When it comes to Hurricane Katrina, seeing is believing.
Five Wesleyan students did just that, as part of a Hillel-run initiative in the Gulf Region. Hannan Braun ’09, Janie Stolar, ’08 Lillian Siegel ’08, Lily Walkover ’07, and Zach Lazarus ’06, decided to spend their vacation in Mississippi as volunteers in a hurricane-ravaged town.
Along with 60 other students, the group stayed in Gulf Port, Miss. and worked on de-roofing and re-roofing houses in the lower-income (and harder hit) town of Biloxi. The students went with Hillel, a Jewish student organization, though the project was an interfaith effort.
In visiting the site, the students were able to gain a better understanding of the devastation in this region, which has received less media coverage in the wake of New Orleans’s tentative recovery.
“The part I was at, the Gulf Coast, was hit much harder by the storm,” said Lazarus. “In New Orleans, the levies broke, it was like a human-made problem in N.O.”
The students experienced firsthand the damage done to homes, many of which the storm devastated beyond repair.
“The house next to the one I worked on was four feet off its foundation, [and] there was another house nearby that had been moved at least 80 feet to the side,” said Walkover. “The whole house had been moved off its foundation and into the yard of the next house.”
Even more striking was the fact that some buildings escaped the hurricane relatively unscathed.
“Within an area, some houses might be relatively okay, while other houses were completely lifted off their foundations,” Walkover said.
Lazarus, too, was impressed by the randomness of the destruction, citing how the storm affected Gulf citizens across race and class boundaries.
“A lot of people got hit in kind of similar ways, so the storm kinda crossed many racial and class boundaries,” Lazarus said. “Though better built houses stayed up better, a lot of them still got damaged.”
Still, they did note some general trends as to how the storm affected people in the region. Lazarus and Walkover both mentioned that the houses most damaged were the ones closest to the shore. Houses with more sophisticated fortifications, such as those made of brick, were also more likely to survive.
Some houses, it seems, were never structurally sound in the first place, and Walkover said that one of her colleagues on the site called the project “Southern Construction.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has a presence in this area, helping the reconstruction effort. Braun, however, said the agency could take a more active role in the community.
“There were FEMA workers, but not nearly enough,” said Braun. “Many of the residents I talked to had not gotten any help from FEMA, which is unacceptable.”
Much of the town of Biloxi has been destroyed, according to Lazarus. Only three of the region’s casinos are now open for business. Lazarus and Walkover said that while the casinos might help revitalize the economy, they might also prove to be a distraction to people whose money would be better spent in resurrecting their homes and businesses.
“[For] a lot of them, everything they own has been washed away, their home has been wrecked,” Walkover said. “And they go and distract themselves by giving away money [at casinos]. It’s escapism, and really depressing.”
Lazarus hopes that the casinos will ultimately help the region. Citing the many out-of-state cars parked outside one casino, he expressed hopes that casinos may attract revenue from wealthier parts of the country.
“It has its plusses and minuses,” Lazarus said. “All the public schools in the area are reopened, and that has a lot to do from funding from the casinos. However, casinos and gambling are kinda considered a poor tax. And it’s a known sociological phenomenon that the upper class don’t spend much time in casinos.”
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