Following the incredible destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina three years ago, an intimate recovery took shape, spurred in many ways by local volunteer relief workers. These are their stories.

By Scott Edwards

About 200 miles outside of New Orleans, Kris Geller and the four others he was traveling with reached the outer edge of Hurricane Katrina’s mammoth footprint. It started with a few fallen limbs along the interstate. And then entire trees gave way to entire swaths of forest. Thick, centuries-old trees uprooted and slammed onto their sides, one on top of the other.

The group, all members of the New Hope Community Church congregation, was nearing the end of a long drive that started in Central Bucks County and would soon deposit it right in the thick of the devastation, in downtown New Orleans. Their mission was simple: Do whatever they could to help. After less than two months of watching the chaotic aftermath unfold across virtually every channel on TV, they’d seen enough.

Katrina struck New Orleans early in the morning on August 29, 2005. Eighty percent of the city was submerged once the storm surge breached its levees. The images that followed were horrifying: Those that remained behind tried to stay just beyond the water’s reach, but it rose too quickly and there was nowhere left to go. Many found themselves trapped in attics, desperately trying to break through roofs in the frantic search for air. Others who went straight to the rooftops wilted under the sultry New Orleans summer sun waiting for rescue from above – for days on end. Then Hurricane Rita barreled through three weeks later and reflooded much of the city.

Camille, which came ashore in Mississippi on August 17, 1969, was considered the benchmark for brutal hurricanes along the Gulf Coast for much of the last half-century. At its peak, Katrina’s intensity, with wind speeds of over 170 mph, was comparable to Camille’s, but Katrina was a much larger storm. Katrina left in its wake a major US city and countless coastal communities in Louisiana and Mississippi that may never be rebuilt to their previous stature.

Initial impressions

Geller lives in Doylestown today, but he called New Orleans home for about three years two decades ago. The city he came upon, though, in October 2005 was not the one he once knew so well and continued to feel, right up until that moment, an indescribable pull toward. A gray, brown haze coated everything and fogged the air for as far as he could see. Geller tried to act as tour guide for his travelmates, but nothing was matching up with what he remembered. Even more than landmarks like the Superdome being physically transformed, there was this eerie sense emptiness. There were no people, no electricity, not even any birds or squirrels, and that haze just hung in the air. “You’re feeling heavier and heavier because of all the damage you see,” Geller says.

He made two trips as a volunteer to New Orleans. The second came in July 2006, when he helped lead a youth group from the church there. Having lived in the city had little to do with his decision to help, which he describes simply enough as a “compulsion.” “It just seemed like the right thing to do,” says Geller, who wears a LA Dodgers hat so that I can more easily pick him out from the crowd when we meet at the Bucks County Coffee Co. in Doylestown. “There are parts of the Bible that say why we are created is to do good works. Here was an opportunity to do the very thing that I was created for.”

Jim Davis made that initial trip with Geller in October 2005. The destruction he witnessed was beyond anything he had ever seen firsthand in his life. “You couldn’t drive out of it,” he says. “I mean you could drive for a half-hour and you were still in it. It literally covered the whole city.”

The New Hope Community Church sent four volunteer groups to New Orleans between October 2005 and January 2007. On each occasion, its efforts were very focused. Volunteers worked through Geller’s former church in New Orleans, aiding members of that congregation gut and, in rare situations, reconstruct their homes. Their days were spent in New Orleans, and even then, in very specific corners of the city. But the destruction they witnessed and helped dissolve was some of the most extreme because the city sat submerged in stagnant floodwater for several weeks after Katrina cleared out.

“Most of our job was to go in and take out mold-infested furniture, mold-infested sheetrock and peel it all off so that they could start off with fresh wood or dried wood that was not moldy and then start to rebuild,” Davis says. A 10-day stretch in October 2005 was his lone visit. 

