Getting started

NEW ORLEANS -- After lights on at 6:15 this morning and a hearty breakfast that included biscuits and gravy, the group of St. Olaf volunteers at Bethlehem Volunteer Center -- as well as the other two camps of St. Olaf students -- spread throughout the city to tackle the day’s projects.

One group of eight volunteers was sent to a home on St. Ann’s St., just a dozen blocks northwest of the famed French Quarter. The house had already been “mucked out” (the process of digging out the layer of hazardous silt left behind by the receding flood waters) so the job of this crew was to tear out ceilings and drywall, taking care with handling the mold they uncovered.

Gutting a house
After removing her hard hat, respirator and multiple layers of protective gloves, Emily Segar ’09 talked about stripping the interior of the house down to the studs. “We’ve run into a couple of problems because the walls of the house were moved about 4 to 6 inches [by the flood water],” she says. “The water rotted everything away and shifted things around inside, so it’s been an interesting challenge.”

She calls the neighborhood a “mix” of houses that have been rebuilt and houses that are just getting mucked out and gutted now. She notes that there are quite a few more people in the neighborhood where her crew was working than in nearby neighborhoods that remain largely abandoned. “So hopefully we can get through a lot of houses this week.”

Crew member Michael Murchison ’10 says he’s felt “overwhelmed” by everything he’s seen. “It’s going to take a long time before everything is back to normal. We’ll just do what we can and go from there.”

Other current Ole Spring Relief II projects Monday included (but were not limited to) stocking a food shelf, mucking out an office building and maintenance work in the various camps.

In photos: Ishanaa Rambachan, Tony Olson and Tremaine Versteeg confer about the day’s plans before heading out from Camp Atonement in northeastern New Orleans (note that Ole Spring Relief II, like last year’s trip, has been organized entirely by students); Shaina Short sweeps out debris; Chris Peterson takes a break.