#23 Slidell Part I

Oh I am tired!!! What the hell!!??? Wasn't this supposed to be easy!!??? Oh yeah....no...it specifically was not supposed to be easy. I forgot. Sorry about that. Get into work and start in on the paperwork lots of paperwork. Someone has thrown us a barbeque outside, I of course miss the Que, and end up with the dregs of chicken bits. So what else is new?

Suddenly there is an emergency. So what else is new again? Everything around this place is an emergency, unless it is a real emergency. A real emergency seems to be a signal to the paid staff and long timers to go to lunch, or get their nails done, or just go out and invent something else, that isn't actually an emergency. This was again, not a real emergency. Well not exactly.

Apparently, CBS News was planning to shoot a segment in the heavily damaged town of Slidell at one of our shelters. Unfortunately, that shelter didn't have enough blankets for the clients who were already sleeping on miserable cots in crowded stupid conditions. Bad press = emergency. Hmmmm.....not having enough blankets for the clients is an emergency, but not because CBS News is going down there to shoot a segment. Not having enough blankets for the clients is an emergency because the clients are cold without blankets.

This may be a warm state, but in these cavernous concrete bunkers that we have turned into shelters, it is as cold as a witch's nursing part when the air conditioning is on.....and it has to be on. It is beyond uncomfortable not to have a blanket to sleep under in those conditions, but this was an ACR emergency because the ARC would look bad to America when devastated evacuees living in shelters being filmed for CBS News didn't look perky and happy because they were cold....because they didn't have enough blankets, that the ARC hadn't supplied them with to begin with. Get it? Sigh.....One wonders how long these clients went without blankets before CBS decided to take a look. Interesting definition and timing of an emergency.

...And while I am ranting, why the hell isn't the Federal Government supplying the dang blankets and shelters and help in the first place??? The Red Cross is supposed to be a stop-gap aid, not completely take the place of our totally useless government in an emergency. That was never a part of the ARC job description! The Feds don't show up to save the locals from the storm, then they pointed the finger at anyone or thing in sight other than themselves as the culprit. To add insult to injury, these jokes for human beings continue to check out the pigeons flying by and twiddle their thumbs while people are still lost, homeless, peniless, injured, destroyed and without blankets!!!............................................... End of lecture # 361.

Anyway, this BS all came from the top brass on down to we the underlings. "Banana Man", who I have previously refered to as, "The Old Man", I have since decided deserves no respect or distinction, this rude, pitiless, mis-begotten "top rat" of the whole Baton Rouge mess apparently ordered this mission his own self. From what I have seen, its about the only thing he has done since I have been here. He is a useless arrogant appendage that should have been amputated eons ago. What is the ARC thinking??? Apparently the Hornet thought it was a good idea too. Now what is she thinking? Even after everything between us, I truly thought better of her.

In any case, I was suddenly assigned to roar down to Slidell, beat CBS, and make it look like: Hey.....? Blankets???? Why of course we have blankets! That would be bordering on criminal not to supply our freezing clients with blankets! My new job: Liar to the stars...I mean the press....I mean America. I am not amused. I am told I will be the hero shoudl I beat the media there. I think my cape should be tucked between my legs if this is what constitutes heroism.

So ok, blankets. Where the heck am I gonna get blankets? Aha! The famed River Walk shelter is shutting down. I will go nab blankets at River Walk. Plan is in place. I have the keys to Moosie, and am ready to roll. Thing is, I can't go alone. I am fine going alone. I want to go alone. Boss thinks that I am safer alone than having to babysit any of our staff who would go with me. However "rules" dictate that female staff don't go alone to dangerous areas. Since the hurricane, Slidell is considered a dangerous area. For some time, female staff were not allowed at all in some areas of the state due to the dangers. Just male volunteers accompanied by the Army. It was that bad. Slidell has been devestated. Flattened. It ain't good. I ain't going alone. Besides which, Big Daddy has forbidden it.

About an hour ago, some guy named "Bobby" from California came around looking to transfer to our department. Said he would do anything. This might be that. My alternative is "Jaqui" She that might be a he. the "Jaqster" is oh so eager to go with me. Although, truly she is not that bad in short spurts, I think that this particular trip might be two hours of torture by "Jaqui", so I go looking for "Bobby". "Bobby" is a Mexican guy from my neck of the woods. Thank god....someone I might be able to relate to. In fact, our department is populated by several sunny Californians, so "Bobby" might fit right in. Mid sized and squat, "Bobby" looks like one of those Toltec gods off of an urn. I know nothing about him at all other than that. It seems like a great idea. Its interesting that in this situation, we are al reverting to the fifties descriptively. I am the Jew, "Bobby" is the Mexican guy, then there is the Puerto Rican Woman and the Italian. It goes on and on....Sigh......

