"Kicking Katrina's ass"

2005 Ochberg Fellow Mike Walter -- a Washington, D.C., broadcast journalist -- shot video during his weekend in New Orleans that the society hopes to use for a documentary about the project ...

Mike Walter (WUSA-TV)

Friday morning starts early: We are on the road at 8 a.m.

We are to meet at a house behind a church on State Street. We spot the group on the porch and know that we have found the right place.

I walk up and introduce myself to the leader, a guy named Will. Where there's a Will there's a way! This Will is young, earnest and knows he's making a difference. He confides in me later in the day that he also needs a break. Ten months ago he answered the call and moved here from North Carolina. In that time he's probably gutted more homes than he can count. He'll be leaving soon, and there will be another one just like him to take his place.

Today he's very much in charge, and deftly assigns the eager volunteers to their appointed tasks. It's a patchwork group of volunteers. Most are college students who will work hard during the day and party hard at night. I can tell this largely by the enthusiasm they exude as they talk about the pub crawl in the Quarter tonight. They are pliable, reliable and ready to work.

Once they jump into the job there is no resting, no talking, just action. It's just hard physical labor.

All of it is impressive to watch and to take part in. But the most impressive part of the day is watching Will talk to the homeowner. He is treated with respect. These are battered people. So much has been taken from them by Katrina. Will will do all he can to make sure that their dignity isn't taken as well.

Will asks the homeowner if it's OK if a videographer and I shoot video of the work effort. Will also asks what the homeowner wants to save, although all of us here know that there is nothing worth saving.

No judgments are made when the homeowner asks that we save his moldy sofa and love seat.

It is easy to forget why we are here. We think we are here for the experience, or, as journalists, for the story. We are here to witness the wrath of Katrina. We are here to see firsthand the damage and the recovery effort.

But as you stand inside this house -- what's left of it -- and watch Will talking to this elderly man you see the real story. You see a man whose hopes and dreams and life played out in this home.

Suddenly you recognize why we are all coming here: It's the people. It's about the people who care enough to come here and contribute, the people who care so deeply about a city that they refuse to leave or give up.

This is a story about the human condition. It's a story about Hope. I see it on this day and I see it throughout the weekend. I hear it in the voices of the people from the Times-Picayune.

Editor Dan Shea tells me that a lot of weekends he'll go out and gut homes and take his 10-year-old son with him. Before they leave he asks his son, "What are we doing today?" His son replies with a smile, "We are kicking Katrina's ass!"

Dan's wife will work alongside me on Sunday. She's mighty tough with a crowbar. I can see that spirit is alive in every member of the Shea family. It's alive in all the people from the newspaper whom I met and worked with all weekend long.

I'm getting ready to board a flight back to Washington, and while I know I didn't kick Katrina's ass, at least I helped people like Dan Shea, his wife and 10-year-old son. I know that Katrina tried to kick their asses, but in the end it's hope and not the hurricane that's prevailing in the Crescent City.

--Mike Walter

Five-year-old Will is fabled fund-raiser

Will Manware, son of Dart Center Ochberg Fellow Melissa Manware, baked goodies to help raise money for the recovery effort in New Orleans.

It's the talk of Target: New Orleans -- Charlotte Observer reporter Melissa Manware and her 5-year-old son Will raised a chunk of money for the Muckrakers with a bake sale at the paper. Their fund-raising drive has done more than melt the hearts of Muckrakers, it's spurred donations from others, including Ochberg Fellow Michelle Trudeau, who's donating two wheelbarrows ...

I wanted to make sure my 5-year-old understood why his mommy -- who already works too many hours -- would leave him and his daddy for five days. I wanted to make sure he knew I wasn't going on vacation without him, but instead going to work helping people who really need it.

We'd talked before about Hurricane Katrina and how it ruined people's homes. So I told him that I was going to New Orleans to help rebuild some of those houses. He seemed impressed and asked lots of questions. How many houses are broken? How many will I fix? And, can he help, too?

I explained to Will that only adults could rebuild the houses. The work is too difficult for little boys.

But then I thought of a way he could help.

We spent an entire Sunday afternoon baking chocolate chip cookies, brownies, Rice Krispie treats, and cream-cheese cookies. I measured each ingredient and then called him over. He poured the sugar, butter and flour into the bowl, he cracked the eggs, and mixed until his little hand hurt. He helped pour the batter -- and he licked the spoon! Then he drew a picture of a house with green grass in front and the sun shining brightly over the rooftop.

