Chet Held returns home: nothing but studs and memories. 
Sandy Theriot: “I’m a voter. I don’t miss elections.” 
Jeffrey Johnson at work. IBEW Local 130 now has 1100 members serving the New Orleans area, about the same number as before Katrina. 
Two years after Katrina, the doors of this university library are just now being opened to reveal a toxic mess. 
Chet Held finds the name of a friend on a memorial to Katrina's victims from St. Bernard Parish. 
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He wasn’t there, he evacuated his family the night before. But he experiences those apocalyptic hours like an amputee revisits the pain of a missing limb. The overtopping of the levees, the loss of power, the rush of water, people fleeing to their roofs.
Katrina is part of him now.
A neighbor told Chet the first thing he saw after making it to the roof was Chet’s truck floating by.
Chet is driving through that neighborhood now, a vast cemetery of gutted houses and lingering debris. His voice is measured, a personal levee against a flood of feelings, as he thinks about those long nights that people spent clinging to their roofs.
“Dead silence,” he says, hearing it still. “Total darkness. Snakes in the water. Dead bodies in the water. People on their roofs yelling, ‘Help, help!’ Nothing but silence.” He is speaking to you but he is somewhere else. “The next night there are fewer ‘Help, helps.’”
Some were rescued. Too many were lost. Chet points out their houses, in memoriam. There. There. And there.
St. Bernard Parish remained submerged for 10 days.
* * *
Chet lost his home and nearly everything he owned. But he knows he’s among the lucky. Along with 25 members of his extended family, he ended up at his wife’s cousin’s place in Tampa, Florida.
A week later, Chet moved his family to St. Louis, where they were sheltered by members of IBEW Local 1—union brothers Chet had befriended a decade earlier while working at a car plant.
Chet and his family returned the day after Hurricane Rita, staying in a travel trailer on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
Despite the massive economic dislocation inflicted by Katrina and Rita, his skills as a journeyman electrician gained him temporary work at CCI Carbon, a co-generation plant that sells its surplus power to the area’s utility company. Lines were down between the generators and the substation. Chet worked alongside 30 other men on repairs.
Fourteen of them lived on-site, crowded together in a doublewide trailer provided by the company.
You’d think, two years after the apocalypse, the Louisiana parishes ravaged by Katrina would be surging with employment opportunities. The need is vast—for hospitals, for schools, for transportation, for sewers, for housing. For the fundamental building blocks of community.
President George W. Bush stood in the French Quarter less than three weeks after Katrina struck her blow and pledged to orchestrate “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”
It took the federal Marshall Plan to help a devastated Europe recover after World War II. It’s increasingly clear that St. Bernard Parish and other Katrina-ravaged communities will require federal leadership on that order.
They’re not holding their breath in St. Bernard Parish. Two years after Katrina, the community Chet Held once called home remains largely a ghost town.
* * *
Still, work for electricians has bounced back. Chet will tell you with some pride that their union—the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 130—now has 1100 members serving the New Orleans area, about the same number as before Katrina.
But it’s a displaced workforce, housed by relatives or friends or FEMA trailers. Many no longer live anywhere near the communities they serve.
Chet, a rank and file union leader before Katrina, now works full-time for Local 130 as an assistant business manager. It makes sense. His great-uncle, grandfather, father, and various cousins were in the IBEW before him. His oldest son, Bradley, is a first-year apprentice.
Chet wants you to know that the IBEW surrendered no one to Katrina. “All our members are accounted for.”
At Southern University of New Orleans, some of those IBEW members are installing a dehumidification system. They’re trying to dry one of the buildings and kill the mold. The foreman is Sandy Theriot, a woman 27 years in the trade.
Recovery work is “caught up in red tape,” Sandy says.
She has first-hand experience with red tape. After Katrina, she stayed in a fishing camp 70 miles from her home. She wanted to get a FEMA trailer, but no dice. So she called the White House directly.
“I spent $14 in phone calls. I got my trailer,” she says. She thinks about this for a moment, then adds: “I’m a voter. I don’t miss elections.”
Sandy has two sons in the Navy. One is an airline electronics technician. Unfortunately, Louis Armstrong Airport still isn’t hiring.
