Biloxi in December

The New Orleans bus station has stopped serving as the jail. Our writer friend who lives in Marigny just outside the Quarter has hot water and no longer requires special chocolates for “fortifications” (having moved on to beer and Dr. John’s Katrina album). In Biloxi, you can still drive backwards down the highway 90 exit ramp, but you probably can’t drive backwards down highway 90. The Gulf Coast is beginning to rebuild, but if you think three months is a long time when it comes to remaking 150 miles of coastline that went under in Katrina’s storm surge, think again.

What I mean is, in East Biloxi the Thursday before Christmas I spoke to a man sitting on his front porch in work clothes beside a rusted out blue pickup and a neatly gutted house. He said he had been working on his house since a week after the storm hit, steadily, without applying for a trailer or asking for help from anyone because, he said “I didn’t want to get comfortable with an arrangement that I knew I couldn’t stand.” After three months of steady work by this man who framed up this house himself thirty-four years ago, the sheetrock was just going up. Meanwhile, there are plenty of homes all along the Gulf Coast that people have not even entered since the hurricane, that still house wet couches, foul-smelling fridges, pictures on the walls. This is especially true in New Orleans where uncertainty surrounding forced demolition means that people are unwilling to invest emotionally and financially in the process of gutting their homes. Neighborhood after neighborhood persists in an eerie suspended animation, a sort of brown haze over whole blocks, the waterline still visible just short of the eaves of sweet little yellow houses. Many of these families haven’t got the money to hire professionals (remember they just lost everything they owned); the way it looks now. . . thank god for the volunteers.

For many casinos, the rebuilding process has almost finished; at least three in Biloxi just reopened. It’s amazing what money can do. They were missed. Before the storm, 14,000 people worked in Mississippi’s twelve Gulf Coast casinos. Every day that they are closed, the town of Biloxi loses $54,795 in tax revenue and 14,000 Mississippians continue to go without a paycheck. They are part of the fabric of Biloxi as much as any fishing boat or home. Still, there is some fear that they have an appetite for land that threatens community members’ right to live where they do, in a relatively poor community that has managed to keep its place even though it is only blocks from the water, in a country where waterfront property belongs to the rich. With help, the locals can rebuild and maintain their right to live alongside the casinos and hotels.

In Biloxi, Hands On USA has been hard at work, being this help. Working with Hands On, I had the satisfying feeling that people were doing exactly as much as they could do--- putting in eight hour days ripping out drywall and plumbing and nails, scrubbing and vacuuming mold, hauling out trees to clear lots for FEMA trailers, helping people file their paperwork and learning what they lacked, delivering Christmas gifts to families with children who couldn’t afford Santa Claus--- and coming back to base ready to make merry before they started up again the next morning.

I want to interject here to correct what I think is a misconception about the wisdom of rebuilding along the Gulf Coast. When I told a Kentucky friend about the volunteer work in Biloxi, she responded incredulously--- “They’re just rebuilding right where they were before?”--- as though this were a terrible affront to Mother Nature and Good Sense. Yes. Communities are trying to get back on their feet right back on the coast. Some of the houses on the Mississippi Gulf Coast have been there for more than a century. Katrina was unique in those parts because of her enormous storm surge that made the water damage so extensive. People are rebuilding with the hope that Katrina will continue to be remembered as unique. In New Orleans, there will have to be more substantial re-thinking to decide what gets rebuilt where and how the city will drain. Still, it’s worth remembering that if the levees hadn’t failed, Katrina would not have been a catastrophe for New Orleans, and the levees would probably not have failed if it weren’t for a long list of preventable human errors related to pressure to cut costs and a murky chain of command during construction and inadequate annual inspection of the levees thereafter. See The Times-Picayune “Evidence points to man-made disaster” from December 08 for more on this.

The last step before rebuilding is getting out the mold. At Hands On, Mold is what I did. I still dream about demolding houses. January looks like a critical month. The house-gutting work may have peaked already, at least in Biloxi, and Hands On is starting to branch out to other needy communities; mold though, is still a force to be reckoned with there. At Hands On, we reckoned with it in the most labor-intensive gritty tough way you can. We scraped at it with wire brushes, vacuumed spores, wiped with Shockwave and primed with Kilz under the tutelage of a former navy seal, current mold expert and (at least this was the word on the street) shooting coach for the LAPD. He was a tough boss, and we did professional quality work. The trouble is that there are way more houses to rebuild than there are crack teams of volunteers.

Some houses will be demolded the expert way, and it will work some amount; others will be done with power-washers and fans, or with x chemical, and will have some amount less mold. It will be done haphazardly with little regulation--- like commerce in a place that sat underwater just a couple of months ago. The Gulf Coast will rebuild for better or worse with more or less mold. It’s hard to make scientific goals and measurements of success because, as the tree guys at Hands On put it: “the mold always wins.” In any case, there is a breathtaking amount of work and a lot of need for volunteers to be doing the dirty and mostly tedious work of getting out (enough of) the mold.

As much as I love to hate mold, last week I went with a group of volunteers to the St. Rosa de Lima Catholic Church in Bay St. Louis to listen to the gospel sounds and take a morning to not-demold. After the services, on the way to our car, a friendly nod to a gentleman picking up free supplies lead to an hour-long accounting of his family history. It began with the educational careers of 11 brothers and sisters who had been to this prestigious medical school or law school or who did undergrad at Harvard and now head up Peace Corps in West Africa, and... and look, here that brother comes now, look here we all are, coming from this small town, here we still are in this small small town on the Gulf Coast. We drank a glass of water in this brother’s house which was saved by a matter of inches from having water on the first floor. His grandfather had built this yellow frame house miraculously just tall enough and just far enough inland. As we started to depart, the man revealed the moral of his story, made sure we took away what he meant for us to take away. “When you’re working on these humble little houses,” he said, “remember that from these humble houses can come great things.”

His moral also could have been that these Gulf Coast families have deep deep roots in the Gulf Coast soil. Driving along the beach road, this contrast struck me every time. On one hand, you could pass a casino boat looking like a 20 story building, concrete and steel twisted by the uprooting water which left the giant barges a block inland, tossed like toys. And on the other hand were the live oaks, debris tangled in their great branches, holding tight along the coast like they had for hundreds of years. This is me believing that the communities of Louisiana and Mississippi have roots as strong as the live oaks have, and reminding you that these good people can use your help while they reach for the renewal of spring.