Among the many projects a group of volunteers from Seekonk embarks on is to help a man salvage mementos from a house that no one has entered in six months.

09:25 AM EST on Tuesday, February 21, 2006

BY KAREN A. DAVIS
Journal Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS -- Six months after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city, boats remain lodged alongside local highways, fallen trees and washed-out cars remain part of the landscape and countless homes in the city's mostly middle class Orleans parish remain unoccupied.

Journal photo / Kris Craig

Jacob DelRosso, of East Providence, looks over a waterlogged and moldy diploma recovered from a house in New Orleans yesterday. DelRosso is among the volunteers from the Seekonk Congregational Church, United Church of Christ who are lending a hand in the flood-ravaged city.

That's the reality that the group of volunteers from the Seekonk Congregational Church, United Church of Christ found as they arrived in the city yesterday after a two-day bus ride.

"It was six weeks before anybody was allowed to come back," said Alan C. Coe, a United Church of Christ minister for disaster recovery in the Gulf Coast region. "But then what do you come back to?"

Those wanting to return have no place to stay and no jobs to reclaim.

Seventy percent of the city remains without electricity, 2,800 people remain unaccounted for and many of the stores where residents would go to buy simple items, such as work gloves and supplies, have not reopened, said Coe, who routinely attends meetings with emergency management and city officials.

"People are just emotionally frozen by this whole thing," Coe said yesterday. With the city lacking a basic infrastructure, rebuilding is something many people "just aren't able to do."

Without question, Coe said, "People do want to come back."

Willard H. Hill Jr. has always planned to return to his ranch-style home at 5232 St. Bernard Ave., where he lived with his two children.

But Hill, a lawyer who had a thriving law firm, was forced to evacuate the city. Eventually, he found a new job in Cleveland where he had relatives -- after all his clients left the city, too.

Hill, who received a kidney transplant three years ago, is on medication that compromises his immune system, working so that his body will not reject the kidney, he explained yesterday. Doctors have advised him not to go inside his home as long as the walls and ceilings remain laden with mold, contaminants and debris.

As a result, until the Camp Katrina volunteers arrived yesterday, Hill's home had not been entered in six months.

"So I really appreciate this," Hill told the volunteers, noting that the house contained family mementos dating to the 1800s. "Having lived here 10 years, this is really painful.

Though Hill said he knew he was taking a risk, he did manage to walk through the house yesterday morning and found a photograph of his late grandmother, Eva Jones, that had somehow floated on the floodwaters and stuck to a wall.

"I take it as a sign of hope," Hill told the volunteers.

For nearly five hours yesterday, one team of Camp Katrina volunteers worked to clear Hill's home of its unsalvageable items, while setting aside mementos -- photographs, diplomas, glassware, china, record albums and a family Bible -- that could be saved.

Another team worked to install a roof on a house six blocks away; a third team cleared debris out of the parsonage of Central Congregational Church, in another neighborhood.

Before going into Hill's house, volunteers donned protective jumpsuits, masks and gloves. They had to throw away the family piano, furniture, televisions, stereos, plants, lamps, clothing, rugs, books and DVDs.

Before the volunteers stopped work for the day, private haulers came to collect the electronic debris and chemicals.

"I can't imagine what these families have been through," said Edna Bujold, of Seekonk, one of the Camp Katrina volunteers. "Every time I put something out here, I just want to cry. This is his life, his family history."

Bujold said other volunteers chided her because she kept removing items from the trash and placing them in the salvageable pile.

The moldy walls and ceilings in Hill's house will have to be torn down and replaced. Volunteers started to do that yesterday.

Journal photo / Kris Craig

Lawyer Willard Hill Jr. holds a photo of his grandmother, Eva Jones, that he recovered from his house yesterday.

With so much activity inside Hills' house, the volunteers noticed that it was becoming harder to breathe and there was a very strong odor. The house, like most in the neighborhood, has been without electricity since the hurricane. Owners are required to apply to the city when they've completed the mold cleanup and made other repairs; then the work must pass inspection before an electric meter is returned.

Ryan Heelin, 14, of Seekonk, said he and other members of the Seekonk church's confirmation class were making a difference by helping to clean up houses.

"I couldn't really imagine it before because I couldn't see it," Meredith Norton, 14, of Seekonk, said of the hurricane devastation. "When you see it, everything is so real. All the houses are empty and there's [washed-out] cars parked outside. It's a lot different in real life."

"When you see it on TV, you think it's not that bad," said Aneesa Bey, 14, who attends Seekonk High School with Meredith. "It's bad."

Officials estimate that 200,000 houses in the city are unfit for habitation and should be demolished.

The United Church of Christ disaster-response team has a list of 74 rebuilding projects that it hopes to take on, thanks to volunteer groups including the Seekonk group. Groups from New York City and Ohio have arrived in the last week to help the rebuilding projects.

"It's sad. It's really sad," Bujold said. "I've never seen anything like this in my life, ever-- and never will again."

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MULTIMEDIA: See more photos of the church group's activities and audio reports from Journal staffers Kris Craig and Karen Davis, who are traveling with the group, by noon each day this week, at:

http://projo.com/extra/2006/camp_katrina

kdavis@projo.com / (401) 277-7353