Steve Iskovitz New Orleans report #2 Feb 5, 2006 2:50 AM

It's late Saturday night and I should be in bed, but here I am instead. Okay, so since I gave you the general description of the scene here in my first report, I can go into more detail and give updates in this one.

Well, first off all, there was a tornado here Wednesday night! The local paper said it was an "F 2" tornado, with winds up to 110 or something like that, and that it was the first F 2 tornado since 1981!

The winds got pretty heavy, we were running around tightening tent ropes, tarping things, etc. Some of us were freaking out, I was a bit scared myself, but one of the people staying in our trailer is from LaFayette (?) and said "this ain't nothin'" and was completely calm and making jokes, so that was reassuring.

It's all a roll of the dice, though, I suppose. Next day I read that it touched down in three places, one in Jefferson Parish and two in New Orleans. Today someone told me it hit the FEMA tent city just across the field from us and lifted a tent up and moved it across the lot! He's told me some awful stories about that FEMA camp. His name, by the way, is John Wilkes Booth—seriously, that's his birth name.

As if that wasn't enough, there were heavy winds again Friday night. Again we had to run around tarping things, etc., it started out just like the other night, but then tapered off.

For those of you who might have noticed a lack of political perspective in my first report, I've since filled in some blanks. I've had the chance to talk with people about Common Ground Collective (CG). They're a big volunteer group which has set up in New Orleans, in the lower 9th. They've made deals with property owners, in which CG agrees to fix up the building in exchange for being able to use it for a year. In this way, they've taken over a whole block or so. They have sleeping quarters, offices, kitchen, workshops of one sort or another. They're a heavy-duty organization and they're fighting racism very directly. The Lower 9th is a poor, mostly black section which supposedly was flooded intentionally to relieve pressure for the rest of the city, and is, I'm told, seeing more evictions than other areas. So CG does things like show up with 20 or 30 people when the police are trying to evict someone, call out the media, etc., to embarass local officials into backing down.

They work with Black Panthers, and Malik Rahim [Green Party candidate for mayor of New Orleans] is very much a part of this. It sound like they're a fairly strong force, representing the neighborhood and resisting the police and authorities.

As a result of this, the authorities can't stand CG. Someone told me CG people never walk alone, they only travel in groups and always have a video camera with them everywhere they go, to tape cops, badge numbers, etc. It works, and cops have stopped arresting them, but the result is constant confrontation and tension, which is burning a lot of people out. Some refugees from CG come to us to relax.

Our scene is decidedly apolitical and non-controversial. We're here to feed people and that's pretty much it. the person who explained this to me said both approaches are needed, and that the two need to be done separately. If we associated ourselves with CG then we'd start getting arrested and hassled, and would all have to get video cameras, etc. Likewise, if they lost their edge and became like us, they wouldn't be able to defend the people in the lower 9th.

Their website is commongroundrelief.org , and they even have internet radio ("Radio Uprising"), which you can click on from their web page. (I haven't heard it yet.)

Here at Emergency Communities' Made With Love Cafe, in St. Bernard's Parish, just outside New Orleans, well, earlier in the week our numbers dwindled, and we were having a hard time getting everything done. People had to work too hard, a lot of stress, etc. New volunteers have been flowing in, though, and we must be over a hundred now, maybe 110 or 115.

A group of Salvadorans, 8 or 10 or so, rolled in a few days ago. At first they kept to themselves in a way which made me think they might continue to do so their whole time here, but aftere a few days some sort of wall came down, and they're suddenly meeting people all around the camp.

I've noticed this with others, people who arrive and don't fit in, for whatever reason. One guy used to go off by himself and drink all the time, didn't do any work, and almost got bounced from the camp. A few days later, he did a little work, then even more. Another guy's real eccentric and hard to work with, would just walk around talking with people, making jokes, etc. Now he's caught up in a project and seems to be there working every waking moment.

There seems to be a high percentage of people here from Michigan and Wisconsin. I asked a girl from Madison why this might be, and she answered simply, "Because people are cool there, and it's cold." Apparently there was a first wave of people from Madison who came down here, then went back and reported on it to the community, causing this current second wave.

There are a lot of oil refineries around here, and one nearby is run by Murphy Oil Co., which is headquartered, I think in Arkansas. There have been some oil spills from there, one during the flood. It's hard to get current information, but the Louisiana Environmental Action Network has some info that's a year or two old, and is quite disturbing. There are super high levels of arsenic, benzene, and a lot of other chemicals, found in the soil around here. This is from before the flood.

It's all very disturbing, and a few days ago, with about one-fifth of the camp (including myself) sick with a strange flu-like illness, and after just reading the data, Iconcluded that I had to leave this place within a few days and not return. It's sad, but it's what I have to do, I told myself. I reconsidered, however, deciding that people have lived here for decades around all this stuff, and though they may have high rates of cancer, etc., I shouldn't complain too much about being exposed for just a few weeks. I think what I'll do is take breaks for four or five days or so, every few weeks or so.

I'm still working on bikes here. The thin-tired english racers keep going flat, there are so many little things on the roads, rocks, scraps of metal and whatnot, it seems like I could spend a good deal of my time simply repairing them. So I think I'll just retire them as they go, and fix up more mountain bikes, the only kind of bike you want to ride around after a flood.

I still manage a little time every day (night, actually) to work on my pet project, a bike cart. I cut some aluminum tubes from the frame of a cot and am planning to use them to attach the bike to the wagon. With a few notable exceptions, people don't generally seem to interested in this, but I'm hoping that when I finally finish one they'll understand why it excites me so much. Then it might be easier to justify the time to make more (whereas now I think some people see me as wasting time on a personal project and neglecting more important kitchen work).