I attached the picture to a shoebox and wrote on the front, "Help Build New Orleans."

My colleagues have decided that Will has a future as a baker. They also contributed $355 to the cause. I gave the money to the Muckrakers, so they can buy more wheelbarrows, shovels and gloves.

Will is quite proud of himself. And I think he should be.

--Melissa Manware

Massive rebuilding effort is required

Fellows Melissa Manware (far left) and Gina Barton (second from left) pose with their work crew in New Orleans.

Charlotte Observer public safety reporter Melissa Manware reports being struck by how massive the clean-up and rebuilding effort is -- and will be -- and she wonders how tourists in the French Quarter could party through their vacations without being exposed to the devastation ...

Imagine a two-story house with fresh paint, a newly manicured lawn and a front porch perfect for a wooden rocking chair. Plants sit on the porch and in boxes outside the windows.

Now think about the homeowner -- so proud to have rebuilt -- standing on his porch. As far as he can see there is nothing but gutted-out houses, most still bearing the ominous markings of a search for the dead. If he's lucky, a few neighbors might be living in FEMA trailers parked in the front yards of their flooded-out homes.

This is post-Katrina New Orleans. The scene is similar in most every neighborhood. To me, it looked like a sad and a lonely place. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen.

There is so much work to be done.

Years ago, I rode a school bus to eastern North Carolina with a high school football team that was going to gut a house flooded by Hurricane Floyd.

The images -- and smells -- of that trip came rushing back as I toured New Orleans. It was early on a Saturday morning when the school bus turned onto the street and people were already working, not just on the one mucky, moldy house the team was there to gut. People were working on every house on the street.

New Orleans isn't like that -- at least not now, a year and a half after the levee breeches. The houses are mostly dry and the smell is mostly gone.

But so are many of the people who made New Orleans the quirky, wonderful place it used to be. There is still so much work to be done.

And then there's the French Quarter. I know a lot of people see hope there, but not me. At least I didn't see it on this trip.

The Quarter -- with all its mixed-drink specials, funky art and beignets -- made me even more sad. A few books and smart-ass Katrina T-shirts were the only signs of the storm. A tourist could easily spend a long weekend and have no idea of the devastation just a few miles away. I know it's necessary to get us shallow Americans to be tourists there again. But it's not right!

Make people see the mess. Make them aware of abandoned neighborhoods. Do whatever it takes to get them to stay a few days longer so they can help rebuild. There is so much work to be done.

Don't get me wrong, I did see hope:

* A large group of college kids chose New Orleans instead of Cancun for Spring Break. They were there to work, not party.

* An older man mostly just watched as we gutted his daughter's house. But he filled a cooler with bottles of cold water and offered me one. It was his way of saying thank you. It was the best water I ever drank.

* The daughter of another homeowner -- the mother has died since the storm -- told workers 15 times about a barbecue she's planning to thank workers who've helped their family through the storm. She said she'll have it at their new home in a neighboring town. She told me she hoped I'd make a trip.

I hope so too. I will do my best to be there. Not because I think I earned a cheeseburger for scraping up and carrying away her dead mother's tile floor. But because I want her to know I care.

I care about her and her city. And if I can get back that weekend, I can do a little more to help. There is so much work to be done.

--Melissa Manware

Looking down a long, hard road

Gina Barton, a staff writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, arrived in New Orleans March 1. Gina's no stranger to the aftermath of devastation, having traveled to Rwanda several years ago ...

I gave the cab driver the address of the Dart house.

Gina Barton

“That’s going to be hard to get to,” he said. “The roads there are bad.”

He was right. The journey from the airport consisted of more potholes than I could count. And filling them in is obviously not a priority.

The cabbie also pointed out dark, quiet, empty streets that used to be teeming with activity, even in the evenings. At 10 p.m. on a Thursday, they were desolate. I didn’t see a single porch light.

I asked the driver what he had done during the hurricane. He’d been evacuated to Texas. Coincidentally, he ended up in the town where his brother lives. After some weeks, he’d returned to New Orleans and gotten a new apartment. The rent was higher, though, he said. And the taxi business was no longer what it had been. As we talked, he told me he was considering returning to Texas for good.