“He asked me if he should move back here and I couldn’t tell him yes.”
Sandy says she feels sorry for all the professional people thrown out of work when their companies left town after Katrina. “I was very fortunate that I had a skill—I could go back to my trade.”
And work was a welcome distraction—all that overtime after the storm.
“When you’re busy working you just come home and collapse,” she says. “But when you go back to 40 hours and have time to think about it, you cry.”
There’s commotion nearby, at the university’s library. Workers in respirators and hazard gear are starting to haul out ruined computers, rusty cabinets, and things made unrecognizable by mold and neglect. After 25 months, the doors of this building are just today being opened for the first time since Katrina.
“…one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”
* * *
Let’s talk about guns.
Chet had a lot of them—all lost in the flood.
One of Chet’s neighbors decided to continue living at home after the flood.
“He would put his garbage out at night with a pistol in his hand,” Chet recalls. It’s not clear whether Chet regards the man as a hero or a crazy fool. Maybe both.
“He’d confront looters at neighbors’ houses: ‘Freeze, mother-…’” Well, you know what he said.
Jeffrey Johnson, an IBEW steward and electrician on the job with Sandy at Southern University of New Orleans, was living on the Mississippi coast when Katrina hit. Jeff’s wife came back, right afterward, to see what was left.
“It affected her and it affected me,” Jeff says. “It affected everybody—physically and mentally.”
His wife didn’t come back again for months. Couldn’t bear it. Jeff stayed by himself in a tent on the deck, armed, protecting their house. He lived like that for over a month.
There were 161 homicides in New Orleans in 2006. Many of the victims as well as the suspects were teenagers.
New Orleans fired its education workforce in the months following Katrina—7,000 teachers and other school employees. The state is trying to impose a system of charter schools, an approach already discredited in California. Investigators there found millions of dollars were spent on huge executive salaries, perks and questionable contracts awarded to the friends and family of the CEO.
Flooded buildings aren’t the only place you find toxic mold.
* * *
In the Chalmette neighborhood of St. Bernard Parish, Chet pulls up to the place he used to call home. It’s not as bad as the first time, when he confronted an unspeakable toxic mess, “like a Port-O-Let turned upside down and then put through a blender.”
He pauses at the front door, lowers his head.
“This is really hard for me, guys.”
The inside is gutted, just studs and memories. The brick base of the stove that he built just before the storm. The remnants of a fireplace.
Chet doesn’t say much, just moves among the studs, alone behind his sunglasses.
* * *
An hour later, along the shoreline of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet near Shell Beach, Chet points out the name of a childhood friend.
“I grew up with him. We were almost exactly the same age.”
It’s one of about 150 names on a monument to victims of Hurricane Katrina from this parish of St. Bernard, the 12th century Catholic abbot who viewed the world as a place of banishment and trial. Behind the shrine, a golden metal cross is anchored in cement next to the water, catching sharply angled rays from the lowering sun.
In one direction is the bayou where Chet’s father hunted alligators. In another, the waters where he caught oysters and crabs in boats that he built with his cousins.
Boats in Shell Beach have personalities. Miss Bonnie. Pretzel Logic. Brothers. In Shell Beach, losing a boat is like losing a relative.
Katrina took a terrible toll here. But somehow, seeing the deep feeling Chet has for this place, it’s impossible to think that Katrina will have the last word.
The performance of local, state and federal officials in the aftermath of Katrina is not likely to be judged kindly by history. There’s plenty in government that’s bent, and people never seem to catch on quick enough to straighten it out.
Chet suggests a shrimp po’ boy at Rocky & Carlo’s, although oyster is good too. It’s a big noisy place where you’re really missing out if you don’t like it battered and fried. T-shirts abound, tooting the horn for various candidates for local political office.
Old friends stop by Chet’s table. There’s real joy in these hugs.
* * *
The Ninth Ward has received the lion’s share of media attention in Katrina’s aftermath. Chet understands this. But St. Bernard Parish has suffered, too. More than Chet can say, perhaps more than any outsider could ever understand.
“Black or white, Katrina didn’t discriminate,” he says. “Tell people what happened here.”
EW-LS-EM