One thing that surprised me about what we saw is how much remains to be done, nearly four years after Katrina blew through. I know it was a big storm but the amount of devastation hadn’t really clicked with me until actually after this trip… driving around the city, both in the Ninth Ward and elsewhere, there were still many homes with obvious and massive damage, padlocked, some open to the elements, some overgrown, and many that appeared to be simply abandoned. There are a lot of reasons why, and maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. When we got home, my dad pulled out some pictures from a work trip he took to New Orleans six months after Katrina, which really put things into perspective. What we saw is actually a herculean amount of work. But there is still so much left to do.

This is on one of the houses we worked on. You can see these signs still spraypainted on many homes all around the city, four years later. I know I said that already, but FOUR years. Our students were gutting this house down to the studs. I wondered if I would want to paint over this, or if I’d want to leave it as a testament to my surviving an incredible storm. The owner said the water was about nine feet high here (my head if I were standing on the porch). Isn’t that amazing?

Normally I don’t put captions on the images in my galleries, but there are stories behind each of these pictures, so I took the time to give you a brief explanation for them. (That means: please take a minute to read the captions under the images.) Thank you for sticking with me!

I don’t know why we were standing in a lake. This is not water runoff from the house; it was coming from a valve or something on the bottom of the truck. When the truck wasn’t spraying, the water wasn’t coming out. Is it a pressure valve or something? If you know, please tell me what it is and if it’s a normal byproduct of a fire truck in action.

Just like last time, click on the thumbnail to see any of the little pictures bigger. For my curious P2 visitors, this gallery setup is not part of the P2 theme; it’s done using free WP plugins.

I’m glad you asked. First, because I like big pictures. With this fun new blog setup, there’s only one column, which gives me more room to put up bigger pictures. The sidebar with links and the search button and everything is way down at the bottom of the page–hasn’t disappeared, just moved. The other big reason for moving everything was because I really don’t need a huge site with tons of pages–actually, there were only three or four pages over there. I can put that information up just as easily (more easily, actually) on my blog. (See the menu labeled “about”.)

There’s some kinks to work out still, and I’ll keep tweaking (because I like to tweak!), but I am thrilled to be here. Because the blog address is changed, those of you using feed readers will probably need to update your subscription–not hard to do; just do it!

Thanks for stopping by and I’ll have some new fun pictures up in the next day or so!