I won't say anything more now about the bike cart, although every minute detail about fascinates me endlessly.

Better sign off, it's getting late, and it's "cold" tonight, like maybe low 50s or so. I'll close with a quote from White House press secretary Trent Duffy on the government's response to Katrina: "There was a lack of situational awareness at all levels."

Hope you all maintain your situational awareness until next time.

Steve Iskovitz New Orleans report #1 Jan 30, 2006 11:45 AM

Greetings from St. Bernard's Parish, just outside New Orleans.

Well, I've been here ten days and haven't yet written my first correspondence. I was waiting for a time when I felt I could summarize in a somewhat clear fashion what I've seen and done up to that point. I guess I've pretty much given up on that idea. There may be no "good time to write," so I won't put it off any longer.

Okay, a basic fact: St. Bernard's Parish (a parish is basically what you'd call a county) is the next parish over from New Orleans. Like most of the land around here, it's pretty much totally flat. This area was covered with somewhere between 12 and 20 feet of water. Eventually it dropped to about three feet, and when you travel around the parish you can see a line on every house, about three feet off the ground, where the water line stayed for a longer time.

The water's gone now, and the neighborhood now looks like a sort of post-apocalyptic suburb. Yesterday I walked through one of the drives, the little streets which run off the main drag. Everywhere you go it's the same thing: The houses are arranged neatly on neatly arranged streets, but everything inside them is totally ruined. In front of every house is a huge pile of ruined items-- any item you can imagine, I mean anything. I could try to list them, but there's no point. Just imagine any objects you can think of, then imagine them all soaked or rusted or broken and in a big pile.

Anyone you see on the streets in the daytime-- residents, or laborers from out of town, out of state and out of country-- is pretty much here for the same reason: to gut houses. Everything's broken, everything's ruined, there's nothing else to do but to begin fixing things. Gutting a house means carting everything-- EVERYTHING-- in a wheelbarrow out to the street.

Last September or so, a community of volunteers formed in Waveland, Mississippi and, as the story goes, everything came together in some sort of magical if chaotic collective effort. After Christmas, many of them moved here to St. Bernard's Parish, formed a non-profit called Emergency Communities and set up shop in a huge lot behind The Finish Line Off-Track Betting, The Rocking Horse Game Room, and Pepe's Lounge, on Judge Perez Blvd.

It's a big cement parking lot with a huge dirt field behind it. On the cement lot they've set up a bunch of tents (15 or 20 maybe?). One is a kitchen, one is for dishwashing, one provides medical care, a few are offices, some are for dry food storage, etc. Just across the dirt line is a "dormitory" tent, a huge teepee-like structure with cots inside. Thirty of forty volunteers sleep in there. Others set up their own tents further back, on top of wooden boards lifted off the toxic dirt with palates. There are palate-walkways leading to them.

On the cement lot, nearer to the street is a huge geodesic dome, connected to another smaller dome. It's a crazy looking thing, and the first time you see it you'll probably rub your eyes and look at it again, thinking your eyes had deceived you. When I was ten years old in 1970 our teacher told us to each draw a picture of a futuristic house, under-water or extra-planetary or something like that. The dome reminds me of some of the pictures we drew.

Anyway, inside the dome, the Made With Love Cafe serves breakfast, lunch and dinner to whoever shows up. About three hundred locals, in addition to the seventy or so volunteers, show up for each meal. On average, we're serving about 1200-1400 meals a day. Good meals, too. I just finished breakfast: egg and cheese souflet (sp?), grits, sweet potato home fries, fruit salad and coffee. Lunches and dinners are even better. From about five in the morning until late into the evening you can see a whole crew of people cutting vegetables, cooking, washing dishes, serving, emptying trash, etc

Okay, that's my attempt at an overview

I'll talk a little about my own involvement before signing off. There are a million tasks to be done around here, and most people who arrive fall into a particular area or two. For whatever reason, I've become the bike person. There are junker bikes all over town. People have cruised the area in pickup trucks and brought some of these back, and mostly since no-one else was doing it and I saw how it could be done, I took on the project.

The first major problem I encountered was that as soon as I fixed a bike it got stolen. At a meeting one night I was told we had seven functioning bikes. The next day when I looked, there were three. I fixed two and built the fleet up to five. The next morning there were two. I spent the rest of that day procuring a lock and chain, and locked up the two. Next day I fixed two more and we had four. Next day I fixed two more, and for three or four days now we're holding steady at six. Now, in addition to maintaining the fleet, my next project is to build or find a cart to put on the back of a bike, so we can start delivering meals around the neighborhood. We'll see how that goes.

I don't take material things for granted around here. I have no tools in the bike shop. When I need one, I walk over to the office and sign it out. Later, if I need another one, I have to hide the ones I already have under a tarp to walk over and sign out another one to bring back. Things have a tendency to "walk away."

We're living in a disaster zone, there's no question about it. You can't forget it for even a minute, unless your eyes are closed. We volunteers are mostly all from out of town, are energetic, and generally optimistic. Thus, we're insulated from the tragic element to a large extent. Still, it's never far. Today at breakfast as I tried to read a newspaper article about how the Coast Guard is cutting back on its boat salvaging mission because it's too expensive, I was interupted by a woman a few feet away, standing over a cute little three- or four-year girl and talking to another woman across the table from her. "I was up on the second floor with my little girl!" she said, bending to kiss the girl on the top of her head.

Okay, I have to go. The sun is shining (oh yeah, it's in the 70s these days) and I have to go cruise the trash heaps looking for a wagon. More later.