I arrived in New Orleans in late November of 2005, a few months after hurricane Katrina hit. It was the first ride I could catch down there, in a rented van from New York City, since buses and trains weren't running yet. It was evening when we got to the convergence space, and we got a quick introduction to the warehouse. There was a large stack of bottled water piled near the entrance- that was our supply of drinking water since the tap was unsafe, if it worked at all. Xmas lights were strategically placed around the stairways, halls and rooms for navigational purposes, thankfully none of them blinked. Inside most rooms were one to two small battery powered fluorescent lamps. One of the bathrooms didn't work and there was the smell of mold in a few places. Well, more so than the usual smell of mold.
My group went to sleep in the warehouse, which was located next to a small but active trainyard. I had to punch someone in the leg to stop their snoring, but it was an otherwise uneventful night. That morning after breakfast, most of the volunteers gathered up to tarp up the wind damaged roof as rain was predicted and a storm a few days before blessed the floor with 2 inches of standing water. After that, I went to the 9th ward distribution center to staff the wellness center.
There was only one beached boat on the path there, sitting on the road like many of the cars, junk strewn across the grass and pavement. There were visible floodlines which could be seen as either mudmarks or in other areas, dead leaves. You could tell the elevation you were at all of the time. In some areas, the cars were crumpled into walls and telephone poles.
I was staffing the wellness center alone it turns out. But it was a slow Sunday, so I mostly helped with distribution and talked with the kids from Plan B bikes. They were wary of Common Ground already, too quick to claim credit and too hungry for attention made them hard to work with, they told me. They were selling bike for cheap, having received a shipment of 500 donated bike of all conditions; they had tried to give them out for free, but people had trouble valuing things that they did not pay for. They would take one and bike around until a tube caught a flat and then ditch it and go for another, and sometimes they wouldn't even wait that long.
Pride begets entitlement, and entitlement begets greed. If you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times. I headed back at sunset, given that there was no electricity in the 9th ward, the street lamps would not be lighting up my path. I could no longer clearly see the TFW spray painted on the houses, which stood for Toxic Flood Water. There were also X or circles which had numbers and letters around them which told which unit checked the homes, when they did, if they entered, and how many corpses they found. Most indicated that they didn't find any bodies.
I mingled with more people just coming in before dinner was served from the outside kitchen. A bit after everyone went to bed, the rain started falling, slowly finding its way to the floor. The room I shared with a dozen others leaked from several places in the ceiling, which people tried to correct with pails and miscellaneous containers but without the desired effect. I woke with bleary eyes to the midst of the hubbub, and as people vacated the room, I promptly fell back asleep as no water either fell on me nor pooled aside me. When I got up, I was one of only two left in the room. I guess most of the people didn't have squatter sensibilities.
I was stationed as the medic for the first aid station for the day. As a joke, I called it the medic cave, complete with a handmade sign, because it had no windows or lighting- save two battery powered lanterns. I grabbed a two-way radio and decided to keep myself moving. I ended up on the roof, removing water still pooled up there. It turned out that there was a night crew which on sweeping water off the flat roof, prevent further flooding. Although tarps draped about had worked to some effect, debris had to be cleared from under it to be more effective.
As we secured the tarp at the edges of the building, a gust of wind slipped under the tarp under me and bucked my body up from the surface. Someone next to me gasped and seemed convinced that I was going to be thrown off the roof to my death, but I simply straightened out my body so that I was doing a 45 degree handstand and slowly landed back on the roof. I shrugged. I helped with the decontamination station after that, which was for cleaning carcinogenic dust and mold spores from the people who worked in the flooded out houses. The houses had to be gutted, and quite a few of them had asbestos in the drywall. After that, a security shift. I was pretty bored with having so few people to treat.
The next day, I decided to go to Algiers with another medic, but we got detained before we got close, because the cops got nervous about us getting too close to the cruise ship they lived on. Immigration police, aka the ICE cops, seemed to be the main federal force overseeing the the local police. I suppose this was not only because of the notorious reputation of the NOPD, but to help coordinate between the city, state and federal agencies. I acted in my best official federal/state worker-type impersonation and the performance paid off with their inability to find any bench warrants for me despite the medic with me who seemed to be trying to get me arrested.
