Gulf Coast still in chaos 4 months after Katrina
College student volunteer sees devastation of hurricane firsthand
BY KATHY CHANG
Staff Writer

Six days in Chalmette, La., has changed 20-year-old Jessica Pracher’s life.

“It looks like Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast yesterday. Everything is the same except the water has receded and most of the bodies are gone,” said Pracher.

Pracher, a junior at Centenary College in Hackettstown, went to Louisiana with more than 100 students and faculty from her college and Drew University in Madison on her winter break. Some groups helped in Chalmette and some in Metairie. They stayed in a church in Kenner, La., which was provided by the United Methodist Church of Relief.

They were not prepared for what they saw.

“We didn’t think there was much to do since the hurricane hit over four months ago, but when we drove into the towns, it was like stepping into a war zone. All of us were confused,” said Pracher. “Cars were overturned, houses were destroyed, there were dead dogs lined up on the highway where their owner probably had left them, the levee was leaking. It’s like nothing was done.”

Some homeowners are living in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers in front of their destroyed homes. Others are living in tents in a parking lot, and some travel back and forth to their homes just to fix them up and put them up for sale.

“Most of the homeowners have put their houses up for sale and some are unsure what to do,” she said. “It’s the only place they call home.”

Despite the devastation, Pracher says the residents are in high spirits.

“I have met the nicest people,” she said. “They have told me they have hit their low point, but seeing the volunteers have lifted up their spirits.”

Pracher’s group was assigned to complete demolition, which meant gutting everything in a house, including furniture, walls and debris. The frame of the house was the only thing left standing when they were finished.

“You would lift up something and that’s when you would smell everything,” she said. “The bathrooms were the hardest. We left them for the guys because the smell was so overwhelming, I started one and I just couldn’t finish.”

Before Pracher and the group went down to Louisiana, they were told to expect snakes and big cockroaches. But once they arrived, snakes and big cockroaches were the least of their problems.

“We would start working by 6:30 a.m. and work for five to six hours,” she said. “We had to leave by sundown because the town didn’t have electricity and we stayed an hour away. I haven’t worked so hard in my life. By the end of the day my body was shot, but it was all worth it.”

It was an emotionally difficult experience as well as a physical one for the group members.

“The homeowners cried out to us about their frustration with the government,” Pracher said. “It would make us frustrated because we wanted to give them answers, but we couldn’t. All we could do was listen.”

The town of Chalmette was deemed an ongoing health hazard by several civilian ecological groups because of the large oil spill originating in Chalmette’s large Murphy Oil facility, she said..

KATHY CHANG Jessica Pracher, 20, a junior at Centenary College, is pictured with the photographs she took from her trip to Chalmette, La., to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

“Officials are questioning if houses should be rebuilt,” said Pracher.

Some residents came to see their destroyed homes for the first time, including a woman named Mona.

“Mona was seeing her in-laws’ home for the first time, and she was devastated,” said Pracher. “I think the devastation is seeing all their belongings put on the side of the road as if it’s nothing.”

Another resident she met was a man who bought his dream house a year ago. The hurricane hit just as his fiancée was about to move in. The house was destroyed and is now up for sale. He gave the volunteers a $500 check as a donation.

“We didn’t want to take it at all, but we also didn’t want to be rude, so we gave it to this other woman who needed her roof fixed,” said Pracher. “He kept on calling us angels and on his note with the check, he said, ‘Thank you, angels.’ The other woman gave us cake, and Mona, who is a photographer, had taken photos of the angel headstones from the famous cemetery in Chalmette and gave us an angel photograph.”

Pracher wants to go back down to Louisiana in the summer and wants to get the word out that people are still suffering from Hurricane Katrina and need help, even if someone can only help for a day.

“My goal is to educate people up here because they don’t know; the news doesn’t say what the newspaper and news say down there,” she said. “The pictures they show are not the pictures they show up here. In the six days, we gutted five to six houses. There was 17 groups with us, and so about 100 houses were gutted.”

“I remember when I told some people I was going down to Louisiana, people asked me for what,” she said. “These pictures that I have taken don’t even tell you the whole picture, you have to go and experience it for yourself.”

Pracher only experienced the heartache of Katrina for six days. She still doesn’t know how the people who live in the destroyed town day in and day out do it.

“These people are so positive that it teaches us a lesson,” she said. “We should be more grateful for what we have.”

Some businesses have taken advantage of the disaster. Professional companies that gut houses have jacked up prices to over $1,000, far above what many residents can afford, she said.

“We are down there for free and these businesses have the nerve to raise their prices because they know some of the homeowners will pay because they have no one else to go to,” she said.

Residents are also frustrated because officials are still considering having Mardi Gras.

“For the most part New Orleans is OK and the Superdome is fixed, but these people in the towns are not,” said Pracher. “It’s like the businesses and money are more important.

The worst time of her days in Louisiana was sunset.

“It’s warm down there, and when the sun is on you during the day, it doesn’t feel as bad, but when the sun goes down, it just hits you,” said Pracher.

For information about how you can help, visit http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/.