Katrina does Biloxi

disaster tourism, or fema forgot waveland

stuart updegrave — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 12:30:00 GMT

Ever since I arrive in Biloxi, I wanted to get a better sense of the damage wrought by Katrina. In particular, I wanted to see the Waveland area, which I’d heard had sustained far more damage than East Biloxi. To that end, a few of the temple volunteer crew went on a ‘disaster tourism’ drive along the coastline on Wednesday evening.

We borrowed Phil Linsday’s truck (conveniently sporting an American Red Cross Disaster Relief placard in the window), drove the several blocks down to Highway 90 (the beach road) and headed westward. The damage between Biloxi and Long Beach was fairly consistent – the first few blocks in from the beach were heavily damaged or nearly erased along most of the route. Several older large houses were gutted on the first floor, with varying degrees of damage on the upper floors. Not far inland, the damage transitioned to mostly roof damage – the number of blue tarp roofs in the Gulfport area in particular is sickening (but roofing and drywall contractors are having a heyday).

Once we hit Long Beach, we had to head north to the interstate in order to skirt around St. Louis Bay, as the bridge between Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis was washed out by Katrina (as was the one from East Biloxi to Ocean Springs). We then headed back to the shore near Bay St. Louis and continued westward.

The devastation in much of this area is simply unfathomable. It’s been several days since this excursion, and I’m still having a difficult time wrapping my head around the power this storm carried. There are preachers who have said that sinful New Orleans deserved its fate – what have the people of Waveland done to deserve this fate, then? Their region looks as if an angry god decided to smite them for having the audacity to be poor. Unfortunately, that wrathful god appears to have been in collusion with the government, as the area saw very little response for several weeks, from what I understand. There’s even a rant-infused website on the issue: www.femaforgotwaveland.com.

One bright light in the despair is the New Waveland Café, a joint effort between the Rainbow Family and Latter-Day Saints. Unlikely bedfellows, but they are doing good work. In addition to serving three square meals a day (to nearly 1000 people at peak), they offer a medical facility, POD (free distribution center like the one at the Vietnamese temple where I was volunteering), publicly available internet access, a snuggle dome (go Rainbows!), and movies in the café at night (which can prove distracting, but struck me as a useful diversion for people). I suspect there are other services I didn’t see, as we were there for dinner and a brief visit. The meal was not the best eating I did in my 12 days, but was certainly fresher and healthier than those provided by Red Cross.

Biloxi update, 27-Oct-2005

stuart updegrave — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 09:47:00 GMT

There is still a constant ebb and flow of volunteers through the temple – ten new arrivals in the last two days, in fact. Amani (from Seattle) has returned to the Biloxi area (working with World Shelters on her first trip down) to join us at the temple. Amani’s friend Savi arrived this morning; she is 15 years old, here until at least Nov 1st, and will be receiving school credit for time spent volunteering here. Another burner crew (Chaos, Doc, Monty and Teresa) rolled in yesterday with a 24’ truck (which they bought for an art project, but decided to use to help the people of Biloxi for now) – they’ve eagerly dived in, helping out on various projects already. Richard’s friend Linda arrived yesterday morning – she’s likely to take over cooking responsibilities after I leave. And there’s another posse that came in (Ryan from L.A., Rachel and Mandy from Toronto) to help out as well, working in the free store and helping finish up the drywall effort in the temple building.

Jim left this morning to go spend some time with his son in South Carolina. While here, he talked to several bicycle shops to solicit donations of used bicycles. A shop in Ithaca NY committed to send 100 bikes down, and he is talking to a few shops in Seattle as well (including BikeWorks, which has helped many Sea-town burners find playa-worthy wheels).

We’ve made progress on getting basic services moved back indoors. Richard salvaged a stainless steel three-tub utility sink from the old Catholic church across the street; after cleaning and re-plumbing, it is now installed in the temple for us and the temple staff to use for dishes. Yesterday, Thomas moved the washer and dryer into the temple (they were previously residing in the driveway). And today, Chaos is going to plumb a sink and flush toilet in the bathroom to go along with the shower.

The cover on the large dome used for the store has taken some wind damage over the last few days. Richard spoke with Asha, the owner of Pacific Domes, who says they will fabricate and send us a new cover. This is wonderful news!

The store is still providing for at least 100 people per day, and supplies keep rolling in. Occasionally, we get large resources for use by the temple volunteers and staff (such as the full-size chest freezer which arrived this morning – which will be used mainly to store ice as it comes in), but mostly the shipments consist of food, water, toiletries and cleaning supplies for the community. Yesterday, some cots and blankets arrived, which were eagerly received given the cold nights recently. We are still working our various networks to drum up more donations of tents, sleeping bags and warm clothing. Steve and Elena (the Peace Corps / FEMA folks who stayed here a few nights) are bringing in some coats and blankets tonight, I just heard. Wonderful news!

