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Topic: Upload your random pictures (part 2)
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 10-07-2005 01:46 AM
Tarps are gold after a hurricane, because with parts of the roof gone, rain can get in & quickly cause damage that will result in having to raze the building. The best, if you can get them, are from billboard companies: billboards now are mostly digitally printed on heavy vinyl sheets that are now known to be excellent, sturdy tarps, better than hardware store tarps! So let's mooch a van, & load it with about 30 14x40 outdated-billboard tarps otherwise marked for disposal by the outdoor sign company. Look at the tires bulge & squat now! It's riding on the sidewalls, & handles at speeds over 35 mph like a pat of butter on a hot skillet! Wooo-hoo, let's go!
Let's drive through coastal Long Beach, MS to visit my friend Leo.
I always thought Leo was smarter than me, but he sent his family to Kentucky & stayed at his house 4 blocks from the beach during the hurricane. Everything in front of his house, down to the beach, was completely smashed. he now owns beachfront property. There's a good picture of Long Beach on TerraServer; what looks the separate path of a tornado running down the center is actually the frontier of the storm surge pushing the debris which once was all the construction atop the stripped foundations to the right. It stopped right at the road in front of Leo's house. They've only just bulldozed the roads, & have not yet been able to pull from the debris the bodies of the people Leo has listed as staying in the houses that were in front of him.
Lost your chimney & some roof? Want some tarps, Leo? Here, take a couple more in case somebody nearby needs one.
Bye, Leo! Love ya like a brother, but now everybody who knows you stayed knows you're a dumbass! Every cell, every molecule in your body is just et up with dumbass! If your storage sheds hadn't been cast to the winds, I would stop by to get one of your Simplex pedestals to beat you with.
The interstate over Pontchartrain has been destroyed, but coastal Hwy 90 is reported passable to New Orleans, but the coastal bridge to Bay St. Louis is destroyed. So it's up to the interstate, then back down towards Bay St. Louis to get on 90. Heading west, we find that today they've opened a bridge for repairs, so now 90 won't go into New Orleans. The folks wave us on northbound roads back up to the interstate again, picking a route through roads that have been cleared enough to let a car through. The inland MS coastal cities west of Bay St. Louis aren't even recognizable as places where there was once civilization: it looks like somebody put a bunch of houses & trees in a blender & just troweled it down for miles. It's nonsensical: no houses are standing, but there are people here & there. There's a huge school that someone's cleared around with a tractor, a marquee tent is up, & a couple hundred people are there, like druids that come out of the forests to assemble or something. I don't take any pictures, because it feels like taking tourist photographs at a funeral. It's like nothing I'll see anywhere else.
Back to the interstate, through smashed & sodden Slidell, onto the old Hwy 11 bridge across Pontchartrain! My, the traffic is light; it's just me! On the other side is a military checkpoint: Nobody is allowed into New Orleans except the screwdriver people, the media people, & the people who shoot everybody who isn't one of the above. Let's not to take these guys' picture.
Down Hwy 11 to Hwy 90, then back up to the interstate, & into New Orleans! Off on Canal Street, another checkpoint, Show Us Your Papers, get out, everyone who enters must have a hepatitis & tetanus booster shot. The military guy says sign here, picks up a syringe, I ask "Do you have grape?", he says "Sir?", "Uh do you have grape, or are they all the same?", "They're all the same sir", "Uh, okay". Matinee audiences are always tough.
They have done a LOT of work in the six days since the hurricane: almost all the debris downtown has been removed. It looks like their plants are drooping though; maybe if they watered them they would perk back up. A couple of the larger, least damaged hotels have been patched up & powered up to house the screwdriver people & the media people. However, I know a couple of more exclusive places with 4 or 5 floors of rooms where I can stay.
SUV's whiz by every now & then. An SUV with an "Animal Rescue" magnetic & Tennessee tag goes by, then comes back again the other way, then comes back up another street, & finally slows down to ask, "Excuse me, where is Rampart Street?" "That's Rampart Street." "That?" "Yes, that." "Well, where is Basin Street?" "There is Basin Street, that is Rampart, this is Canal." "Ummm, okay." Off they go.
New Orleans is never easy to get around in for new people; the streets change names at Canal, outside of downtown the streets follow the river instead of a grid, people become very disoriented, & I notice that the storm has rotated all the street signs 90 degrees.
Canal is identified as Rampart, Rampart is identified as Canal, Basin is now Canal, round & round adding to the whimsy! I feel a little sorry for the Animal Rescue people though because I feel a sort of kinship: I have just been performing Alphabetical Rescue, pulling out a massive clot of plastic marquee letters & 6' plastic shelving units that have floated up & jammed the entry to a mechanical room.
