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# Remote control: Hitting the road to help
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/remote-control-hitting-the-road-to-help/
- Published: 2005-10-13T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T07:56:52.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: local, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By JENNIFER NORRIS Special to the Daily Press*

I got an early start to my day, knowing that it would be a long and hot one. I have been in Louisiana for just over a week now and still the humidity is overwhelming.

After swinging past the Healing Place Annex in Baton Rouge, headquarters for a local church coalition assisting with the relief effort, I learned my destination for the day — St. Bernard Parish, one of the areas worst hit by Hurricane Katrina and flooded again after Hurricane Rita.

I found myself morbidly excited to see post-hurricane New Orleans.

I work for Relief International, a Los Angeles-based, humanitarian aid agency. While we deployed teams to Baton Rouge within days of Hurricane Katrina, I only arrived just in time for Hurricane Rita. Our niche in the hurricane relief effort has been our Mobile Distribution Units, trucks and trailers loaded with relief supplies specifically requested by shelters and people in remote areas who do not have access or transportation to Red Cross shelters or other relief supply distribution sites.

The request from St. Bernard Parish was urgent — bring water and relief supplies as quickly as possible.

Before leaving Baton Rouge where RI has set up its base of operations, I rendezvoused with my volunteer-sidekick for the day — Shirley, a Ph.D. student from Indiana in town visiting friends. Having loaded my truck and trailer to capacity with supplies, we jumped onto the I-10 and headed east towards New Orleans.

For more than an hour, Shirley and I drove through the bayous of southeastern Louisiana. While we were anxious to see New Orleans for ourselves, we didn’t know what we would find once we got to St. Bernard Parish — or if we would even be able to get in at all as there is still a strict curfew throughout the city and armed National Guard checkpoints at every exit.

After passing Kenner, 10 miles outside of the city, the scenery took a drastic change for the worse and from that point on, we drove through miles of devastation and ghost towns.

As the I-10 freeway merged into the 510 freeway, we crossed a bridge that over-looked both the ports and parishes of New Orleans. As the traffic eerily dissipated, we got out first glimpses at the devastation in New Orleans that even the national media coverage couldn’t fully capture.

Refrigerators and lawn furniture were strewn along the side of the freeway, vehicles were buried up to their doors in toxic muck, train cars were blown off their tracks, trees and power lines lie in tangled webs across streets, and apartment complexes and neighborhoods looked more like black and white photographs due to the ashy-colored residue that spared nothing.

The once bustling city looked more like something from the set of a movie than the surreal reality of the situation. The water was gone, but the stains it left and the havoc it wreaked remained. Shirley and I drove on in silence.

As the 610 Freeway became Paris Road, the putrid smell that permeated our truck even with the windows rolled up forewarned of the disaster zone we were entering — St. Bernard Parish.

We arrived in Arabi, a small, semi-primitive fishing town turned inside out by back to back hurricanes. Nothing was in its proper place — shrimp boats were belly-up in the middle of marshes and cars were upside down in harbors; trees protruded from holes torn in the side of homes and portable sheds littered the sidewalks.

Flashbacks of people stranded on their rooftops came to mind as we noticed the holes people had cut through their roofs in order to escape the rising flood waters in their homes.

Our destination was a relief staging area on the corner of Paris Road and Judge Perez Drive. We pulled into what was left of a gas station to ask directions from the driver of an emergency vehicle; the gas station itself providing nothing more than shade from the sun as the convenient mart had been looted and the pumps destroyed. Ironically, the street we were looking for was directly in front of us — but with the traffic signals dangling precariously and the street signs completely blown away, we would have had no idea.

Shirley and I crossed the street and pulled into the parking lot of what used to be a Walgreen’s. Huge tents had been erected to provide protection from the sun, but rendered minimal relief from the heat and stench.

Clustered in the shade around a their hot lunches and chilled bottles of water, an eclectic mix of policemen, Humane Society staff, relief workers, and smiling volunteers mingled with citizens of Arabi who had come back to salvage whatever was left of their homes.

Most would go home empty handed. One by one, with dazed looks on their faces, they trudged under the tent, their dirty faces streaked from both sweat and tears.

In a perfunctory manner, Shirley and I, as well as the volunteer teams, unloaded our truck and trailer. As quickly as we set the supplies down, crews of relief teams loaded them into their vehicles. From here, the supplies were taken into the surrounding neighborhoods and distributed to people as they worked beyond exhaustion to clean or collect what little was left of their homes after the storms.

As we made our way out of town, the only people we saw were heavy equipment operators, National Guard troops bunched in the shade like African plain animals, volunteers wearing their uniformly colored shirts and nomadic people ambling around what used to be their neighborhoods and homes.

On our route home, we stayed on the 10 West. As we wound our way through downtown New Orleans, we caught glimpses of the Superdome, the French Quarter and above-ground cemeteries, all bearing the stains of the polluted water that deluged the city. The deserted boats still tethered to the power poles along the interstate a testament to how high the water rose.

The citizens of Arabi represent only one community and there are many others like it. The clean-up effort has only just begun — but it is beginning. The locals I met are strong and determined people, merely knocked down by the hurricane, but by no means knocked out. Life is returning to this area. And I was thrilled to have been part of the relief effort. (Jennifer Norris is communications and public relations officer for Relief International-Schools Online, located in Los Angeles.)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/101305-18_01.jpg)

to the Daily Press DOWN, NOT OUT: Despite being belted by hurricanes, people in the Gulf are staying strong. (Photo: Jennifer Norris/Special)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 13, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/101305.pdf?ref=smdp.com)