Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast is still facing years of recovery and volunteers are still helping rebuild.
Paul and Linda Rowton of Sweet Home recently returned from a church mission to Mississippi where they helped rebuild two homes.
The Rowtons recalled losing 60 trees around their home during the February 2002 windstorm that blew through Sweet Home. The trees missed their house, but a neighbor’s was damaged.
They thought that was “pretty severe,” Paul Rowtons said. But “when we got to Mississippi, we were going, ‘We didn’t have any trouble at all.’ Things were obliterated for miles and miles.
The Rowtons were members of a United Methodist team from the mid-Valley, including their pastor, April Hall Cutting of Sweet Home United Methodist, her husband and Albany Pastor Craig Hall Cutting, Ken Stahl of Albany, Ken Hilton and Elizabeth Nielson of Corvallis, Andy and Marilyn Belcher of Lebanon and team leader and Lebanon Pastor Todd Bartlett.
The Rowtons left for Mississippi in time to pick up the team at the Gulfport Airport on March 20.
Rowton is retired from School District 55 where he was a music teacher. Linda Rowton worked in information technology for Willamette Industries for 20 years and then for EDS contracting with Weyerhaeuser.
“We drove and hauled tools in our pickup,” Paul Rowton said. The team went to the St. Paul Methodist Church Camp where volunteers rotate through, mostly on one-week schedules.
This particular camp was in charge of restoring 70 houses, Rowton said. The camp assesses the skills of visiting volunteers and what work needs to be done at its houses and then assigns teams to the houses.
The Rowtons worked on the homes of two single men, one who uses a wheelchair and another who has learning disabilities.
Their team worked on grouting tile floors, painting, taping and mudding sheetrock, doing a little plumbing and building cabinets and counter tops.
Rowton estimated that the homes were within a couple of weeks of completion and being ready for occupancy. Then the two men will be able to move out of the trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“That was kind of fun to have it be at that point,” he said.
While the two homes that the Rowtons were working on were close to finished, a caseworker told Linda Rowton that more than 90,000 families are still living in FEMA trailers in Mississippi. About 80 percent of the volunteer help in the area is being done by church teams. More than 13,000 volunteers have gone through the camp where the Rowtons were based. While there, the camp had about 100 people. The camp could handle up to 150.
When they started planning this trip a year ago, they were worried that they might get there and there would be no work, Linda Rowton said.
That wasn’t the case, she said. The devastation was so widespread that officials estimate it will take upward of eight years for the region to recover.
The media frenzy following the hurricane has died back, and volunteer numbers have fallen, the Rowtons said, but the area is still in miserable shape and needs help.
For about four blocks along the waterfront, there is nothing left but building slabs and bank vaults, Paul Rowton said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Everything is so widespread.”
The Rowtons said they talked to many people while in Mississipi.
“Three older women next to us were getting ready to leave,” Paul Rowton said, and they asked if the Rowtons were there to help. They said, yes; and the women thanked them.
The oldest of them was 92 years old. She told the Rowtons that she lost her home to the hurricane, but she left to stay with her daughter in another state. While at her daughter’s she had a heart problem that would have killed her had she been home alone at that time.
The Rowtons also talked to a gas station clerk whose son had been out in the country taking care of his horses. She talked her son into coming and weathering the storm with her. The horses perished during the storm, but the clerk’s son survived.
A Lowe’s employee told the Rowtons how he weathered hurricanes at a friend’s home. He did the same thing during Hurricane Katrina, but this time, it wasn’t easy. As the storm raged, they had to stand on kitchen tables and counter tops to keep their heads above the rising water.
They survived, Rowton said, but “he says, ‘I won’t weather another storm.'”
“My heart really went out to the people who didn’t know how to go after help,” Linda Rowton said. A year and a half after the catastrophe, people would come up to her and ask if she was part of a mission team and then ask how to get their names on the list for help.
Even people who had insurance face hardship as insurance companies sort out whether they were covered, she said. In some cases, homes were insured against wind damage, but the damage to many homes came from slowly rising floodwaters.
On the way out of Mississippi at the end of March, the Rowtons stopped at another Methodist camp, Paul Rowton said. There they went to work on a third home. The home had to be totally stripped because of flood damage, but the owner received only $900 from his insurance carrier for wind damage to the roof.
“How do you separate the water and wind?” Rowton asked. “The wind made the water surge.”
Some places remain without power, they said.
Rowton described one place where an apartment complex is rebuilt but cannot be inhabited because sewer lines are still under repair. The day they left, crews were laying the pipe, allowing Sweet Home Pastor Hall Cutting’s brother-in-law to begin rebuilding his nearby home.
Rebuilding in an area destroyed by a natural disaster may seem foolish to some, Rowton said. “It’s easy to say it’s pretty stupid to build there, but this may never happen again. Of course it may happen next year.”
His point is that the homes along the Gulf Coast in Mississippi destroyed by Katrina had been there since the 1800s. They had weathered storm after storm. Even the next worst storm, Hurricane Camille in the 1960s, was far less destructive. Waters rose 13 feet in that storm, but during Katrina, they rose 27 feet.
The Rowtons have a book on order that shows before and after shots of various locations ravaged by the storm. Just visiting now doesn’t even show the true extent of the disaster, Linda Rowton said. The book begins to show it when it shows lush, green landscapes compared to the desolation left behind after the hurricane dumped saltwater across the coastal region, followed by a drought.
“I didn’t have any idea what it was like,” Paul Rowton said. “I had talked to Larry Johnson and read articles, but you have to see it to understand it. There is no way that pictures can even describe it.”
Linda Rowton said it helps to think of the situation in terms of Sweet Home.
“If you think about one family with a house fire in Sweet Home, the community will rush to your aid.”
In Mississipi, one community was 80 percent destroyed, she said. Jobs are gone. Homes are gone, but mortgages must be paid on those annihilated homes.
“We were kind of in shock for a few days,” she said, and that’s even now where so much has already been cleaned up.
The people in Mississipi are positive though, Paul Rowton said, and they’re grateful.
Linda Rowton called them resilient.
But they still need help. Though it no longer gets the attention it did, they still need volunteers, the Rowtons said, and they want to encourage anyone who can to go and help. They are organizing a second trip for next spring. Anyone interested in joining the Rowtons can contact them at 367-5695 or the church at 367-3073.
Many denominations have work camps throughout the region, Paul Rowton said. If people do not want to travel there with the United Methodist Church, he encourages them to check with their own church and get involved.