There once was a girl named Katrina.
I never met a girl who was meaner.
She blew into town,
Knocked all my #@&* down,
And now I’m left messing with FEMA.
- St. Bernard’s Parish resident

Newspaper and television images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina cannot convey the sheer havoc left behind, according to Jeff Haight, who spent days assessing the damage.

Haight is a Goleta resident and a structural engineer, who donates his professional services in the aftermath of disasters. He spoke recently about arriving in the St. Bernard Parish community of New Orleans following the hurricane disaster.

“The first impression was, the whole parish was a complete ghost town,” he said. “It has a population of 25,000, and they had all left.” Haight said a small tent city erected in New Orleans housed firefighters, sheriffs, the “first responders.”

A partner in the engineering firm of Ehlen Spiess & Haight, he has been doing disaster damage assessments for about 12 years, through the California Governor’s office. He and his team members are trained to go to the sites of major earthquakes, and Katrina was a whole new experience.

“St. Bernard’s Parish, south and east of the city, was the hardest hit,” Haight said. It consists of neighborhoods with such colorful New Orleans names as Araby, Çhalmette and Mireaux.

Although much of the hurricane damage affected poor neighborhoods, mostly black, “St. Bernard’s Parish is middle class and 80 to 90 percent white,” Haight said. "There was nothing but empty houses, damaged buildings. Perhaps one or two per block, there would be someone who came back to remove a household’s possessions.”

Haight was one of a group of 25, the whole thing organized by the state of California. “It was California’s gift to the parish, done through FEMA,” he explained.

The group of 25 broke up into groups of five, and each group received a small map and was told to go out and assess buildings. Among the heavily damaged or destroyed structures were houses, a library, apartments, a school. “We filled out an evaluation form for each one,” Haight said.

The entire parish was under water, much of it to a depth of 12 feet, for five weeks. “TV doesn’t convey” the horror, he said. The aftermath of the hurricane and flooding was a community saturated with polluted water and black mold.

“All the insides of buildings were covered with mold,” Haight said, “even though they had dried out” by the time the assessment groups arrived. One bit of gallows humor, Haight noted, was that their California forms were created to assess earthquake damage, and they had to improvise in filling them out for buildings left behind the storm and flood. One of the assessors brought a computer with him, and created a database into which the team members entered all the data about the damaged structures.

While slogging through the omnipresent mold, Haight and his teammates wore surgical masks, to filter the fetid air. “We were out 9 to 10 hours a day, looking at building,” he said. “We got pretty tired, and our feet were hurting. The bugs weren’t too bad. There was a truck driving up and down the streets, spraying (insecticide) mist. We ran when we saw them coming down the street. We didn’t really believe that the mist was harmless.”

Although he didn’t go inside any houses, Haight said, “I was chased out of a yard by one big dog. He was defending his turf, and hungry. I called SPCA.”

Haight had high praise for the animal welfare group, which operated Camp Lucky for lost and abandoned pets. “We saw dogs and cats running around. We would call the SPCA to rescue them. We also saw many dead animals.”
As first responders, Haight’s group was there to help people get an initial handle on how much damage there was. He said survivors would quickly find out whether or not they were from FEMA. He had the impression that the locals were not impressed with the federal agency. “The general feeling was that everyone had failed,” he said. “There’s enough blame to go around, at FEMA and the state level.”

Back home on the South Coast, Haight has had time to consider what would happen here if there were a disaster of the magnitude of Katrina. “If it’s the real ‘Big One,’ no one can be adequately prepared for that,” he said. But unlike Louisiana, in which building codes were not high, California has a better building standard. “New buildings are reinforced, and should withstand [a quake],” he said. “It shouldn’t be as bad. Louisiana was like a third world country in some ways.”

Haight is married, to Cindy, and they have two daughters. He is adamant that anywhere people are subject to major disasters, they have to plan ahead. “People need to take responsibility for their families. Water, water, water, you can’t have enough water.”

He still remembers the people in St. Bernard’s Parish, and how they are facing a desperately uncertain future.

“They asked us, ‘Will it ever be like it was before the storm?’ Some said, ‘We’ll come back.’ Others said they’re not sure, if they’re retired or have lost their jobs, they may not come back.”

In any event, Haight said, “These people are going to need help for years.”

PHOTO BY JEFF HAIGHT