Day Six: Ground Zero

After finishing the Slack family's home, today we drove back to ground zero. As usual we got cut off by houses in the street and had to turn around several times. We were giving up on finding a house in that neighborhood that was salvageable, but then we saw house number six. It was a hip-roofed brick rancher built on a slab. Amazingly, this house was still straight and on its foundation when every house in sight looked like tinkertoys.

The house was at the corner of Jourdan Ave & N Robertson, one block from the Industrial Canal levee break, and we could see the work going on, with several cranes, large trucks, and a pile driver knocking the sheet metal piles deeper in the Louisiana mud. Hopefully deeply enough to hold this time.

This house had been partly gutted by a previous crew, and we had to move two refuse piles from just outside the picture windows to the street where they could be picked up. It took a long time. There were lots of dressed-up people driving by and rubbernecking. A crew was removing a house from a street while we were there.