For the record, never ask anyone if they have warrants, or if they are a criminal on the run/are an illegal immigrant/underage runaway/AWOL/have illegal drugs/weapons/have been excommunicated by the pope/whatever, while they are being detained by the police. When they came to her, they told her that they had a hard time believing that the name she'd given them was real and that she had no form of identification on her at all. They looked at me for help but I denied having known her before that day or knowing anything else about her for that matter. As pissed off as I was, I wasn't about to be a snitch, but she knew I was never going to let that go.
Eventually, I got to the Algiers clinic, a very busy center placed within the local mosque, along with the medic who I was still upset with. I technically don't really belong in a clinic, since I'm basically a trauma on the streets kind of medic. The neighborhood itself was in very good shape, and managed to avoid the brunt of the damage of the storm and flooding. I felt a bit out of place. I helped organized the donated supplies and then went to work on organizing the kitchen. The doctors and nurses seemed to appreciate my rearrangement with the microwave and spice rack more than anything, oddly enough. I guess street medics are useful everywhere.
One of the sketchballs was around for no apparent reason, a heavyset twentysomething named Johnny. In addition to having a white supremist tattoo on his upper arm, he was a wacko who had an obsession with proving himself and inflating his self-esteem. He saw the sheath of one of my knives and offered to take out his so that we could compare, but I refused and told him this wasn't the place. The clinic cook managed to keep him out of most peoples hair most of the time. He wasn't dangerous, just stupid. All the same, I probably should have stabbed him.
I helped drop off biohazard waste at the local hospital on a biodiesel bus which malfunctioned in one way or another much of the way there. After that I was shown a large cache of miracle juice snake oil. Apparently some representative sent many pallets of an oddly named juice of the mangosteen fruit, marketing it as a cure-all. The glass bottles which held them were the size and shape of wine bottles. I got myself one, which I was told retails for $25. Strange donations like this weren't all that rare. Before I left I bumped into another medic who I hadn't see for a while and who I'd wanted to hang out with, but we only had a hot minute before I got dragged into a car that took me back to the 9th ward. Johnny being in the car with me didn't improve my mood.
The Frida bus from Maine arrived, it was a biodiesel powered activist center on wheels that looked like a hippified schoolbus- which I suppose would have been an accurate description. Apparently they had mechanical troubles which stranded them in Alabama for a bit. They'd left Maine a full week before I'd left my squat. Megan, who owned the bus, grinned and hugged me so hard I could actually feel her ribs press against mine. We'd medicked together years before, when we evacuated a patient via canoe, being of the few medics who knew how to canoe. Fellow canoe medics. She showed me the modifications she'd made to it since I had been in it last, a library and kitchen. I remember it breaking down then though, stranding me and others in Maine for day.
The next morning there was some big news and everyone was giddy and excited. Apparently there was going to be a huge pickup that required a caravan consisting of all the larger vehicles. The supplies would be from the Army National Guard, and we'd be guided in by the 5th Ward police force. That has got to be a trap, some people muttered upon hearing it, they're gonna take us down to Guantanamo. The rest of us just looked shocked. Anarchists, progressives, New Orleans police, and the Army working together? If it didn't involve zombies, killer robots, or space aliens or some combination thereof, hell had to be freezing over.
The fifth ward cops, we were told, were required to live in the wards that they policed back then, and thus had some sympathy for us- given that we were doing more work there than the federal government was. They'd donated some old clothing to the activists as a show of good faith, and some of the activists wore the jackets- stripped of their markings but still undeniably police issue- proudly upon their backs. This eased some of peoples doubts, but a lot of people, myself included, would only believe it when it actually happened.
I'd heard of at least one volunteer who was threatened with a watery death by a cop, though I wasn't certain which ward the cop was from. Also, there was the possibility of behind the scenes shenanigans taking place. For all I know people may have been assigned to do work on the police commander's house or any of his favorite subordinates. We laughed uncomfortablely at the notion, since it was more than just a possibility.
Of course it didn't happen, the dirty magic of New Orleans and the wishes of everyone's personal dumpster fairies wasn't enough to make that dream real. Reality crashed in on us as we waited for the go ahead, sitting in our trucks and buses on the side of the road for a few hours. A no-go, and everyone had to head back with the better part of a morning wasted.
More roof work was next on the list. Malik was grinning widely over some rolls of roofing material, before heading back down. This didn't make sense, all this roof work one day after another. Wait, someone piped up to the site manager, we were told that this whole roof is going to be torn down and replaced, so what's the point of resurfacing it? Can you tell us why we're doing it? What's the point? Is there a point? The site manager threw up his hands and walked off without a word. What the fuck, the volunteer yelled after him, and everyone got the point and got off the roof. Of course that answer was in the air: because Malik wanted it to happen.