Ginny Bennett joined Geller in July 2006. But her first trip to New Orleans as a volunteer came earlier that year, in January. She made a third trip the following January. Everyone, when asked, cited a different quality of the surreal scene that stuck with them long after that initial impression was made. For Bennett, it was the odor. “One day, we were cleaning stuff and I had overalls on and a pot spilled on me,” Bennett says. “I couldn’t stand the smell, so I took the overalls off and took a trash bag, a big, contractor-size one, and I put holes in it and wore that back. And I tied my boots on the back of the van so that they could kind of air out. I couldn’t take the smell.”

The Doylestown grandmother, who is far more youthful and energetic than the title typically indicates, had a rather ordinary reason for wanting to be an active participant in the recovery effort. “Personally, I’m a hands-on, practical kind of person,” she says. “I just felt there’s got to be something we can do.” 

The basis for her being there was not unique among the many from in and around Bucks who decided that cutting a check for the Red Cross was not going to be enough. 

Maureen Gatto arrived in Hancock County, Mississippi, in April 2006 as part of a team of lawyers from the Bucks County Bar Association who expected to be charged with salvaging records and documents. But the courthouse was unsafe. So the lawyers fanned out across the surrounding community and began clearing debris.

Gatto was home in Doylestown for only a couple of days when she realized she was having a tough time focusing. Her heart remained back in the muck of Mississippi. She told herself that she just needed some time to separate herself from the experience, but after a month, she was no different. She drew another line in the sand: Two weeks. But that time, too, came and went and her desire to return to Hancock County was as strong as it ever was. Gatto made the dramatic decision then to uproot her life and move there for the next two years, a moment, by the way, she recounts with the nonchalance that is expected of a description of a daily jaunt to Starbucks.

 That said, the degree of the decision surprised even Gatto. “It could not have been more of a left turn in my life,” she says. But, much like Bennett and the other volunteers profiled here, Gatto, basically put, saw a void and knew she could fill it. “Everything that I saw there was a need that I thought I could fill in some capacity,” she says.

Gatto, half-jokingly, put her husband in charge of keeping their home from going into foreclosure while she was gone, a job, she says, he managed successfully. And she asked her two adult sons and her mother to put all life-altering experiences on hiatus until she returned. “The directive I left with the boys was they weren’t allowed to get married or have any grandchildren in my absence,” Gatto says. “And my 82-year-old mother wasn’t allowed to get sick or die. And I’m happy to report that I came back and all of my directives were followed.”

Her next move was informing the executive committee of the Bucks-Mont Katrina Relief Project of her decision. The nonprofit was formed by the late Bill Eastburn with the aid of Bob Byers Sr. and Mike Scobey to help specifically with the reconstruction of Hancock County. The committee immediately deemed her the project’s Mississippi coordinator. “It was a job without a description,” Gatto says. “And that’s pretty much the way it stayed for the next two years.”

Business turns personal

Jon Otto comes off as a humble person, but that may have more to do with his admittedly “brief” nature than with any modest inclinations. The Solebury resident and president of Penn Valley Constructors in Morrisville is all business all of the time, which leaves little time for small talk and colorful descriptions. In the midst of one action, his mind is already onto the next item on his lengthy and ever-present to-do list. Which made him the ideal candidate as far as Eastburn was concerned to lead the project’s construction committee.

“I had no idea what that meant,” Otto says. “I kind of thought we were going to go down there and help people rebuild houses and clear the mud out.” But Eastburn’s vision was far greater than that. And, as Otto would soon find out, the commitment would be far more encompassing than he ever could have expected.

Otto first visited Hancock County, which includes the coastal communities of Bay Saint Louis and Waveland, two of the hardest hit places outside of New Orleans, with Eastburn in early October 2005. The scope of the county’s need came into focus with each new scene, which was actually much like the one before it. “There were miles of mud. Unless you were down there, you just couldn’t begin to comprehend it,” Otto says. “Along the waterfront, literally mile after mile of Waveland and Bay Saint Louis was houses that were stripped off their foundations – four, five, six deep. Sometimes there were pilings left for houses that were built after Hurricane Camille.”

