After Katrina, a pool table is a bed, mattresses are boats
In devastated Chalmette, La., at Lehrmann’s bar and seafood restaurant just across the street from a refinery, pool tables were converted to beds for those who lost their homes but refused to leave flooded St. Bernard’s parish.
In New Orleans, mattresses became life rafts and plastic storage bins were floating baby strollers.
Without electricity and running on sheer adrenaline, survivors of Katrina quickly learned that making do meant making use, in an entirely different way, of whatever was at hand.
Their improvisations serve as valuable lessons — and testaments to the human spirit and adaptability. A baby can be delivered by the illumination of a single flashlight. A raft of two-by-fours can be a funeral barge. Anti-bacterial dishwashing liquid can clean your dentures. And an exotic dancer’s garter belt can become a headband.
“That’s called the ingenuity of survivors,” said Joanna Dubreuil, standing outside what used to be Waffles Plus restaurant in Bay St. Louis, Miss., a gulf-front town that is basically gone. Her sons had just secured a length of pipe to an erupting artesian well, creating a blessed outdoor shower in the middle of widespread wreckage.
In New Orleans’ French Quarter, where flooding was comparatively minimal but running water nonexistent, personal hygiene took a great deal of improvising. Carolyn Krack, 76, used dishwashing liquid to brush her dentures.
Ron Seitzer, 61, took up residence on the roof of Chris Owens’ transvestite cabaret on Bourbon Street. Just outside the quarter, in the Mississippi River, he joined others who came to wash their clothes, their cookware, and themselves.
His detergent was a mix of dish soap and “cool ocean scent” floor cleaner. “I feel sort of bad that it’s going to be going into the river,” he said. “But I’m sure there are a lot worse things at this point.”
After Katrina, even death required improvising. In New Orleans, a woman’s body lay outside for days. Eventually, bricks were stacked to form a makeshift grave. A bedsheet became a tombstone. “Here Lies Vera,” it said. “God Help Us.”
Xavier Bowie died while his common-law wife was out looking for help. No one would come get his body, so Evelyn Turner wrapped a sheet around him and floated him down to the main road on a raft of two-by-fours. A truck finally stopped and its driver was persuaded to carry Turner and her dead companion to Charity Hospital.
There, doctors had enlisted bystanders and relatives to squeeze portable air bags for patients — a demanding and tedious job — who had been on ventilators that gave out when the generators died. Boats became gurneys, transporting the sick out of the damaged hospital. “The patients were being treated with not even what you’d have in a field hospital,” said Dr. L. Lee Hamm.
At University Hospital, in a dark and airless third-floor room, Dr. Stacey Holman held a flashlight while her colleague delivered a baby. The mother couldn’t have epidural anesthesia because there was no power.
Ferries became giant relief rafts. In Chalmette, would-be evacuees waited in a storm, wearing garbage bags as rain ponchos. Standing in line, exotic dancer Cortny Elder, 24, used her garter belt to hold back her hair.
On Canal Street, in the heart of New Orleans’ central business district, relief workers who had journeyed from cities across the country — to improvise everything from meals to housing to rescues — found they had to improvise again when they had nowhere to turn for church.
So volunteers stood in the bed of a pickup truck, took up a bullhorn and led about 100 worshippers in prayer.
“We want to thank you for bringing peace and love and hope to this community,” said one.
On the fringes of downtown Dallas, at the Decker Detention Center, a minimum-security prison, 750 inmates were removed so the dispossessed of Hurricane Katrina could have a place to sleep. The refugees also got new clothes to wear, with “PRISONER” running down the leg of loose-fitting pants and “Dallas County Jail” printed across the back of shirts.
Some weren’t so appreciative, even though a county sheriff’s spokesman insisted authorities were doing all they could to make it feel like home. Computers with Internet access were brought in. Phone calls were free. “We don’t want them to feel like it’s a jail,” said Sgt. Don Peritz.
Which is much easier to say when one doesn’t have to sleep there.
“Why we got to stay in a prison cell?” asked 38-year-old Norris Gullo, a New Orleans construction worker. “Why we getting strung out like this?”
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Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed, Marilynn Marchione, Erin McClam, Matt Sedensky and Vicki Smith contributed to this story from Louisiana and Mississippi.