Malik was an activist who founded Common Ground Relief, originally known as the Common Ground Relief Collective right after Hurricane Katrina in September of 05. The matter with the roof was the first solid indication of something a bit fishy with Common Ground.
My group went to sleep in the warehouse, which was located next to a small but active trainyard. I had to punch someone in the leg to stop their snoring, but it was an otherwise uneventful night. That morning after breakfast, most of the volunteers gathered up to tarp up the wind damaged roof as rain was predicted and a storm a few days before blessed the floor with 2 inches of standing water. After that, I went to the 9th ward distribution center to staff the wellness center.
There was only one beached boat on the path there, sitting on the road like many of the cars, junk strewn across the grass and pavement. There were visible floodlines which could be seen as either mudmarks or in other areas, dead leaves. You could tell the elevation you were at all of the time. In some areas, the cars were crumpled into walls and telephone poles.
I was staffing the wellness center alone it turns out. But it was a slow Sunday, so I mostly helped with distribution and talked with the kids from Plan B bikes. They were wary of Common Ground already, too quick to claim credit and too hungry for attention made them hard to work with, they told me. They were selling bike for cheap, having received a shipment of 500 donated bike of all conditions; they had tried to give them out for free, but people had trouble valuing things that they did not pay for. They would take one and bike around until a tube caught a flat and then ditch it and go for another, and sometimes they wouldn't even wait that long.
Pride begets entitlement, and entitlement begets greed. If you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times. I headed back at sunset, given that there was no electricity in the 9th ward, the street lamps would not be lighting up my path. I could no longer clearly see the TFW spray painted on the houses, which stood for Toxic Flood Water. There were also X or circles which had numbers and letters around them which told which unit checked the homes, when they did, if they entered, and how many corpses they found. Most indicated that they didn't find any bodies.
I mingled with more people just coming in before dinner was served from the outside kitchen. A bit after everyone went to bed, the rain started falling, slowly finding its way to the floor. The room I shared with a dozen others leaked from several places in the ceiling, which people tried to correct with pails and miscellaneous containers but without the desired effect. I woke with bleary eyes to the midst of the hubbub, and as people vacated the room, I promptly fell back asleep as no water either fell on me nor pooled aside me. When I got up, I was one of only two left in the room. I guess most of the people didn't have squatter sensibilities.
I was stationed as the medic for the first aid station for the day. As a joke, I called it the medic cave, complete with a handmade sign, because it had no windows or lighting- save two battery powered lanterns. I grabbed a two-way radio and decided to keep myself moving. I ended up on the roof, removing water still pooled up there. It turned out that there was a night crew which on sweeping water off the flat roof, prevent further flooding. Although tarps draped about had worked to some effect, debris had to be cleared from under it to be more effective.
As we secured the tarp at the edges of the building, a gust of wind slipped under the tarp under me and bucked my body up from the surface. Someone next to me gasped and seemed convinced that I was going to be thrown off the roof to my death, but I simply straightened out my body so that I was doing a 45 degree handstand and slowly landed back on the roof. I shrugged. I helped with the decontamination station after that, which was for cleaning carcinogenic dust and mold spores from the people who worked in the flooded out houses. The houses had to be gutted, and quite a few of them had asbestos in the drywall. After that, a security shift. I was pretty bored with having so few people to treat.
The next day, I decided to go to Algiers with another medic, but we got detained before we got close, because the cops got nervous about us getting too close to the cruise ship they lived on. Immigration police, aka the ICE cops, seemed to be the main federal force overseeing the the local police. I suppose this was not only because of the notorious reputation of the NOPD, but to help coordinate between the city, state and federal agencies. I acted in my best official federal/state worker-type impersonation and the performance paid off with their inability to find any bench warrants for me despite the medic with me who seemed to be trying to get me arrested.
For the record, never ask anyone if they have warrants, or if they are a criminal on the run/are an illegal immigrant/underage runaway/AWOL/have illegal drugs/weapons/have been excommunicated by the pope/whatever, while they are being detained by the police. When they came to her, they told her that they had a hard time believing that the name she'd given them was real and that she had no form of identification on her at all. They looked at me for help but I denied having known her before that day or knowing anything else about her for that matter. As pissed off as I was, I wasn't about to be a snitch, but she knew I was never going to let that go.
