Back in Slidell

I finally made it back to my hometown of Slidell for the first time in 2 months or so today. This is the first post-Katrina viewing I have had of it. This time I wasn't there to visit with family but to help with hurricane relief efforts.

A bunch of us from Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship met at 8 a.m. at the LSU Visitor's Center and drove together to Slidell. We helped out at three different houses. My group went to Adam Stephenson's uncle's house, which had about 5 feet of water.

The first overwhelming thing about the experience was the putrid smell. It was just short of sufficient to make one vomit. The interior of the house was one big smushy mud puddle. So the first task was moving out all the furniture. Then we ripped up the stinky, saturated carpet. Then we destroyed walls, which took the longest. We had to take hammers and knock out the walls in the whole house from about 6 feet off the ground. We of course also had to break off baseboards and moldings and such. We had to rip out the fiberglass insulation. We were carrying out dissasembled toilets, sinks, and other household amenities. The most surprising thing was the weight of wet carpet. It took 10 of us to move the living room section of carpet house. I'm sure that one roll of carpet weighed many hundreds of pounds. The work was tedious and arduous to say the least, and it was bleeding hot. A great experience though, and really did feel as if it was the least I could do to help out, because my house in Slidell was spared destruction.

It was a very tiring day, and I did it on 3 hours of sleep and legs so stiff, from working out, I could barely walk. It was so weird driving through my hometown seeing gas stations destroyed, trees strewn about, etc. I've watched it on the news for weeks, but now that I witnessed it firsthand up close and personal, down and dirty, it was totally different.