Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Larry Johnson was distributing food supplies recently to New Orleans-area residents whose homes were damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
At one home, there were five residents, “none younger than me,” said Johnson, 59, a retired Sweet Home High School assistant principal and athletic director. “I heard a lady hollering in the back, ‘Is that the guy? Is that the guy?'”
Turns out, the woman wanted to thank Johnson for delivering some sandwiches earlier. She said they’d made them last for three days.
“They made a meal out of one sandwich,” he said.
He told of one man, over 70, whom he met in a fishing village called Irish Bayou. The man lost 28 pounds before food started coming in after the hurricane.
Johnson returned Christmas Day from Louisiana after helping with the post-hurricane cleanup since Sept. 6. He plans to return in February “for at least another month.”
“These are tough people who need help,” Johnson said. “That’s why I’m going back.”
When the images of the disaster caused by the hurricane and flooding flashed on television screens last summer, Johnson and his wife Candy knew instantly that he would join the relief effort.
“We were watching TV, and my wife turned to me and asked, ‘When are you going to go?’ I said ‘as soon as possible.’
“I’m going down there to help people. That’s why I’m going back.”
Johnson has been managing a mobile shower facility for firefighters in East Orleans for the Oasis company. In his free time he he has distributed surplus food supplies to needy people and helped with cleanup efforts, often simply driving around and keeping an eye open for people who needed help, he said.
“I delivered lots and lots of food to people that wasn’t going to be used otherwise,” he said.
Johnson said the area he was in was comparable to the neighborhoods just west of Interstate 5 in Albany. He spent a lot of time in Chalmette, a community just south of New Orleans, and in Slidell, east of the city.
“In Chalmette — a city with over 50,000 population — when I left, there were two gas stations open, one public school with grades one through 12, three bar/restaurants, one hardware store, a beauty shop, and I think that was about all,” he said. “I could name the places that were open. What other town could you drive through and name all the places that were open?”
Before he left, he got his hair cut at the beauty shop, he said. A woman, whom he guessed was about 30, was in the shop rejoicing because she was getting the sewer line hooked up to the trailer she was living in.
“Those are little things we don’t tend to celebrate,” he said.
Johnson said that he made frequent visits to the parking lot of the Domino Sugar company in Chalmette, where the company had brought in 250 trailers, including the one the woman in the beauty shop lived in, to house its employees. He said the sugar harvest was tough this year for local companies because truckers who normally haul sugar cane were making more money hauling waste from the hurricane recovery effort.
Folgers Coffee, also in Chalmette, is housing employees in 124 trailers in its parking lot.
“A hurricane is like cancer,” Johnson said. “It treats everyone the same. I met a lawyer, and his wife, who has no clients. He is now gutting houses for his income. You’re at the Red Cross or a church center and in pulls a Lexus. You ever visualize yourself needing to go to the Red Cross for food?
“I met people that were just trying to put their home together — enough to live in because that’s all they have.”
He said that in East Orleans some residents are just now getting water and electricity, more than four months after the hurricane.
The damage in Chalmette was largely due to water from Lake Pontchartrain.
“In Chalmette, a camera on the water showed the water went from zero to 12 feet in 20 minutes,” Johnson said.
In Slidell, a mile and half from the lake, Johnson met a man who stayed through the storm with his family. When the eye of the hurricane hit Mississippi, he said, the man was excited, thinking they’d survived the worst of the storm.
“Then he saw the water coming,” Johnson said. “He jumped in the back of the truck and put his wife and kids on the roof. By the end, he had to swim to get on the roof of the truck. That water came from Lake Pontchartrain.”
Johnson said things were even worse in Mississippi, where he went first in September before moving to New Orleans.
“Where I’m at, it’s water damage,” he said. “In Biloxi and Waveland, Miss., all they have to start with is a slab. In Waveland, most of the homes are gone.”
Johnson said that he saw “two kids” during the first two months he worked in East Orleans, and those two children’s grandfather was a fireman he worked with.
“For the first month or two I was there, I could walk down the freeway or the main street for two hours and maybe see five rigs — and they would be fire or military or police,” he said. “It was just like a war zone.”
Johnson said many residents are salvaging their houses by clearing out their ruined belongings, which are hauled away from the curb, gutting the house down to the studs, then putting in new wiring and new sheetrock.
“The ones who plan to return, it appears, come in every day to work on their house or, if they’re too far away, they come in on the weekends,” he said.
When Johnson returns, he wants to take some help with him. He said Sweet Home-area residents who want to help can purchase Wal-Mart or Home Depot gift cards that he will deliver to needy people who are trying to rebuild. The reason, he said, that he suggests Home Depot is that it is one of the few stores that is actually open in the area and has merchandise available. Cards can be dropped off at Sweet Home Florist, to Peggy Emmert at Sweet Home High School or to The New Era office.
Those wishing to donate funds should write a check to :”Help” and drop it off at Key Bank in Sweet Home with instructions to deliver it to Johnson, who will purchase gift cads with it.
“I think this is one of those things, as a nation , where we have to say ‘I’m willing to step up and do something,'” he said.