We tell "Jaq" that she ain't along for the ride, and I go fetch "Bobby". Yeah man, he is so up for it, so off we go. He drives, I navigate. We get to the River Walk in no time flat, and go tearing into the loading bay. Meeting us there is "Georgette". Remember her from Shreveport? The other troublemaker? Well "Georgette" has been the logistics coordinator for the River Walk since we snagged her from Shreveport/hell.

Anyhoo, There she is with a bunch o' blankets. In we stuff 'em, along with toys, sheets towels. Anything at all that we can grab to take with us, figuring that if the Slidell shelter hasn't been given something as basic as blankets, then god only knows what else they are doing without. I am hoping/assuming that some boss "greenied "/invoiced at least some of this stuff prior to our arrival. We know for certain that the blankets were. Everyone on the dock at River Walk is there to help. Bosses think they are rescuing the ARC from CBS News. All of the volunteers involved figure we are rescuing Slidell clients from the ARC.

Loaded up, and off we go. Volunteers are good people. They come from all over the globe. They want to help because today's victims of disaster may be any one of us in some future crisis. They work overtime, past time, with little time to themselves, few breaks under gruelling pressure cooker conditions. Its amazing that most of them are still standing. Sure there are a few bad apples, but they are the exception, not the norm. Other volunteers root them out and turn them in if they can. God help you if you are screwing over some client. the volunteers will tear you limb from limb. Oh....I am not talking about staff by the way. Volunteers and clients are the enemy to many of the staff and long term volunteers. Those without lives or other existence. Excepting my department of course. They are all great and good....lol.

So into the woods. Driving along, we figure out somehow to get where we are going. On the way I hear the life of "Bobby" it is long and colorful. It has involved the law, and not in a good way. ARC not doing its job screening again. FOr that matter, I don't think that the ARC has done any screening....at least they didn't screen me or anyone I had met. Good thing in this case as "Bobby" is a good guy and a hard worker. Our first clue at to what has gone on in the storm is as we are approaching Slidell. We see that the trees in on either side of the road are snapped off at about the level of a two story house. All of them. It is weird. Then we see the billboards ripped up from the ground and crumpled like so many wads of discarded paper.This was looking eerie. We had no idea.

Coming up along "Bobby's" left was a pile. well not exactly a "pile",because a pile would be a mound of stuff in one lump. this was an endless smoldering mountain of wood, debris and the bits and pieces of peoples' lives. It was about three stories high, and went on in a flowing dune for a mile or more. It scared us. We couldn't pry our eyes from it. It was also confusing, because we had never seen anything like it. What did it mean? Was this trash? Clean up? We weren't really sure what the hell it meant, but we knew that it couldn't be good.

The road began to narrow. It was a freeway, but we were being funnelled off. We could see that the opposite direction was closed down completely. There was a long line to exit the road, but we were in a hurry. We pulled out our get out of jail free Red Cross badges, skirted the line and turned right at the exit. The directions got a little sketchy from there. We pulled into the only gas station in sight. We could see the houses across the road from us. Except for the blue tarps covering all of their roofs, the line of houses looked intact, and pretty good for that matter. I walked up to the doors of the mini mart of the gas station, and it was then I noticed the chains across the door.

I looked inside the mart, and it was destroyed. Cans, bottles, cheetos, all over the floor of the store it was dark inside. I turned and saw the bags over the gas nozzles. I hadn't noticed that either. We take so much for granted. Its as if your brain simply completes the picture for you without you really having to look. "Bobby", was busy asking strangers where the heck this shelter was.

None of the folks at the gas station knew, because none of them were from the area. All of these people had come down from neighboring states to make a buck off of the distraught. The guy at the pumps next to our car was an especially vile specimen. He was short, dirty and ugly. His thinning Raggedy Andy hair was scattered to the wind. He had a violent bubbling red and purple birthmark that covered half of his face, and dragged down one eye so that it drooped and watered constantly. To detail the portrait, this joe was missing a goodly number of his choppers. He was drunk. You could smell it from where we stood 12 feet away. He was a crude cruel looking scum of the earth. This is who had come down to,"help".

