Pearl River and the New Orleans Area in October, 2005

From Wednesday, October 5 through Saturday October 8, students and faculty were allowed onto the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary campus to examine their houses or dorm rooms to see what might be salvagable after the flooding of Hurricane Katrina. Jeff had to be on the campus for counseling of those who came.

They were checked onto the campus during this period and then the campus was closed and turned over to the contractors with an anticipated reopening date in August of 2006.

Volunteers walk past pallets of shingles and other building materials that are in place for the work of the repair contractors. Emergency roof repairs have already been made at this time, but more roof repair and the enormous task of rebuilding of the insides of the buildings is ahead.

On October 7, these NOBTS security personnel along with the National Gaurd were providing security for the campus as students, faculty and cleanup volunteers were allowed on campus.

All of the faculty house on the campus were flooded. You could see debris and evidence of flooding on the outside, but it did not prepare you for what you found on the inside. On October 9, volunteer teams were working in houses to remove furniture and start the process of removing sheetrock. This was the kind of heartbreaking sight the cleanup volunteers found in the faculty houses on the NOBTS campus. These were new houses, built during the past two years.

Such was the fate of a seminary professors home library. Most modern furniture disintegrates when submerged in six feet of water, and the books just got distributed in a layer on t he floor.

Besides floor-to-ceiling black mold, the water damaged door a nd wall structures. In this case, even the ceiling sheetrock will have to be removed.

Traveling with one of the mission groups on October 9, Jeff was on the way home via the Highway 11 bridge route when they encountered these two large shrimp boats on the higway some distance from the canal on which they were berthed when the storm hit.

Crossing the Hwy 11 bridge across Lake Ponchartrain near sunset, they got this view of one of the cranes being used to repair the twinspan bridge across the east end of the lake to Slidell. The cranes picked up sections from one span to replace missing spans in the other to get one side of the bridge open to traffic.

October 26. The staff of the Northshore Church out on a tree-cutting mission. Jeff, Pastor Larry McEwen, and Music Minister Andrew with some of the trees trees they had been cutting. The process with the huge oak trees was greatly enhanced when they obtained the 30" Shindawa chainsaw that Jeff is holding.

Another location for the Northshore tree-cutting crew shows Larry, Associate Pastor Jay Victory on the Bobcat and Jeff. Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola provided the Bobcat for them, which helped greatly in tree clearing.