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LSU is an hour away from New Orleans, but the campus has been completely transformed. The gymnasium has been turned into a triage. Helicopters land on the track and field area. The basketball stadium is now a hospital and morgue. Students getting ready for class mix with the Army, Red Cross and FEMA. Police are everywhere.
A day or two before classes began, it felt like the calm before the storm. It was like everyone was waiting for something to happen, and I think the students were anxious to see how they were going to manage going to class in the middle of all this chaos.
But while LSU is a staging ground for emergency workers, it's also a place for students to pitch in. We come into contact with a senior named Michelle. She's the student body president, and a couple of days after the hurricane, she set up a hotline so that students could call and volunteer in whatever capacity they could. She set it up at 8 a.m. and by 4 p.m., there were 500 volunteers — all students. We walk into what is normally kind of a business-school lab, and you see dozens of LSU students taking calls and answering questions. "Hey, I got an apartment off-campus, and I've got an extra bedroom and it's available. So if someone needs a bed, I got it."
It's a very personal project for Michelle because her family has been evacuated. Her younger sister, who's a freshman, is running around between the field house and manning the phones. Her mother is also on the phone, and so is her cousin, who is in high school. The whole family is living at a friend's house just outside the campus, and in the meantime they're all pitching in.
There are so many students volunteering in one way or another. We get in touch with Carl Senner, who is starting his sophomore year at LSU. He's like a Louisiana poster boy: he's got this big, four-wheel monster truck and goes hunting and fishing with his dad. His family has this airboat that skims across the surface of water; when they heard that relief workers were looking for individuals who had these boats, without any hesitation they volunteered. I don't think they knew what they were getting themselves into, they just knew that they had to do something.
We get a call from Carl and his brother Ralph, and they're like, "We're leaving now." I put some toothpaste in my mouth and run out, and we meet them at their house. They're going to go out and launch this boat into the water right outside New Orleans for whatever mission they're being assigned to.
The day before, they had gone really deep into New Orleans, where people were still stranded. It's difficult for Carl and his dad to talk about. Carl had never seen a dead body before. He'd been to his grandmother's funeral, but to see bodies in the water that had been there for a week ... they are very hesitant to go out the next day again. But they do. Before we leave, Carl's mom yells out, "If you hear any gunfire, duck!" And I'm like, "Oh, this is not going to be good."
We go out on the I-10 and run into this group of police officers that are in motorboats and rowboats, trying to get into homes. They can't — the water is too shallow for their boats — but we can. Carl and Ralph have a conversation with this police officer who had just come from the Superdome; he was on duty protecting that area and left to come see the state of his house. He's got his rifle, he's a tough guy, but he asks Ralph and Carl if they would mind taking him to his house. We launch off from this area, and he's very quiet.
It looks like somebody dumped a lake onto a city. You have absolutely no idea what it feels like to be on a boat going over cars in what used to be a parking lot. All you see around you are little tips of houses that are completely submerged. You can't believe that this is a neighborhood. This is where people lived. This is a supermarket, this is a parking lot, this is the DMV, and you are going over it in a boat.
We start to head out to the cop's house. It's very loud, and I ask, "How does it feel to see your neighborhood like this?" He screams, "Closure! I need closure!" I finally understand. We pass by this house, and he points. It's his sister's house. I will always have the image of this cop in his dark sunglasses as his face crumples. That was the first time I understood that this was a personal tragedy.
We finally get to his house, which is kind of like a condo. It isn't submerged. He gets off the boat ... I think we'll be waiting there for a while, that he will go in to save some of the stuff, but he comes out within a minute. Just goes in, turns around and walks out.
He gets back in the boat and he's speechless. He wants to go back. He doesn't want to see any more. We head back to where the cars are, and we pass by this area near where we were, and this man comes up. He doesn't have any shoes on, and his legs are completely covered in cuts and bruises. Ralph says, "You wanna take care of those cuts." This water is so toxic — it's a huge soup bowl of debris, dead animals, waste, and it's sitting in the hot Louisiana sun. It's so hot and humid ... you can't describe the smell. And this man is walking around in this water with no shoes on.
Carl's father says he was talking with his friend, who is a doctor, and he said the people that were still in this water are probably not going to make it even if they get rescued, because the water is filled with so much disease and bacteria. You can't see what's in the water because it's black with junk. So as you're traveling, you just hope that you don't pass something that's gonna tip the boat over. We pass over a concrete step, which we didn't see coming, and the boat tips on its side and comes crashing down. For a second, I'm thinking, "SuChin, just don't swallow the water if you go in."
You think, "Well this is it, this is how it's gonna go down." And it's these moments when you wonder why people are volunteering. Why would Carl and his dad put their lives in danger? Carl's never volunteered for anything in his life. But him and his dad, this is what they can do — go out and help people on the smallest level. The policeman just wanted to go see where his house was. That's it. Nothing huge. Nothing life-changing. But for this man, it meant the world to him that this father and son would take him out on their boat to see what was left of his life.
We meet up with Jen, assistant editor of the LSU school newspaper. Her family was evacuated from the hardest-hit parish in New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish. They're staying at her boyfriend's apartment, which normally has three guys living in it — her grandmother, grandfather, three aunts, a cousin and her cousin's family.
I walk in. It's really dark and crowded with sleeping bags, pillows and mattresses. Grandma, aunts and uncles are piled into this tiny living room, waiting for news on what happened to their homes. You can tell that for the past couple of days, this entire family, all they've been doing is just crying. What is there left to do? They can't plan for the future because there's no future yet. They're in shock.
I become most emotional with the grandfather. He's probably seen everything but doesn't have words anymore. He went through the Korean War, and now there's three generations of his family living in a student apartment. He leaves at one point and brings out this blanket Jen's mother made for he and his wife's 50th anniversary. It's a quilt with pictures of everyone in the family. He really wants to show us; it's the only photograph they saved from the house. He opens it up and is shaking. I look over at Jen's boyfriend, and he's just this college senior who probably a week ago was thinking about school starting and what parties he was gonna go to.
They're so emotional about the fact that every one of their family members is accounted for. These people have no idea if they'll ever get back to any sort of normalcy. These are grandparents that just want to live the rest of their lives out in peace with their grandkids. And now there's nothing. They have to start all over again, but how? Grandparents aren't supposed to start their lives over again.
As I walk out of that house, there's great sadness. But there's hope because the most important thing is that they have each other. And that's enough to build on.
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Photo: MTV News
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