say of course, I tell them about the 1938 hurricane that sent a 6 ft. wall of water over the island. The same storm now would cause $150 billion in damage if it happened now. As with San Francisco, they wouldn't even ask about rebuilding- it probably get done even faster. Please forward this link to everyone you know- the true story needs to be told.