I’m heading back to Seattle on Friday morning, with mixed emotions. I feel like I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of the work that needs to be done here, yet wonder how much difference I am making personally. I see that I'm helping people on a personal basis -- carrying food / water / ice to peoples' cars, helping to unload trucks, keeping the crew fed and happy ... but sometimes it seems like it's not nearly enough. The people here need so much that they can only get from the government or big companies, it sometimes seems like my contributions are simply tiding them over until the bureaucracy churns its way to their doorsteps.

latest Katrina relief update from Biloxi

stuart updegrave — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 11:34:00 GMT

Several times a day, we have the sound of the Red Cross truck driving past with its annoying horn-bleat, and the announcement “Red Cross. Hot meals, cold drinks.” If only the meals were a little better. Once in every four or so is passable, but the rest leave something to be desired. At least it’s fuel for the body, which is important to the people around here.

There are many who have basically nothing. Houses gone, living in small tents in driveways. They come in each day to get some canned food and a case or two of water bottles – one old woman told me this morning that she needed water for fifteen people. It’s interesting, though – nobody wants the canned water provided by the beer companies.

We’ve been setting families up with huge tents, two or three a day. On Saturday morning we sent another out to provide temporary housing for a family of six – they had been renting, and are currently living in a smaller tent. The owner of the place they were renting is apparently considering selling out to the casinos (which have permission from the city to move on shore now). This will leave these people homeless. Things like this are hard to take.

One of the predominant problems we’re hearing is of people who didn’t have flood insurance – they are covered for wind damage, but not water. If your house was destroyed by a spawned tornado, then that’s clearly wind damage – but if it floated off its foundation and into the neighbor’s yard, the insurance companies are likely to call that water damage. Most of the houses around here sustained water damage – unless they were lucky enough (paradoxically) to be destroyed by wind.

The roof on Liem’s shop is finished now – but we still see him or his wife Twin a few times a day. They stopped by today (Sunday morning) to deliver a big bag of egg rolls, and invited me and Thomas to go down to their [friend|family member]’s shrimp boat. We went down for a while and saw the boat back in from last night’s run, and came home with another grocery bag full of shrimp. It was my first time to the beach since I arrived. Seeing the huge casino barges sitting on the land firsthand is really humbling. Every fresh view into the damage caused by Katrina continues to humble me.

Today is the first time the store has been closed since it opened, nearly six weeks ago. This came about partly because Richard and the other volunteers wanted a break from it, and partly because Thay (the master monk) requested a day where he could have services without the interruption and chaos of people coming in to get supplies from the store.

Cowboy (or Jay) and Bob (who is frequently rather silent) continue to do covert ops, bringing us ice and hooking us up with tools as needed. They’re here as grassroots volunteers, working to set up a permanent free clinic in Biloxi.

There’s an old Vietnamese woman who sits in the back of a pickup truck outside the temple gates nearly every morning, selling fresh persimmons and some other fruit I haven’t identified yet.

Pirate Pete (burner from Maine, who has been here for several weeks) is an unstoppable bundle of energy. He frequently will load up the basket on his bicycle with the latest useful booty and go for a ride through the community – giving out flashlights and batteries, baked goods, etc. I turned him on to mashups the other night -- he got stupid giddy with excitement about them. :)

We’ve had several new volunteers arrive: Jim, from Lopez Island, WA; Steve and Elena, who work with FEMA and are here to coordinate with us – they have been in the region for five weeks, in various locations; Michelle and Karen from Florida (Michelle is here with another crew, and they both plan to stop by periodically to help out); and Gregory, a long-time temple crew burner from Austin (who arrived with a huge converted bus, pink with flames on the windows).

I rode into Gulfport on Friday to get a replacement cell phone. Along the way, there were lots of areas that didn’t seem to be terribly damaged – until you noticed that many houses had uniform roofs: big blue tarps. This reminded me of flying in – as we curved northward from our route skirting the edge of the Gulf, the number of blue tarps covering roofs was incredible – Thomas likened it to flying into L.A. and seeing pools in nearly every yard.

We recently received a shipment of school supplies – approximately 250 book bags filled with notebooks, pencils and folders, an equal number of interactive learning aids, a bunch of boxes of crayons, etc. We’re going to schedule a kids’ day soon to give all this stuff out.

Richard says that the odds are good that David Best (who designed and led the efforts to build the temples for Burning Man every year prior to 2005) will come down to do some work on Chua Van Duc temple. The temple structure itself is relatively plain, and Thay wants it spruced up – when he saw my photos of this year’s temple burn, he got very excited and made sure I would help him get some improvements made to his temple.

