On the evening of August 29, 2005, I was at a laundromat in Cedar City, Utah. As I sat there, waiting for the wash cycle to finish, my attention turned to a small TV in the corner. I realized that every station on the TV was now on 24/7 news coverage of a disaster in New Orleans.

The levees had broken throughout the day. First, the Industrial Canal went. Then 17th Street. Then London Ave. MRGO had already been overrun. By the evening, there were 28 total failures of varying causes. Of course, I had no idea about any of these details as I sat watching television nearly 2,000 miles away. All I knew was that everything on TV looked awful. At that moment, I had no idea how much these news images would change my life. 

I was born and raised on Long Island, New York—a place where you are on the island, but in line at the deli. After high school, I moved to Upstate New York for college and ended up living there for six years, including for the start of my professional career as a scenic fabricator working for different theaters and festivals. In August 2005, I was 24 years old, and had just moved to Utah for a three-month contract as a scenic carpenter with the Utah Shakespeare Festival. 

"'Spirit of Louisiana' Firetruck Museum in the Works" video via WWLTV

The Spirit of Louisiana

Just a few years earlier, I had been profoundly impacted by a certain other catastrophic event that happened in New York. That morning and the following weeks of September 2001 were a chaotic time. But the solidarity and togetherness I witnessed during that time forever impacted me. I will always remember standing on the Westside Highway in Manhattan as response vehicles from all over the country were making their way through the tunnels and heading down to Ground Zero. I will always remember being on the corner of 23rd and Lexington staying at my friend’s apartment and watching as they unloaded body bags into the old armory down the street. I will never forget handing out sandwiches to people down by Houston Street. It was a really terrible time, but there were so many people from everywhere that dropped what they were doing and came to New York. 

So it’s no wonder that a few days after Katrina, something really hit me in the feels. The news was showing a convoy heading to New Orleans from New York. In that convoy was a firetruck called Spirit of Louisiana, built by Ferrara Fire Apparatus in Louisiana, and paid for by donations from across the state. That truck had been donated to FDNY and delivered in December 2001 after the 9/11 attacks as Louisiana’s way of showing solidarity. Four years later, when Louisiana needed help and it was New York’s turn to help lead the charge, the Spirit of Louisiana led the convoy. What an incredible inspiration that was for me. I pretty much made the call right then that I was going to join the relief efforts, as well.

Driving Into a Disaster Zone

Once my contract at the festival was up a few weeks later, I returned to New York and started reaching out to volunteer organizations to see if and how I could help. I collected donations from our local church as well as the grocery store I worked at in high school, packed my clothes and tools into my pick-up truck, and headed down to New Orleans.

It was now October, and what I saw as I got past Hattiesburg on I-59 just got crazier as I got closer to the coast. The destruction in Slidell was sobering, and then came the terrifying experience of driving over the Twin Span, which had been outfitted with temporary steel plates for miles. Then after the Twin Span, it somehow just kept getting worse. I got off at Carrollton Ave, and driving around Carrollton and Claiborne was like dystopian anarchy. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I made a wrong turn onto Claiborne and headed toward Broadmoor and then Central City, and it looked like old photos of Warsaw, Poland in 1945. “Where do you even begin to help fix this?” I thought to myself.

"Repairing and rebuilding the I-10 Twin Span Bridge after Hurricane Katrina" video via Louisiana Department of Transportation

Helping on the Ground: The Early Days

I wound up volunteering with Episcopal Relief & Development, as they were the most receptive of the organizations that I had reached out to during my planning phase in New York. When I started, we had a 16’ box truck and a ton of donated supplies that thankfully kept on coming. Those supplies mostly included canned and boxed food, baby supplies, bottled water, and other basics. We began by setting up a table outside of the old Popeye’s on the corner of Caffin and St. Claude. Most neighborhoods at the time didn’t have potable water or power. All of the grocery stores were just as wrecked as everything else, so it really did have to start with just getting basic supplies out first. We went out there every day, setting up our tables and tents and offering free supplies. We also brought more of those supplies to other distribution points in St. Bernard and Gentilly. It helped, but barely made a dent. Fortunately, there were a lot of other organizations who had supply and distribution networks, and all combined, we could slowly see things changing for the better. For the next month, that was our mission: get the basics out there.  