Eastburn took Otto to meet with the Hancock supervisors, who finally let him in on their plans. They wanted the project to build them a daycare center. Otto’s mind promptly launched full-force into the practicalities of such a request. “Everybody thinks this is a wonderful idea,” he says. “I’m trying to keep a smile on, but I realize the magnitude of this. This is a 10,000 square foot building.” Otto’s committee would be responsible for coordinating the fundraising, the design of the building, the necessary materials and the contractors. He responded the only way he knew how: By never flinching.

The groundbreaking for the center came in April 2006. It was finished several months later. In the time between that day and his first trip there, in October 2005, Otto visited Hancock County 12 times and logged an estimated 1,000 hours in work related to the center’s construction. They are numbers that astonish even him in retrospect, but that’s not what amazes him most. That would be the outpouring of support. About $420,000 in cash donations were made toward the center, another $650,000 in in-kind contributions, including $90,000 for the building’s design. At every turn, Otto says he was met by others who wanted to follow his lead. Everyone he enlisted to help paid their own way to Hancock County and covered every expense that came with their stay.

Otto admits now that it was hard for even him – business first, small talk later, if ever – to deny the incredible nature of the movement he was helping to spearhead. He became connected, and he never anticipated that. “After 9/11, I felt kind of – I felt very frustrated,” he says. “What can you do? I didn’t do anything. I sent some money to the Red Cross, but everybody wrote a check. In this case, we all had the opportunity to go down there and show people we cared. A lot of what they needed, oddly enough, was just someone to listen, someone who hasn’t been in the train wreck with them.” Somewhere in the process, the businessman found himself listening.

Making an impact

Otto was in a unique position in that he was directing a very specific aspect of the rebuilding effort. The center had a definite purpose. Local officials knew that to lure families back to Hancock County, they would need a safe, clean place to put their kids. It also offered the deep satisfaction of a conclusion. But so much of what was done by local volunteers along the ravaged path of Katrina was not as defined.

“A lot of the times, the places you went, you didn’t know if these houses were going to end up being demolished anyway,” Bennett says of their work in New Orleans. “We had to keep adjusting our attitude and say, ‘Okay, is this really worth our time and energy? Why are we doing this? But this was the process that people had to go through because they didn’t know until they got stuff gutted and cleaned out how bad it was.”

When surrounded by such devastation day in and day out, a clear perspective becomes harder to hold on to with each passing hour. Eighteen months after her last trip, Bennett was weighing the possibility of making another, maybe simply so that she could see for herself that her efforts weren’t wasted. There was definite progress over the span of her three trips, she says. Her own responsibilities changed from destruction to construction. But it seemed like the process should have been farther along, largely because Bennett had never seen or experienced devastation like this.

“You would have loved to be able to go in and see whole streets back to normal, like they show on TV with the HUD houses being built,” Bennett says. “We did get to drive by that street and see that happening, but most of the communities, it’s just slow, little by little, one house after another.”

But an impact was made everywhere the volunteers went, and it was evident if not on the streets than on the faces and spirits of those they helped. When it became hard to endure the conditions for even one more day, suddenly there was a smile that was so unexpected it was impossible to comprehend. The volunteers would eventually return home, to normalcy. But the endless mountains of debris and mud were the new standard of normalcy for those they worked beside, and yet they were thrilled to be doing something, anything to improve their situation after so many weeks of being relegated to watching like everyone else – and assuming the worst.

“We would think that people would be sobbing and really down and out,” Davis says. “And while they were, they lifted our spirits because they could probably see our faces, the expressions of shock at what we were finding.”

Every emotion felt pressed to the fore. Everyone, from the residents and business owners to the volunteers, was more vulnerable because of it. But because everyone was in it together, each connection was heightened, too. “The people we were helping would reach out to us,” Geller says. “They would invite us over for dinner, 10 or 12 of us, and they’d only been back in their houses for a week or two. Maybe it was only spaghetti and sauce, but it was — .”

