Thursday, 9/15/2005

Lunch break – the unloading never seems to stop around here. Stuff goes out the front door as fast as it comes in the back. The Army Corps of Engineers has brought in bulldozers to make room for the big, floored tents. That is happening in the field behind the current clinic. Peter, the pulmonologist is delighted – they are going to let him drive a big dozer. We are going on a field trip, but this one is not to see patients, it is to look at the beach zone.

The FEMA folks offered to take us through the road blocks in their personal SUVs. We pile into the vehicles, and head for the beach – oh, yeah, sunglasses, hats, we’re cool. We’re with the men in black (actually it is a very dark blue). I had been under the impression that FEMA had personnel trained and ready to roll to disaster areas in hours notice. However, what we have is highly trained firefighters. Ours are from Seattle. They volunteered for a 30 day deployment. This group first went to Atlanta, waited around the airport for five days, got moved around the three states, mostly up in the Northern areas of Alabama and Mississippi, and then ended up at Stennis Air Force Base. When they first arrived at the Coastal School and Medical Center, they were a bit intimidating. However, I now notice that instead of all sitting in the lobby watching folks come and go, they are unloading trucks, driving the forklift, assisting survivors gather supplies, and being very supportive of the whole volunteer effort.

This is my second viewing of the focused destruction and devastation that Katrina wrought. It is not a damaged area, it is destroyed – some one compared it to Nagasaki after the atom bomb. Unlike on Sunday, when I first drove down here, there were people going through the rubble, the Army had large construction vehicles working on the roads and moving the slabs of damaged highway onto large vehicles. A Church from Tennessee had set up a free hamburger stand on the beach for all the military, police, and volunteer groups that were working in the area. The police car is still in the air, and the trucks are still piled on top of the boats. But now I recognize homes or sweeps of debris that people I have treated called home. I look at the cables trailing across the road and wonder if that is the one that CK clung to for four hours as he was battered and beaten by the sea. I see the house that moved a hundred feet off its foundation and is tilting recklessly, where the DS family lived. There is the yellow house the big bearded fellow had spent so much time reconstructing. How did it survive while the houses around it disappeared? There is the swing still in the high braches on one of the huge oaks where RF played after school. No school, no house, just the empty swing moving in the damp, hot air of this steaming day.

There are blocks and blocks of Wavelin that have clean swept slabs, with only the poles and mailboxes standing. A fellow who works on the oil wells off shore told me he had jumped out of a bathroom window into a boat he had on a trailer behind his house in Wavelin. He let enough water into the boat through the plug to keep the boat on the trailer as the house floated away. When the water receded, it took five days for rescue teams to find him. He was, "just fine, no problems," until you looked him in the eye and saw that haunted look I am seeing in face after face. "I am just fine, I lost my house, my car, my cat, my friends, but I am fine, just fine……Thank you so much for coming to see us…." And they do not want to get up and go.

We return to our little harbor of safety. We understand a little better what our new friends are going through, what their physical losses are, and how they have to cope with this disaster by being as normal as possible. They need to return to work, they need to have a home, a family. They need the stability of routine.

Last night and early this morning, we were out on "house calls" and found the economy bustling. The auto repair places are booming – wasn’t that salt water that floated through those cars? There are banks open, and we found a Walgreen’s where we bought pregnancy test kits – there will be another baby boom in 9 months – birth control pills washed away. Cable One looked like it was giving away service. Two of the ladies from Cable One visited with us today for minor illnesses. They reported people were going nuts if they did not have cable…yelling, banging desks, being very rude. Haven’t they heard of books? They just got electricity back this week, and there is still no phone service.

I also found Triton ATM - the fourth largest manufacturer of offsite ATMs in the world – they are providing the internet connection for me to dispatch these notes to you. And they may be providing the ATM for you to send money to me!! The internet is intermittent, so some days you get messages, some days you don’t. They have 200 employees at this site, and 100 at another close by location. They were back up and running within a week of the hurricane – again, this was a low, one storied building. Not on the beach, but close enough that places near it lost their roofs, and had walls collapse. The US Postal Service has an open access office set up within ½ mile of us. There is a large tent, flaps up (It is really hot here- have I said that yet?) with the usual post office bins set up on tables. And, you guessed it, they have the line thing that they set up so you que up properly. There are Postal Police cars at each end of the parking lot that serve as road signs for identification. Life goes on!! I also notice that FedEx is hard at work running trucks up and down the road. And the newspaper delivers bundles of papers to us every morning – normalcy returns in the small things, the big things will follow in good time. Peace.

Susan