We’re expecting for the promised excavator to arrive sometime between Wed and Fri this week. Hopefully by then Richard will be able to cut through the politics so that we can actually put it to use helping people get their yards cleared, damaged houses demolished, sites readied for trailers.

We continue to eat well – we got a huge delivery of pastries this morning, which were nice to snack on for the early risers. Late morning, Jim made a big batch of fruit crepes. We just got finished with lunch – Thay invited the entire crew in for a Vietnamese meal – noodles with tofu and vegetables, rice, fried egg rolls, followed by an odd (to western palate) but enjoyable dessert (a mochi-like gooey ‘shell’ surrounding a bean-based (lotus?) filling with ginger), followed by a tea service. And tonight, I’m planning to fry up the egg rolls Twin gave us, to go with grilled shrimp and salmon burgers.

As can be expected, many people here are paying close attention to storm season, particularly since Hurricane Wilma is so close. While Thomas and I were at the shrimp boat this morning, I looked south into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s a line of clouds running SE / NW, about 50 miles out. Yes, that’s Wilma. She is currently looking as if she might run aground at or around Marco Island, FL, where Bev and I went with a bunch of friends for New Years several years ago.

Two Atlantic storm season records have been broken in the six days I’ve been here: first, Wilma became the most powerful storm on record (as measured by barometric pressure – it bottomed out at 882 millibars), and now tropical storm Alpha – the 22nd named storm of the season – has formed and is causing more flooding in the Dominican Republic and haiti. The previous record was 21 storms, established in 1933.

There is still work to be done here. If you want to come down and help out, please call Richard at 530-401-4007.

Here are a few interesting blogs on tropical storms, both hosted on the Weather Underground website:

I’ve posted more pictures, as well, to my Katrina does Biloxi photoset on flickr.

Biloxi relief update

stuart updegrave — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 04:45:00 GMT

There has been a flurry of activity around here the last few days, with progress on a lot of fronts.

Phil Lindsay (father of Matt of the BM temple crew) got a water heater installed in the temple on Wednesday, about two hours before he and the kids left. Phil also led the ongoing effort to replace the water-damaged drywall and insulation in the temple. As a result, we’ve been able to take hot showers (as opposed to using a very playa-style frame-and-tarp shower). Our washer and dryer are still out in the parking lot, though. But hey, at least we *have* them.

There has been a lot of work to repair the damage to the temple’s garden (which was recently graced by a turtle that Richard probably rescued from a soup pot).

We had a huge influx of clothing on Wednesday – after being picked through for a few days, the remainder got bagged up and is going to be made into quilts for Pakistani refugees displaced by the recent earthquake near Kashmir.

Richard managed to acquire a forklift for a while from Dave Romero, but Dave reclaimed it a few days ago. Richard, the consummate deal-maker, had already scoped out the other forklifts in the area (they make unloading large shipments of water and other goods so much easier), and wandered down the block to a marine supply shop down the street, owned by a Vietnamese man named Liam (ok, so that’s what it sounds like, but probably not how it’s spelled). They cut a deal that the temple crew would help Liam re-roof his store in exchange for use of the forklift – so Thomas and I spent a few hours yesterday and this morning working up on the roof, until the heat got too intense.

A lovely side benefit of doing this is that we made friends with Liam and his wife Twin (again, phonetic). She gifted us with about 10 pounds of whole shrimp, which I boiled this evening and served with a big pot of hoppin’ john (good southern food – rice, black-eyed peas, bacon, tomatoes, jalapeno peppers). Certainly the best meal I’ve had since I got here. This morning, Twin told me that she would bring over some fresh egg rolls tomorrow for me to fry up for the crew. After dinner last night, a few of the guys made jokes about getting me a skirt and keeping me in the kitchen – funny thing is, I brought down a few sarongs, and would be just as happy to cook for people as to do roofing, drywall, landscaping, whatever.

Richard has a line on a few items of heavy machinery – an excavator and a loader. We were sitting around last night and he was musing about how to find people who might need lots cleared for trailer placement. Shortly thereafter, a guy pulled up outside and asked if we could spare any ice (the freezer in his FEMA-issued trailer had broken already). Richard gave him a couple bags, and chatted a bit. Turns out he’s on the Biloxi City Council, lives a block or two away, and is willing to work with us on identifying local folks who might benefit from having their sites cleared once the equipment arrives.

