Time Lapse Video of a Katrina-Damaged Home Tear Down and Rebuild

• Jerse
  March 28th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

  Last March - me, a bunch of people from my school, and people from Rutgers went down to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans to do some relief work after Hurricane Katrina. It took about 20 of us a whole week just to “gut” the inside of one house.

  “Gutting” is ripping down all the moldy walls and sheet rock, removing water-damaged furniture, and clothes, and mattresses, and refrigerators (which was the worst smell you could possibly imagine), then putting all of the garbage and debris on the side of the road, and taking out every nail until just the wooden skeleton was visible.

  And that was just the first part of the process too. They still had to rebuild the inside of the house, install new plumbing, electricity, windows, doors and roofs…

  So just think of the manpower it will take to rebuild the entire city of New Orleans - it took 20 people 7 days just to clean out the inside of one house…

  It will take thousands and thousands of volunteers and at least a decade to get things back to normal again…

• Christophe
  March 28th, 2008 at 11:07 pm

  I notice that they have now a concrete first floor. Is New Orleans’s future linked to Ganvié, Benin?

• Brad
  March 29th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

  I live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where the wind and water damage was worst for Hurricane Katrina. There are a fair number of “Katrina Cottages” being used all over the Coast now. These are prefabricated houses that might be a viable alternative for New Orleans. They are not as large or fancy as the prefab shown in the video; but, they are inexpensive and easy to put on a lot.

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