Day Two: Our First House

The weather today is clear, the birds are singing, and Louisiana hot sauce was on the breakfast table. I can't get over how well set up the camp is here. They have steel shipping containers set up with hot showers. There is a movie tent. There were even people singing Christian songs last night. The harmonies sounded nice, and it was cool to here a group of college kids doing it. We seem to be the only group not part of a church.

Today we will see our first glimpse of the Ninth Ward.

Update: After a great hot breakfast in the dining tent, we caravanned to the ACORN office for our first work assignment. There I met Tony, our foreman. He's a muscular asian guy who stood in the median of Elesiuand Fields and shouted assignments at people and into his cell phone. After a few minutes we dashed after his van to the first house.

We drove through the devastation of the Lower Ninth, just below the levee break on the downriver side of the Industrial Canal. We were at Ground Zero, where many people lost their lives. Houses were gone from their foundations, swept away in the deluge. We wound through this ghost town, staring at houses on top of cars, houses in the middle of streets, and houses with holes broken in the roofs where residents had climbed into their attics to escape the rising water and then had to kick their way out through the old plank roof decking.

Each house we looked at was structurally unsafe. Finally we found a small house on the corner of Lamanche and Villere farther from the levee that looked safe to enter. This would be our first job. We parked and suited up in Haz Mat suits and dust masks. Tools were passed out and we started gutting. In a few hours it was done. That was just a warm-up for what would follow.