Two days after Hurricane Katrina left Louisiana’s St. Tammany Parish a demolished landscape of blocked roads and shattered trees, Waylon Bailey was feeling the full weight of the disaster.
That’s when a huge yellow trailer — a mobile kitchen dispatched from a Southern Baptist disaster relief staging center 175 miles distant — set up in the parking lot of Bailey’s Covington, La., church and begin churning out thousands of hot meals per day.
Three days later — five days after the storm — additional Southern Baptist volunteers from Arkansas, Georgia and Missouri ringed New Orleans with three more mobile kitchens. From each, scores of volunteers turned out thousands of hot meals a day for relief workers and homeowners still stunned by the storm’s aftermath.
In the weeks since, Southern Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans and hundreds of volunteers unaffiliated with churches have poured tens of millions of dollars in private relief and volunteer labor into New Orleans.
Sometimes sleeping in borrowed churches, volunteers deploy daily to prepare food, spread tarpaulins over damaged roofs, saw trees off homes or rip out sodden wallboard. Others hand out cleaning kits, distribute debit cards for gas and goods or provide a prayer partner or a shoulder to lean on.
Meanwhile officials in their relief agencies are making long-term plans.
Various denominations are expanding networks of social services to help storm victims with medical, housing and other needs for years to come.
The current effort, many church relief officials said, dwarfs any previous faith-based domestic relief effort in memory. Southern Baptist mobile kitchens had served 11.9 million meals as of press time, more than four times the previous records set in the Sept. 11 recovery and after last year’s cluster of Florida hurricanes, said Bob Reccord, president of the North American Mission Board, which coordinates Southern Baptist disaster relief.
In the weeks since Katrina, Second Harvesters, a quasi-independent food bank operating under the Archdiocese of New Orleans, has distributed 20 million pounds of food across coastal Louisiana. That compares with 14 million for all of last year, spokeswoman Jenny Rodgers said.
Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod have raised $20 million, said Katherine Kerr of Lutheran Social Services of the South.
Because the relief efforts are autonomous, not even the federal government has an estimate of their value yet, although the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives hopes to develop one soon.
For the present, however, “It’s impossible to describe the wave of compassion that swept through the Gulf region after Katrina,” said Jim Towey, the office’s director. He called the work “historic and heroic.”
In the world of church-based disaster recovery, the initial months after Katrina represent only the middle of the first chapter in what will be a long-running story.
Disaster planners survey the aftermath of a major disaster in two parts: immediate relief, including securing damaged homes, providing food and short-term financial help; and long-term recovery, including replacing lost housing, job retraining and addressing other residual deficits.
“We could be six months here,” said Charlie Hutto, a retired utility company engineer from Ruston supervising a Southern Baptist mobile cooking unit based near Lakeview.
As a result, the Salvation Army has purchased a warehouse in La Place to store food for its massive distribution program. “That’s a three-year commitment,” spokeswoman Capt. Deb Osborn said.
Much of that food goes to the sprawling supply depot in the parking lot of First Baptist Church, New Orleans, where Southern Baptist volunteers cook and load 9,000 hot meals a day onto Salvation Army canteen trucks circulating in New Orleans. More goes into cars that line up to collect meals.
At First, New Orleans, forklifts rumble among eight semitrailers loaded with food and paper products. Pallets are stacked high with shrink-wrapped canned chili, soup, peaches, red beans and soft drinks.
After years of cooperating in disaster relief, some denominations have developed complementary areas of expertise. Southern Baptists are early shock troops, disaster experts say. They cook for the Salvation Army and Red Cross, spread trained chain saw teams throughout neighborhoods and lately have begun to develop “mud-out” teams that sanitize flooded homes.
Other denominations, such as Seventh-day Adventists, are known for their distribution of goods such as clothing. Mennonites, Lutherans and members of the Christian Reformed Church in North America are accomplished volunteer builders, while Methodists and Catholics excel at long-term case management, experts say.
(RNS)
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