Gatto says she felt “utterly overwhelmed every day,” but then, so did every other person that comprised her everyday life over the last two years. “I felt like there were not enough hours in the day to do everything that needed to be done and that I wanted to do,” says Gatto, who returned to Doylestown on July 2. “So it was truly a matter of disciplining myself and saying it just is not going to be done overnight.”

When I ask if she ever felt disconnected from the world, particularly in the early days, because she immersed herself so completely in a community that was rather isolated before the storm and might as well have been a third-world nation after it, Gatto surprisingly – at least to me – answers no. She was immediately embraced by the people there, and that was enough. With a sparse population of about 45,000 prior to Katrina, everyone who found himself in Hancock County after the storm promptly became an essential component to the ultimate rescue of the region. Gatto clung to the camaraderie and the impossibly intimate moments it spurred, like Sundays at the library. “The only Internet service that I was able to use initially was at the public library and the public library only had very limited hours,” Gatto says. It was a wireless service, so even when the library was closed, people would flock there to go online. But the connection was shaky. For some inexplicable reason, it held when users leaned against a wall of the building. So when Gatto arrived at the library on Sundays to email friends and family back home, she was usually greeted by tens upon tens of people who were propped up along the perimeter of the building. “It was all that and a little bit of magic,” she says. “You’d see the same people there week after week and that’s how we got Internet.”

Remaining connected

The Bucks-Mont Katrina Relief Project will assume a new capacity at the end of the year when it will end its partnership with the Salvation Army and some key members such as Gatto and Otto step away from the forefront of the organization’s efforts. Gatto says it is an appropriate time because a number of the project’s endeavors are coming to a natural end. For one, a 3,000 square foot food pantry that was started at the end of July and is being overseen by Otto is expected to be completed in November.

There are a number of reasons, practically speaking, why the organization needed to begin considering a withdrawal, foremost of which is the difficulty that comes with fundraising three years later and in an increasingly lifeless economy. “It’s harder to get the contractors, it’s harder to raise the money,” Otto says. “People have moved on, a lot of them, in their ways.” The necessary funding for the pantry, according to Otto, has already been secured and, as of the end of July, so too had most of the contractors. But, he says, the pantry also connected with more people than the daycare center did, which made his job a bit easier than he anticipated and atypical considering the environment.

Otto, who made his 15^th trip to Hancock County in mid-July, says that the commercial corridor has recovered to a much greater extent than the residential communities, estimating that 85 to 90 percent of businesses are functioning. When construction on the daycare center started in April 2006, Gulfport, MS, which lies about 35 miles outside of Bay Saint Louis, was the closest place to buy a bolt. By the time the center was done, a Lowe’s had opened a mile away. 

Gatto understood as she began planning her own departure in January that a proper infrastructure would be required to enter the next phase, and that meant locals only. More than addressing physical obstacles, like the lack of housing, she says, there needs to be a complete overhaul — from within — of the mindset, a challenge made even greater given the nature of the population, much of which is undereducated and runs generations deep.

“It’s progress and it’s change,” she says. “Katrina changed their world in a way that just gutted it physically, mentally, emotionally, economically. So the world that they’re building back now looks different than the world that was once there.”

The project is being dismantled on a formal level, meaning, mostly, no more meetings, but Gatto anticipates most members will maintain a connection with Hancock County. The path has been forged, she says, for an eternal link. “People there are so in need and people here look for people in need,” she says.

Gatto returned from Hancock forever changed. “You realize the important things in a different way,” she says. “That’s, of course, people.” It should come as little surprise by this point in the story that she foresees a lifelong commitment to Hancock County. “There’s no doubt in my mind that I will continue to work as a volunteer for the effort in Hancock County until there is no more work to be done.”

Otto, who is far less profound about what he’s taken away from the last few years, says he plans to continue aiding in the recovery, though likely in a diminished capacity from his current role. “A lot of people have gone down there and said it was a life-changing experience,” Otto says. “But I don’t think it’s really changed my life. At the same time, it certainly has altered my outlook. I maybe view the whole human race in a slightly higher regard than I did previously. I couldn’t help but do that when people have been so gracious and so wonderful and so generous.” •