October 3rd, 2005
Here’s an e-mail I received today from my friend (and fellow groomsman) Paul, whom I last saw at a Toronto youth hostel. You never know what you’ll find when you open an e-mail…
hello friends… paul here in new orleans. finally found public internet at a local library. i’ll be brief. i’m down here documenting my friend’s (sol) demolition business. I helped drive the convoy out from colorado- 11 vehicles including a mack, a peterbuilt and several diesel trucks with camper trailers. we started with about 15 guys in colorado and now have about 50. some migrant workers we picked up in amarillo, texas and about 20 brazilians came and met us from florida. It’s quite a multi-ethnic affair. hondurans, mexicans, and brazillians all camped out in a torn down school in a black neighborhood in slidell, la. A lot of the disaster footage on the news was in slidell. i’ve never seen any kind of destruction like this. entire blocks have been leveled. if any homes are left standing, they are most likely without windows. every home seems to have the entire contents of the house (furniture, clothes..) on the front yard. i went to do laundry this morning and had to wait over three hours to get a machine. the best meal i’ve had since i left colorado was from, strangely, the red cross. there are some fast food places open but the red cross meals aren’t all that bad and neither are the MREs (they even have vegetarian MREs). the destruction has displaced and destroyed a lot of people here but has also opened up a window of oppurtunity for contractors, construction, demolition, laborers, etc. unfortunately most of these people oppurtunizing off of the chaos are not local. on the highways in from mississippi every other vehicle on the road was a semi or some kind of commercial diesel vehicle. today i’m headed into new orleans on the recently opened causeway toll bridge. i’ll keep y’all posted.