Eventually, I got to the Algiers clinic, a very busy center placed within the local mosque, along with the medic who I was still upset with. I technically don't really belong in a clinic, since I'm basically a trauma on the streets kind of medic. The neighborhood itself was in very good shape, and managed to avoid the brunt of the damage of the storm and flooding. I felt a bit out of place. I helped organized the donated supplies and then went to work on organizing the kitchen. The doctors and nurses seemed to appreciate my rearrangement with the microwave and spice rack more than anything, oddly enough. I guess street medics are useful everywhere.
One of the sketchballs was around for no apparent reason, a heavyset twentysomething named Johnny. In addition to having a white supremist tattoo on his upper arm, he was a wacko who had an obsession with proving himself and inflating his self-esteem. He saw the sheath of one of my knives and offered to take out his so that we could compare, but I refused and told him this wasn't the place. The clinic cook managed to keep him out of most peoples hair most of the time. He wasn't dangerous, just stupid. All the same, I probably should have stabbed him.
I helped drop off biohazard waste at the local hospital on a biodiesel bus which malfunctioned in one way or another much of the way there. After that I was shown a large cache of miracle juice snake oil. Apparently some representative sent many pallets of an oddly named juice of the mangosteen fruit, marketing it as a cure-all. The glass bottles which held them were the size and shape of wine bottles. I got myself one, which I was told retails for $25. Strange donations like this weren't all that rare. Before I left I bumped into another medic who I hadn't see for a while and who I'd wanted to hang out with, but we only had a hot minute before I got dragged into a car that took me back to the 9th ward. Johnny being in the car with me didn't improve my mood.
The Frida bus from Maine arrived, it was a biodiesel powered activist center on wheels that looked like a hippified schoolbus- which I suppose would have been an accurate description. Apparently they had mechanical troubles which stranded them in Alabama for a bit. They'd left Maine a full week before I'd left my squat. Megan, who owned the bus, grinned and hugged me so hard I could actually feel her ribs press against mine. We'd medicked together years before, when we evacuated a patient via canoe, being of the few medics who knew how to canoe. Fellow canoe medics. She showed me the modifications she'd made to it since I had been in it last, a library and kitchen. I remember it breaking down then though, stranding me and others in Maine for day.
The next morning there was some big news and everyone was giddy and excited. Apparently there was going to be a huge pickup that required a caravan consisting of all the larger vehicles. The supplies would be from the Army National Guard, and we'd be guided in by the 5th Ward police force. That has got to be a trap, some people muttered upon hearing it, they're gonna take us down to Guantanamo. The rest of us just looked shocked. Anarchists, progressives, New Orleans police, and the Army working together? If it didn't involve zombies, killer robots, or space aliens or some combination thereof, hell had to be freezing over.
The fifth ward cops, we were told, were required to live in the wards that they policed back then, and thus had some sympathy for us- given that we were doing more work there than the federal government was. They'd donated some old clothing to the activists as a show of good faith, and some of the activists wore the jackets- stripped of their markings but still undeniably police issue- proudly upon their backs. This eased some of peoples doubts, but a lot of people, myself included, would only believe it when it actually happened.
I'd heard of at least one volunteer who was threatened with a watery death by a cop, though I wasn't certain which ward the cop was from. Also, there was the possibility of behind the scenes shenanigans taking place. For all I know people may have been assigned to do work on the police commander's house or any of his favorite subordinates. We laughed uncomfortablely at the notion, since it was more than just a possibility.
Of course it didn't happen, the dirty magic of New Orleans and the wishes of everyone's personal dumpster fairies wasn't enough to make that dream real. Reality crashed in on us as we waited for the go ahead, sitting in our trucks and buses on the side of the road for a few hours. A no-go, and everyone had to head back with the better part of a morning wasted.
More roof work was next on the list. Malik was grinning widely over some rolls of roofing material, before heading back down. This didn't make sense, all this roof work one day after another. Wait, someone piped up to the site manager, we were told that this whole roof is going to be torn down and replaced, so what's the point of resurfacing it? Can you tell us why we're doing it? What's the point? Is there a point? The site manager threw up his hands and walked off without a word. What the fuck, the volunteer yelled after him, and everyone got the point and got off the roof. Of course that answer was in the air: because Malik wanted it to happen.
Malik was an activist who founded Common Ground Relief, originally known as the Common Ground Relief Collective right after Hurricane Katrina in September of 05. The matter with the roof was the first solid indication of something a bit fishy with Common Ground.