Melissa Manware, a Dart Fellow from Charlotte, N.C., was waiting for me. On her way from the airport, she had seen more than one house with a single light on upstairs, an indication that the residents were staying up there while they worked to fix the flood-damaged lower floor.

On a tour of the devastation with Times-Picayune photographer Ted Jackson, I noticed numerous “for sale” signs on crumbling houses. I wonder if anyone will ever buy them. If so, I wonder at what price. It struck me that some billionaire developer should just start buying up entire subdivisions, bulldozing the ruined homes and building new ones. Undoubtedly, such a strategy would pay off down the road, wouldn’t it?

Later though, I realized the faultiness of my logic. I didn’t visit a single neighborhood in which everyone had given up. Every block has a few abandoned homes, a few empty lots, and one or two newly rebuilt structures. And many blocks have a house or two with a permit in the window, signifying the owner’s intent to rebuild.

Gutting a house

The second house I worked on had a spray-painted slogan across the siding: “Do not bulldose (sic), Mr. President.” A friend of the owner was mowing the grass when we arrived. Another friend joined in our efforts to gut the place. When we entered, I felt the place was a lost cause. There were holes in the roof. No drywall remained between the studs. The floorboards were so damp and rotting they resembled wet cardboard more than wood. After a few hours of work, though, my feelings changed. In one of the rooms, two other Muckrakers and I cleared debris from the floor, and then pulled up the rotting layers of wood, tile and linoleum. When we finished, I could picture new drywall, fresh carpet, comfy furniture. Maybe I was just dreaming, I don’t know.

After two days, I felt that our group had placed a tiny raindrop in a bucket three stories high. I couldn’t even imagine living like so many New Orleanians do -- in a trailer in the front yard, staring out at the frustrating snail’s pace of progress every day. Ted Jackson told a story that illuminated that frustration better than any of the others I heard. Three months after the hurricane, the Times-Picayune sent teams of reporters and photographers to five other cities that had suffered natural disasters. Jackson went to Kobe, Japan. He told one of the residents that there were still abandoned cars clogging the streets of New Orleans. The Japanese man counseled him to be patient. It took 10 years for Kobe to recover from the earthquake, the man said, and in New Orleans things might take longer.

Our inspiration and guide throughout the trip was Dart Fellow Natalie Pompilio, who is spending four months doing what Melissa and I did for two days. Late Sunday afternoon, after we had finished working and gotten cleaned up, Natalie gave Melissa and me a lift to the French Quarter. The streets there were alive with tourists. Hundreds of people had stopped to watch some guys break-dancing and doing acrobatics across the street from Jackson Square. At Café du Monde, it was hard to find a table at 5 p.m. on a Sunday, and servers were hustling to bring café au lait and baguettes to everyone who wanted them.

There, everything was just as it had been before. And that gave me hope.

--Gina Barton

Hurting at home

Jimmie Briggs, a NYC-based freelance journalist and author of “Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War,” is now working on a movie about the issue of children in war. In fact, he was in Uganda just days before he was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans for the Target project. I was worried he would be in no shape to head off to another devastated place, but he was eager to go. While there, Jimmie and Natalie Pompilio got some major gutting work done ...

A family connection and desire to lend whatever hand I could led me to New Orleans for a week's time. Like many other Americans, I suspect, the full impact of Hurricane Katrina was lost on me. With each passing day in neighborhoods such as Ponchartrain Park, the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, Lakeview and St. Bernard's Parish, my awareness grew tremendously as did a sense of anger and frustration.

After arriving on a Wednesday, I toured the most debilitated areas with Times-Picayune staff photographer Rusty Costanza on Friday. I couldn't help repeating to myself and eventually aloud, "This is not America, this is not America." I vividly recall watching the immediate images of the storm and its aftermath on cable television networks and feeling like I'd been in that place before, the images of the people begging for outside attention and relief seemed all too familiar. I wanted to believe that what I saw on TV and on newspaper Web sites was one of the developing-world countries in which I often find myself.

Having made my first post-Katrina visit to New Orleans and the surrounding areas, I can only question my country's state of being, how so many people were allowed to remain homeless, displaced and with the feeling they've been ignored, overlooked. Many neighborhoods feel like graveyards, with many homes wiped clean from the concrete slabs on which they rested or had been ruined beyond saving.