All around us, in cars and trucks bearing license plates from everywhere *but* Louisiana, there were twenty more like him . We asked this creep if he was familiar with the shelter that we were looking for. He told us that he "was a f***ing roofer from Michigan", and that, "no, he couldn't F***ing help us". God help the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas.

We drove on looking at the useless map that we had been given. Looking at the blue tarped houses that were getting closer. We saw as we neared, Boats thrown on lawns with no water nearby. Trees ripped apart and RVs tumbled over like toys. We turned around and drove the other way. We finally found the shelter in a place that had no relation to the map that we had been given. Over a bridge and at the end of an otherwise empty spit. It looked like it was not completely built.

Rushing in, we figured we had beat CBS, only to find that they had been there about the time that we had left Baton Rouge. It didn't matter to us. The clients still needed the blankets, and we had them. "Bobby" went to unload the Moose, and I went to get help for him. Who do I run into, but, "Amy", from day one at my shelter. This is where she has been sent for her assignment. We said our hi's, and she gave me an upbeat overview of the site. As I went inside I saw that our first impression was right. This shelter wasn't finished. Not even kinda. What the heck was going on?

I saw cots amid food, and even more food. Dry goods scattered everywhere. Doors wired shut, wires exposed, walls torn up and worse, some kind of pump had blown, and there was no water. None for washing, none for cleaning, no water for sinks or toilets. I spoke to some of the staff, but they had developed Stockholm Syndrome, and were more concerned that I would turn in the fact that they were in a half built wreck of a building, than the fact that they had clients and themselvesin an unsafe shelter in unsafe conditions. Made my head spin. I knew we were coming here tomorrow for a walk through, so I took mental notes as to what to look for.

"Bobby" had finished, the unload, and we were ready to turn around and go back. We headed out of the shelter, talking to a few clients along the way. These clients loved the Red Cross. They all wanted to shake our hands. Because the ARC volunteers lived day in and day out at this shelter with the clients, they shared everything, food, lack of water, sleeping arrangements and had formed a tight bond. Most of these clients had lost everything, and the sense that someone understood what they were going through was important. Many asked if the ARC was going to send any more VIenna Sausages. Huh?

I went back in and asked the ARC staff about the little weenies. The staff informed us that that particular product had taken on a singular cachet among the clients at this shelter. Arguments had even broken out about them. A "greenie"/requisition had been put in a week prior, but still no saucies. The situation was getting dire. The staff seemed as stressed about it as the clients. Vienna Sausages eh? I could see that when you have lost everything, it is the little things, no pun intended, that become important. It is similar to prison in that way. Tubular canned meat products, processed to within an inch of their lives into a overly salty somewhat unpalatable end result had taken on an overwhelming importance in this shelter. These wee weenies were a serious matter to them, no matter what I thought. Ok then. I think I understood. I would be absolutely sure to ask about the hot doggies in a tin when we got back.

Before ripping back to Baton Rouge, "Bobby" and I decided to go have a look around Slidell. We drove in the direction of the blue tarped roofs, thinking that would be a good place to start. As we got closer, we saw that although the houses looked intact, they were definitely not. In this area, the water had risen to second floor level destroying all of the contents of the house if not ripping the things out of the house and scattering it outright. On either side of each and every house and across the street were smaller versions of the dunes of trash that we had seen earlier on the way into town. Couches, tables, bedding, toys. appliances, chairs, tanning lotion. We saw all of it, and all of it was totally destroyed. Anything and everything that any one of us might have in our own homes was in one or most of those plies of detritus. Ruined. The sheer volume of personal things was overwhelming.

I stopped to take some pictures so that I would remember this in detail. The water marks on the walls, the marks on the houses made by rescue crews telling everyone how many died in this house or that, or if there were none. Luckily, there were almost none. The spray painted marks made by insurance companies letting all know that this house had been inspected. The boats on the lawns picked up and thrown like so many dice on a craps table.

The one image that has stayed with me to this day on that forlorn street was the dishwasher that had been ripped apart and thrown. Two baskets that used to be in the washer lay amidst items that had formerly summed up peoples day to day lives. One basket contained all of the dishes just as they had been placed by the homeowners when they had loaded them up to be washed.The second basket was about thirty feet away, the glasses and cups placed in the basket in the same careful way. Nothing was broken, nothing was cracked. It was as though the tableware had just been loaded in to be washed, only it was all akimbo on some random trash heap now. Untouched. It was all we could do to keep from crying. and this was one of the "good" streets.

