Spring Break In New Orleans:
Katrina Cleanup Is No Mardi Gras

Penn State and LSU students construct a potting shed at the Pelican Greenhouse in City Park, New Orleans.

While many Penn State students traded in the cold, cloudy March weather of the Northeast for sun and high temperatures during spring break, some added community service to their vacation. A group of fifty students, mostly majoring in the agricultural sciences or engineering, traveled to New Orleans from March 4 to 11 to help with the Hurricane Katrina clean-up effort and restore the town to some of its former glory.

Jenni James, assistant professor of agricultural economics, explains that shortly after the hurricane hit in August 2005, she and two other professors wanted to do something to try to help the rebuilding efforts. “We were just watching the news, and it seemed like nothing was really happening—or nothing was happening fast enough,” she says. “ So we talked about getting some students involved because they have a lot of energy. We thought we could use their energy to help with the cleanup.”

In November, an informational session was held on the University Park campus. Students were invited to learn about the project, and organizers hoped to get an estimate of how many would be interested. “At that meeting, we had expected to have 20 to 30 students show up,” James said. “But, to our surprise, we ended up with a standing-room-only crowd.”

Penn State students do a group cheer after getting their assignments at Guillot’s Nursery in New Orleans.

Kathy Kelley, assistant professor of consumer horticulture, notes that the project eventually was organized into an actual “ class,” but they had to limit participation to 50 students, who had to raise $500 to cover the course fee. “Many of the students found sponsors, such as former employers, to help with the expenses, and we also had a big fund-raiser to help cover costs,” Kelley says.

Their first day in New Orleans, Penn State students helped at Guillot’s Nursery, a local business that was destroyed and on the verge of permanently closing its retail business. The students cleaned the inside of one of the plant houses and repaired the badly damaged building. Because of the students’ help, Guillot’s is staying open. “You would not believe the help they provided—I could not put a dollar figure on it,” says owner Bobby Guillot. “ It would have taken between six months and three years for me to do it alone.”

The interior of the Pelican Greenhouse, shown before Penn State students got to work (top), and after students cleared the facility of tons of debris (bottom).

In the following days, the group renovated the Botanical Gardens and Pelican Greenhouse at City Park and citrus groves in Plaquemines Parish. In the garden, the plants had died from being submerged under three feet of water for weeks. The students prepared the gardens for up-coming weddings by replanting Japanese yews and cleaned and moved plants in the citrus groves to ready them for retail sale.

After seeing the damage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on the news, project participant Nathan Niehls, a senior majoring in agribusiness management, was planning to go and help even before the Penn State class was organized. “I had never been to New Orleans, but I knew it was my time to pitch in,” he says. “Anything that we can do helps us to grow and to learn.”

Matt Ventrella, a senior majoring in agribusiness management, got tremendous satisfaction out of helping New Orleans–area businesses get on their feet. “Some of the students who went were so emotionally moved by the experience that they are in the process of planning another trip to New Orleans for the relief effort,” he says. “We saw how the trip affected so many people and there is still so much more to be done.”

The final project, gutting the house of a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee and her husband, was the most emotional service the students had to provide. “I had fun, but it was hard cleaning up people’s lives,” says Erik Carson, a junior majoring in horticulture.

He was affected most by the destroyed houses. “Everything was in disarray—covered in mold and black slime,” he says. “The ceiling fans looked like drooping tulips and there was nothing usable left. I will never forget the eerie feeling I got from the houses.”

Carson said the streets were covered with junk that was either hauled out of soggy houses or deposited by the hurricane. Ventrella recalls the overwhelming bad, moldy smell that hit them when they entered houses, many of which had been lifted off their foundations by flooding.

Ventrella believes it was harder to clean the houses than the groves, garden, and greenhouses because the students saw personal belongings reminding them that people lived in these houses before Hurricane Katrina. Some students became too emotional to even enter the houses, remembers David Goheen, a junior majoring in agribusiness management.

“What affected me most were the houses with holes in the roofs from people cutting their way out to avoid drowning,” he says. “The lack of people cleaning up their lives in New Orleans was also a shock. We drove in a bus for over an hour, and we couldn’t count more than twenty people—there was hardly anyone there. I expected to see hundreds of people ferociously working, but all we saw was desolation, empty streets, dusty cars. Just silence.”

Mike Hess, a freshman majoring in agricultural and extension education, removes damaged plastic roofi ng material from a shade structure at Guillot’s Nursery).

Max Schexnayder, hurricane coordinator for the Louisiana State University Ag Center, points out that the students provided much-needed people-power at a time when help was hard to find because of the lack of housing in the area. “There is just no labor to be had right now,” he says. “You can’t buy labor even if you wanted to. It’s just not available.”

Goheen admits his outlook on life was drastically changed by the trip, and he plans to go back some day. “Someone needs to help those people and I don’t think they will get the help they need from the government,” he says.

The Penn State students felt their work didn’t put a dent into what needs to be done, but the reactions from people they helped made the trip worthwhile. “I hate calling it an experience, but there is no other way to describe it,” Carson says.

The students also had a little bit of time to enjoy other parts of the city that were relatively unscathed by the storm and to enjoy each other’s company. “But when there was free time, most students stayed in the India House Hostel because they were exhausted from the day’s work and there wasn’t much to do in the devastated city,” Ventrella says. "We were sort of forced to meet people to pass the time, but everyone was surprisingly nice to one another. I definitely made fifty new friends.”

— Bethany Fehligner