A flood is coming to New Orleans‘ Gentilly neighborhood this week. But this time, no one wants to stop it. In fact, neighbors are welcoming it with open arms and open doors and some are even cooking up creole stew and planning a block party. The flood, is a flood volunteers, around 1,500 in all, who will descend on this community over the next five days to help rebuild what has now been broken for half a decade.
It’s been five years since hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and left thousands homeless. In the 60 months since the storm, many of the communities have been rebuilt … but many have not. Gentilly is among the latter.
This week the nonprofit Rebuilding Together and Sears Department stores, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, will rebuild fifty homes made unlivable by storms Rita and Katrina, as part of their Fifty for Five campaign.
Hurricane Katrina, now known simply as “The Storm” in New Orleans made landfall on the Louisiana coast on Aug. 29, 2005. It was the costliest and one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States.
Today 11,300 Louisiana households still reside in FEMA sites. For the people of the Gulf Coast, rebuilding and returning to their homes remains a daily struggle.
Starting Monday teams from the nonproft and the appliance retailer rolled up their sleeves in Gentilly to begin the massive Fifty for Five effort to rebuild. Compared to most American communities, Gentilly, sitting on the on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, is entirely unremarkable. It’s just like any other racially diverse middle-class community. Except that its London Avenue Canal floodwalls were breached in two places by Katrina’s storm surge and most of the area was flooded. Gentilly’s population has slowly returned, but most homes have required major gutting and repair work before they could be reoccupied — work that still isn’t entirely done.
“Our goal was on the fifth anniversary of Katrina to shine a light on one of the community’s hardest hit during the hurricane and to let people across America know there is still a great need here in New Orleans,” said Sears’ division vice president of Sears Holding, Tom Aiello.
The 50 homes that will be rebuilt this week belong to a mixture of homeowners who, for the past five years have been unable to return to their homes and to some who have been in their homes, but unable to repair the extensive damage that has made them largely unlivable.
Twelve of the 50 homes belong to military veterans and their families. One of those homes was owned by Vietnam vet George Hansell. He and his wife, Barbara, purchased their home in Gentilly in 1996.
They lived there happily for nearly 10 years until Hurricane Katrina flooded their home with eight feet of water. With their house in an uninhabitable condition, the Hansell’s moved to Atlanta. But since they couldn’t keep their jobs in New Orleans they lost their health insurance. In May, George passed away from health complications. This week Barbara has committed to rebuilding their former home.
Heavy lifting and complicated wiring at the properties has been in the works for the past month, but the bulk of the construction will be completed this week and includes rebuilding some properties literally from the ground up as well as tearing out roofs, walls and stabilizing foundations.
“Where we can we will do the best that we can to work with the existing resources,” Aiello explained.
Sears has raised around $3 million for Rebuilding Together this year and in addition to the home rebuilding they plan to use this opportunity to continue their “Big Switch” endeavor, a plan to help America remove over 5 million energy inefficient appliances from the power grid and replace them with the more energy efficient Energy Star appliances. To that end they will install energy efficient washers, dryers, ovens, refrigerators, air conditioners and hot water units in all the homes rebuilt this week.
“We plan to show how people working together can accomplish great deeds. There are still unmet needs in New Orleans that have not been fully met and we want to convey to the nation that we are still in a housing crisis and that New Orleans continues to be in crisis because of the economic tsunami of the past five years,” said Gary Officer, the President and CEO of Rebuilding Together.
The Fifty for Five push is just a fraction of what Rebuilding Together has accomplished. The organization and their network of volunteers have been on the ground in New Orleans since the day the rain actually stopped falling. They’ve completed more than 700 projects with the help of nearly 20,000 volunteers.
This week I’ll be one of those volunteers. I am traveling to New Orleans on Thursday to witness and to participate in the rebuilding on Tonic’s behalf, and to report from the ground the progress made, the current rebuilding and the work still to be done after this week is over.
It really is a whole week of Extreme Home Makeovers that will doubtlessly be just as inspiring.
Photos Courtesy of Rebuilding Together.