We’ve had a big loss of population in the last few days – besides Phil and his kids, three of our other crew also left on Wednesday. Vu, a Vietnamese guy (who works as a policeman in Jackson) left this evening. On Tuesday, however, Thomas (one of the leads on this year’s project The Machine) showed up here, after working three weeks with the World Shelters crew. World Shelters is an organization from Arcata, CA, which has been setting up temporary shelters both for agencies and needy families. Many of their volunteers are also burners, most of whom came down from Seattle.

day two biloxi

stuart updegrave — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 19:09:00 GMT

My first full day here, most bizarre. I can tell that separating truth from fiction will be interesting here. There are certainly a lot of interesting stories I’m hearing already – for example, that the military blockades a block before the beach are to protect the casinos from looting, and that a woman found a $10k roll of $100 bills on the beach. Who knows if either is any more true than the “Michael Jackson is dead” meme that spread on the playa this year?

It was a crazy day. After waking up and getting caffeinated, we set up a HUGE tent, one of twelve donated by an Islamic relief organization. Bigger and taller than the three-room tent Bev and I used as our honeymoon suite. I think that there will be a family of six inhabiting the first one the crew set up out in the community.

Next, I decided to go for a bicycle ride to get a sense of the devastation in the immediate area. This area is fucked. I know, I know … “yeah, no kidding!” Well, there’s a certain visceral sense of it that you just don’t get from pictures alone. Regardless, here are some more pictures. If you look through them, you’ll notice a transition from damaged to destroyed buildings. The latter area is likely where a tornado spawned off of Katrina and completely demolished the buildings, whereas most of them seem to have floated off their foundations from the surge. There are several pictures showing roofs flat on the ground – indicating the lack of a plywood shear wall to keep them intact.

I made it all the way to downtown, where there was a huge bustle of activity, construction crews rebuilding the casinos and other local businesses – and the people in east Biloxi are living in tents on their driveways. I mean, I’m living in a tent on concrete in east Biloxi, but that’s by choice. There’s a difference.

On the way back from downtown, I saw the most disturbing thing yet – a running refrigerator truck in the driveway of a mortuary. Richard tells me they all have them. I suppose that maybe the houses don’t have electricity yet, so perhaps this is the only option for storage, but still. It got to me.

As soon as I got back from my ride, Richard asked me to go to the Community Center to help Dave Romero set up a computer center for the community. He has been here since day three, and got back yesterday after heading home to pick up 50 computers to provide for the community. Six or seven of us from the temple crew ended up helping with this project – unloading the computers and carrying them upstairs, breaking down one room of a makeshift medical center, hauling tables upstairs, and getting the computers in place.

When I arrived back to the temple, I was astonished, as there were about 400 vietnamese people here, covering the grounds and crowding the gate. It turns out they were here for a free money– there was a group of monks from Houston and California who were (I think) giving $50 bills to individuals and $100 bills to families.

I’m glossing over many details, I’m sure. But I’m tired and it’s hard to capture them all.

In Biloxi

stuart updegrave — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:29:00 GMT

I’m sitting under a costco barn shade structure on the Chua Van Duc temple grounds. There’s an incredible amount of infrastructure in place here. The temple itself has insulation hung and is awaiting drywall. There’s a free store, free phones, a computer network with a mac available for public internet access, and a free wireless network as well (w00t!)

We came into this neighborhood on Division Street, which is thrashed. It’s lined on both sides with huge debris piles awaiting clearing. The house next door, on the other hand, is in worse shape, twisted 45 degrees off its foundation. The house on the other side of the temple grounds appears to be in similar shape. A bicycle ride around the neighborhood reveals many more in similar (if not worse) states – many of the houses were on brick pillars, or were not tied to their foundations, and appear to have simply blown and/or floated off.

There’s a constant rumble of trucks and bulldozers and tools, clearing and hauling garbage. A flurry of activity all around. Here on the temple grounds, there are folks focusing on temple repairs, but the primary function seems to be as a POD, or “point of distribution” – that’s the bureaucratese for free store. They’re giving away canned food, paper products, basic toiletries, etc. – minimal items people might need to survive as Biloxi slowly comes back to life.

And, there are numerous little biting flies. Rather annoying, those.

Richard (head of heavy machinery for Burning Man’s DPW) picked me up from the airport along with Thay Tri, the lead monk at the temple. I got to know Richard a little bit on the playa this year, as he helped the Machine crew immensely. Thay is small and gentle, and on several occasions cautioned Richard to drive more cautiously (“I’m too young, I’m not ready to go to Heaven yet!”). I’m quite honored that he took out time to come greet me.

There’s a decent-sized crew here – fifteen or twenty folks – and a large contingent of regulars, or so it seems. A woman named Cat brought enough dinner for a crew twice our size, including corn on the cob. Then, a little later an older guy brought fried spring rolls and a cooler full of beer. Shortly thereafter, two guys (Bob and ??) showed up and filled our coolers with ice, and proceeded to hang out and socialize for a few hours.

I’m guessing that about a third of the crew are burners. Another third are Phil Lindsay (father of Matt from the Temple crew) and several of his kids – but they’re leaving on Thursday.