Following a weekend of gutting homes with Picayune staffers such as Costanza, Suzanne Stouse and Renee Peck, I asked to visit the paper's downtown newsroom and was allowed to speak with nearly a dozen editors, writers and photographers about the impact of the storm on their lives personally, the paper, and the community at large. It was all very informal, of course, but I'd like to believe that the days I spent sitting in the cafeteria or at various desks was of some comfort and benefit to those with whom I met. It seemed to me that having a colleague affiliated with Dart come and talk -- but more importantly, listen -- was greatly appreciated. One of my most memorable conversations was with Features editor James O'Byrne, who stopped working to share the havoc created in his life, as well as his process of coping. Like everyone else I met at the paper and in the larger community, he was candid about his emotional state and general feelings.

In the days since returning to New York from New Orleans, I can't get the place out of my head, but then again, I don't think I should. Already, I am planning my return to gutting and I continue to speak by phone with the colleagues and new friends I met in the Times-Picayune newsroom. I figure that if I can't make an effort to support and advocate on behalf of the voiceless and forgotten in my own country, then I shouldn't be going overseas to do it.

--Jimmie Briggs

Target: New Orleans

Photo by David Grunfeld

Dart Sociey member Natalie Pompilio had the idea to spend four months in New Orleans volunteering on reconstruction even before she was laid off from her job at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She told other Dart Society members of her plans back in November, mentioning the weekend efforts of the Muckrakers, a group of Times-Picayune staff members who've gutted their coworkers' homes. Many of us were eager to join up, but we needed to know how we individually or as a journalism society could be most useful -- were carpentry skills required?

Society members had already come through in the wake of Katrina in 2005 -- raising more than $10,000 to help journalists on the Gulf Coast. But this time we wanted to do something different.

The Dart Society's homebase Uptown

After some discussion, the Dart Society came up with a simple plan which Natalie named “Target: New Orleans”: We would send Society members down to tour the wreckage with a partner from the Times-Picayune, and on the weekend, join up with the Muckrakers. No carpentry experience necessary. We'd give Society members a hammer or a broom -- Dave Cullen, who'd be the first to go, happened to have his own tool belt -- and get ourselves into the thick of it. Society members would also lend assistance to Natalie for a book project about the coverage of Katrina.

Head Muckraker Suzanne Stouse and Lynn Cunningham, the Times-Picayune's assistant to Editor Jim Amoss, have been working with the Society to schedule the tours, work detail, and match Society members with their Times-Picayune counterparts.

Tornado damage. (Photo by Dave Cullen)

Dave Cullen, the first Society member to arrive in New Orleans for the project, was paired with Mark Schleifstein, who took Dave on a 35-mile tour of the wreckage, through what Dave described as “every conceivable permutation of vibrant to post-apocalypic urban ghost towns and stages between.”

On Saturday, Dave was scheduled to clean up debris and perform some gutting work on a house hit by the recent tornado. That house, Dave said, was being renovated when the tornado struck.

Days after his return from New Orleans, Dave said he was still riding a wave of euphoria. He knew the project would be personally rewarding, but it wasn't until he witnessed the scope of the wreckage and lent a hand to help that he realized how much. Dave sent us these thoughts:

Dart Society members Natalie Pompilio and Dave Cullen

My foremost observation was that some areas, like the French Quarter, downtown and much of Uptown (where I was staying), look like nothing happened, at least on the surface. These areas are full of life, and though I'm sure they are hurting in a lot of ways too, they looked and felt vibrant.

At the other end of the spectrum were places like the lower Ninth Ward. We drove over a very high bridge (over the Industrial Canal, I think) heading in, which gave us a bird's-eye view of much of it, and it looked like a neutron bomb had gone off. Block after block of houses were still standing, but kind of battered, and there were few signs of human life or care. The streets remained intact in some places, crumpled and ravaged in others; shops and schools and mini-malls deserted, lawns still grayish and scorched by the weeks of standing saltwater, but plant life fighting back, weeds and vines and brambles beginning to creep into the sidewalks, onto the front porches and over and through the link fences.