The church housed its volunteers, including me, at a rectory that had been used by the National Guard as a base of operations in the immediate aftermath of the levee failures. The National Guard had set up about 50 cots and stocked the closets with MRE when they moved in, and both cots and MREs had been left behind when they moved out. That helped a lot. As more people started to want to volunteer with us, we had beds for them to stay in. 

From Supplies to Sledgehammers

Other Episcopal churches in the area also had some room, and by December we started to put more of a network together. The question started to become: “Well, what are we going to do with more volunteers?” We had some interest from church groups and college groups outside of the New Orleans area that wanted to come down and help us out during winter break. This gave us the chance to ask what the next critical need was, and how we could utilize dozens of people at a time to fill that need. And that’s how we built a house-gutting program. 

The first house our new program gutted was in New Orleans East, and from there it grew and grew. We got through winter break, and then next thing we knew, we were approaching spring break and the interest from volunteers was growing exponentially. We had an agreement with St. Paul’s Church in Lakeview to utilize their gym as a staging area. We went to various Lowe’s and Home Depots outside of the affected area and were able to stock up on wheelbarrows, sledge hammers, crowbars, shovels, basic hand tools, and PPE, and started to put together tool kits so that we could send out volunteers. 

Scaling Up

By March 2006, we had around 100 volunteers coming for a week at a time, and early April had more than that. We would have between five and seven crews working simultaneously, and my job was to ensure that all of the various crews that we were sending around the city had the tools and supplies that they needed to get through the day. We had a lot of homeowners who desperately needed this help, and our teams were up to the task. We built the internal infrastructure from scratch. None of us had any kind of formal training to do the kind of non-profit administration that would typically be required to pull this off. And none of us had any kind of experience or training in dealing with trauma. 

Many of the people that we helped had life-altering experiences during the storm and the aftermath, and there was virtually no way to get them any kind of actual support. I remember that while we were gutting one man’s house, we were removing all of the house’s contents, including items from the closets. The house had had 8’ of water inside that sat there for weeks, so everything was completely wrecked and covered in mold. As we were taking out the bedroom, the team removed a wedding dress from the closet, along with other contents. The homeowner collapsed and started wailing. 

It turned out that the homeowner’s wife had died on the roof after the flood, while they waited to be rescued. He was helpless, and none of us had any idea what to do for him, except just to be there for him while he was going through this. None of us had any support system either except for each other. All you can do is help this man out the best way that you can in the moment. All you can do is have a drink with the volunteers after and talk about what this all means. All you can do is wake up the next morning and maintain your conviction that this is the most important thing to do in the world right now and lead your volunteers into helping the next family. 

Lessons from the Front Lines

In the end, Katrina is a vast collection of stories that can be difficult to navigate. Every person in this community has their own story of that time and how it affected (and maybe still affects) them. But volunteering during that time gave me frontline placement in stories of community and morality, struggle and work, commitment and passion, aggravation and of catharsis, and of leadership and camaraderie—things that informed who I am today. In March of 2007, The Episcopal Church interviewed me as part of a larger article about the relief efforts in New Orleans, and I honestly look back with a little bit of wonder at how much that 25-year-old had grown in a 15-month span. 

When I got to New Orleans in October of 2005, I honestly didn’t know how long I would be here. It could have been 20 days. But this place grew on me, and 20 years later I am still here. I myself am now a homeowner, a business owner, and my parents even eventually moved here from Long Island. I am about to marry the love of my life, Anna, who herself has been here for more than 25 years. I made my stand in this place, and it is in this place that I have thrived. Through all the loss and rebuilding, one thing has remained constant—the unshakable spirit of this community. Even as New Orleans continues to face deep challenges, the people here keep showing up for one another, and that resilience has shaped countless lives, including my own.