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Commissioner Rackleff in the attic of a house on Claiborne and Pauline Streets helping to convert it into a free health clinic operated by Common Ground Relief. As a volunteer for three work visits to the Ninth Ward of New Orleans in 2006, he worked with others in interior demolition and decontamination of hazardous mold, wearing a full hazmat suit and respirator. |
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After work was completed in February, the interior was ready for renovation into another Common Ground Relief free health clinic. It was gutted and decontaminated by mostly young volunteers from around America who slept in tents and church buildings and worked seven days a week, many of them since September 2006. |
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Delivery of the first shipment of respirators from Leon County Commissioners Bob Rackleff (shown) and Tony Grippa, a Tulane University graduate. This equipment prevents the Common Ground Relief volunteers from contracting respiratory diseases while working in flooded homes. Two later deliveries funded by private donations provided 400 sorely needed protective respirators. |
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The living room of a Lower Ninth Ward home flooded by rooftop-high waters and vacant five months after Katrina demonstrates several realities of this massive hurricane: The Lower Ninth was and can be again a vibrant, prosperous community. Almost all houses we visited are easily restorable for future occupants. Only incompetence of federal officials can explain why homes like these are still vacant and battered. This is a national disgrace. |
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Devastated homes on Beach Boulevard in Bay St. Louis MS. This now-mostly uninhabitable town is two miles from the open Gulf, yet destruction was total here and hundreds of miles inland. It also demonstrates that Katrina was a regional storm of immense proportions. |
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The front of the main post office of Bay St. Louis, MS is obscured in February by thousands of new post office boxes. Each box represents a postal customer with no home to deliver mail to – five months after Katrina hit – underscoring the massive destruction it caused in this and other coastal Mississippi cities. |
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What was left in February 2006 of the First Baptist Church of Gulfport MS across U.S. 90 from the Gulf of Mexico. |
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