I was taken aback by small sights that seemed obvious on reflection, yet continued to grab me: so many signs of life frozen in time, like vehicles backed halfway out of driveways, and all the temporary signs, like the church listing the theme of the coming Sunday service that was presumably never held. So many times I felt like I was driving through Pompeii, frozen at the moment of the volcano.

Some neighborhoods were a patchwork of alive and dead, but nearly every block was one or the other: almost nothing in the middle. FEMA trailers became the main sign of life in the 'dead' neighborhoods, although occasionally I would spot a house with its lawn neatly trimmed, flowers blooming all around the deck, Carnival decorations hanging from the windows. But the FEMA trailers were the easy sign: usually that meant someone was living there, trying to build back. The pleasant surprise about the trailers was how much they came in clusters. We would drive by block after block where there would be one trailer, then zero, one, one, zero, zero . . . 10. Out of nowhere, a block would have eight or 10 or 12 or more. Mark and others I talked to explained that a lot of extended families and a lot of neighbors have gotten together to make a go of it, and in other cases one or two families on a block are going it alone, but their presence has encouraged others around them to follow. I'm sure there are all sorts of different patterns, but what is clear is that people need each other to do it. There is strength in numbers, and they seem to be succeeding most when they don't have to face it alone.

Street signs. (Photo by Dave Cullen)

I was struck by the enormity of all the simple tasks I had not considered. So many obviously huge things, and then so many little details. The temporary hand-painted street signs put up in some places offered a little glimpse. God, they have to replace EVERYthing in some areas. And those street signs are important: just getting to our work sites both Saturday and Monday was problematic, because so many remain missing and it was a struggle to find our way. I was told this has been a major problem hampering outside contractors and others helping with the rebuilding process who don't know the city. The asphalt on the streets is buckled in some areas, some are nearly impassible, other such hazards are just marked with hand-painted warning signs. So much to be done. But most of the main thoroughfares we took were fine.

The devastation was hard to look at sometimes, and meeting the people and hearing their pain made me wince. All that was expected, though--the surprise was this peculiar thought that kept creeping into my mind: "I could see living here." Really. I kept toying with the idea of moving there. That's how powerful the charm of this city is. That's the best way to describe the hold it had on me.

In spite of what Katrina did to this city, in spite of roughly half the population still missing, the same essential essence of the city that made me fall in love with it a decade ago isn't simply surviving. It's thriving. It's in the architecture of the houses, in the causal layout of the neighborhoods, in the relaxed attitudes of the cab drivers, and the warmth in the smile of a very old woman I saw as I walked down the street Monday morning. I was heading to a parade, she was dragging in a garbage can, straining just to pull the empty plastic container.

"Happy Lundi Gras," I said. "Happy Lundi Gras." She was tickled, and not afraid to show it.

I felt the odd but soothing essence of this city in a hundred different ways, some of which I could identify, others I could only faintly sense.

Of course it was Carnival. I'm sure everyone is not this nice all the time. But I have been to enormous holiday parties and festivals in New York and Chicago and London and Cairo and Bahrain and countless other cities, and rarely have I felt this kind of warmth, and definitely not sustained for an entire week. New Orleans is a special place. That's not a very bold statement, but I'd heard that a thousand times before Katrina and especially after. FEELING it is a whole different experience. Get them to New Orleans, I kept thinking. Get as many people here as possible, and that will make more difference than all The New York Times series imaginable. Get them to feel the vitality of this place even in its weakened state, and they'll never let it fade away.

I found myself feeling re-energized in my conviction that this city and its population have to be saved. I was horrified by how little has been done, and how many barriers the people there face. However, I also believe that whether they knew it or not, New Orleanians had already rescued the essence of their city. It's there. They still have a hell of a fight to bring the rest of it back, but the soul of the city is more resilient than I had imagined.

I realized that in the early days after Katrina, I was responsive to the plight of both the city and the people, but more so to the people, and over time that imbalance has grown. I had almost lost sight of the plight of the city--as an organism itself--and how unique and priceless it is to America. When I thought about Katrina, I thought about the victims, almost always the people. I thought a lot about them this week--impossible not to, especially as I met them--but the plight of the city as a whole leapt to the foreground to join them. Just being in this city it's hard not to feel how remarkable it is--what energy it oozes into the American culture. I got scared for it all over again. And I feel a personal need to help save it, in a way I never experienced even in the worst of the coverage of the aftermath.

--Dave Cullen