As we drove farther we saw cars that had been dragged up from somewhere wet, completely trashed. In the end, there would be three hundred thousand cars recovered from the affected areas. Each car would have to be stripped. Tires disposed of separately from useless engines. Toxic batteries taken out and dismantled. It is and will be a nightmare, and that is just the beginning.

In every area we would see refrigerators with the words, "full", painted on them, taped shut. "White teams" were hired to remove home appliances which had to be dismantled one by one to remove the toxic elements in each one, like the mercury in the refrigerators. There were hundreds and thousands of these too. Where was it all going to go? how were the governments going to fix this, dispose of that? As we all know, they haven't.


"Bobby" and I drove on. We saw giant 40' boats tossed around like potato chips. Some were piled on top of each other like pick up stix. Several of these former luxury yachts were thrown into and onto houses and apartments. We saw houses that had collapsed into themselves, gigantic trees lifted up and thrown onto roofs. Cars in trees,suspended in mid air...... Upside down. Another three story apartment complex had its bottom floor totally stripped down to nothing but 2x4's and studs by the intensity of the winds, while the two floors above it were so unscathed that bycicles and shade umbrellas still sat untouched on patios. We drove to the end of one road where a salvage company was dragging up boats that had sunk. They were lined up tilted on the grass. Ghost ships dripping algae as if they were being prepped for some Disney movie. It had been some storm. Driving back towards the highway, we passed one apartment building with a simple, plaintive, spray painted message: " I want to come home".

As we headed back to Baton Rouge, we didn't talk much. we had seen too much. Part of why you volunteer for a disaster such as this, is because you want to see it first hand. We had. It wasn't even the worst of it, it wasn't even much of it. What had happened here that our government was so oblivious to the danger and the outcome? We were ashamed that anyone had to experience something of this magnitude with no help and no support. Seeing house after house destroyed, and the inhabitants, now our clients and what they were reduced to made us even more ashamed. If nothing else, it gave us a renewed compassion,and an empathy that couldn't be gained only from watching news reports. We would never forget.


We got back to HQ late. Dropping off "Bobby", I ran into two people from another department who had a clipboard, a flashlight and a miner's light on one of thier heads. They were going into the parking lot to try to find some of the missing rental cars. By the end of my deployment, the ARC had apparently misplaced or lost hundreds of them. Our HQ was no different. "Bobby" and I said our goodbyes. I went back to Moosie and began to turn out of the lot.

Just as I was almost gone, who do I see but Big Daddy and some of the Material Girls. They stop, I stop, and we all decide to go to dinner. After this day, I needed a break. Off we went to some rib joint down the way. Walking in to be seated, we pass a no necked man about the size of a volkswagon. He was an amazing sight, and we couldn't tear our eyes from him. He was sitting on a stool, that we couldn't see because of his girth. I could almost swear that the steel pole that held it was bending, but I digress.

Daddy, "Mo", "Minna" and I were seated at a plank style table. I showed a slide show on my computer of the things we saw that day. Others from the restaurant gathered around to watch. No one asked questions, the pictures spoke for themselves. Apparently at some point, "Mo had whispered to the waitress that it was Daddy's eighty- third birthday. The waitress was thrilled. Daddy was not. He is sixty two and it was not his birthday. To make it more interesting, we also told her that I was his wife. Waitress-girl gushed all night how Daddy looked so good for his age, and married to such a young woman too. At one point we all practically laid down on the seats we were laughing so hard. This went on for the whole night, and only got worse. The climax came when the excited waitress brought out the birthday cake and the whole restaurant sang Happy Birthday to poor Daddy. We all about strangled ouselves out-cackling each other. What a bunch of hens.

Night ended at last. I felt as though I had been attacked by elves and beaten with sticks. What a day. And it was just another day in this screwed up situation. If you like stress, intensity and constantly having to think on your feet in a situation that will change completely from one second to the next and inevitably screw itself up some way, no matter how hard you try, then join the Red Cross in a disaster. It is certainly not for everyone, but we were happy and proud to do the best job that we possibly could.

Finally got back to the shelter about midnight. Stayed up writing on the computer, finishing some more drafts of fliers that I had promised for other departments. Tomorrow we all go back to Slidell. Can you believe it?

xxoo

Lisa