The hardest part here will be figuring out where to start fixing things:
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 10-10-2005 02:48 AM
Yay, the lantern is still on top of the Hibernia Bank building
Notice the fun continues with the street signs, as Canal Street is now Camp Street, & vice versa. All these people rushing around in SUV's, with maps spread out over the dashboards...
I just like this building. I like taking pictures of it.
The Joy is for sale. Won't someone buy the Joy? It's a beautiful theatre inside, & the outside when its neon & chasing incandescents are lighted is spectacular at night - it just screams "HERE'S A BIG OLD HOLLYWOOD MOVIE INSIDE!" The Joy's roof had no damage, but like everything else, it's full of water to the sidewalk. The theatres have 12'-15' basements, & the auditoriums are excavated.
Pumping at the Orpheum! That's 2 diesel pumps (one behind the other) pumping for 3 days, 7am to 4pm, to empty the basement at the Orpheum. It's important to get the water out as soon as possible: the electrical service entrance for all the buildings is in the basement, usually adjacent to a transformer vault beneath the sidewalk. Especially important for the theatres is the huge problem with the humidity while the water is in...& after the water is removed. The humidity gets in the drapes, the drapes become very heavy, & in a couple of the theatres, the weight of the drapes with the added humidity has caused them to start to tear horizontally. Even after the water gets out, it's still humid, but then the power can be turned on (when the power company gets this far up Canal Street) & the AC units can be turned on to help drive out the humidity. But for now, the only electricity is in just a couple of blocks down toward the foot of Canal Street. The power company guys (Entergy, plus trucks from Con Ed, etc.) are busy sending folks out who are pumping out manholes, transformer vaults, etc. before the wire-twisting guys can even start in to work.
State Palace still standing, too. Flooded basement, roof damage, some windows (and steel casements) blown out, and the external fire doors from the pipe chambers (& the above blower room) blown out too. The State Palace is luckier in that, even though it has an excavated floor, all the seats on the floor forward of the balcony rail have been removed for the theatre's festival seating/dance floor/mosh pit configuration.
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 10-11-2005 04:16 AM
Oh, no, the hurricane blew out the panels from the vertical sign on the Basin Street side!
OH NO, the hurricane also blew out the panels from the marquee on Canal Street! Unbelievably, they are found neatly stacked inside! The only thing we can figure is that the hurricane blew out the panels from all the marquees, then when the flooding came, they all washed into the building somehow! STRANGE THINGS happen during the hurricanes!
The Saenger is lucky in that it was in the middle of a summer renovation project, & all the seats on the floor were out when Canal Street flooded. Very unluckily, though, a new roof was being put on when the hurricane came: the whole roof is bare to the flapping tarpaper & broken sheathing. Leak, leak, pour. A front door is broken out, unquestionably where the looters tried to get in & steal the panels from the marquees.
The basement of the Saenger, as seen through the sidewalk elevator. The water's already down, but it's still about 8 - 10 feet deep -- all through the block-wide basement. That's the elevator itself; it's tall enough to stand up in below the top of the water.
A contractor friend who was overseeing a lot of other work at different sites came by to talk. Besides the immediate problems associated with the floodwater like humidity in the building, soaking all the equipment in the basements (the main AC units, boilers, etc. are down there, & anything with a motor down there will need the motor replaced or rebuilt), entering conduits, etc., the water itself is bad. The water in the basements is floodwater from the breaking of the levees, which also had an associated sewer failure. It is contaminated with E. coli, other bacteria & parasites, petroleum products, etc. We are told that its technical name is "The Poo-Poo Water". Anything that has been in The Poo-Poo Water must be cleaned & sanitized before anyone can touch it. The same for the surfaces down there. Chemical-resistant gloves must be worn, & if by accident your hands come in contact with The Poo-Poo Water, they must be immediately washed with antibacterial soap & bottled water, then washed with hand sanitizer or bleach followed by a rinse of bottled water. If The Poo-Poo Water gets in a scratch, under the cuticles, or if you rub your eyes, lightning-fast infection results. Lots of bleach is around. Washing gloves after a day results in little bleach splashes on clothes, etc. You never get it all out, & you get caustic burns when you put the gloves back on & work for a while. Respirators must be worn because of mold & contaminants in the air. Freakin respirators!
Let's walk down Canal Street & see what's going on!
Nobody here but the screwdriver people & some media people. All the screwdriver people are busy, busy, busy doing different things, but they've all been told the same thing "Just jack that mother up & make it work!"
Here's a nice collection of the regular guys. Generator, portable Air conditioning unit, Dehumidifier. After a building's basement has its water pumped out, the dehumidifier pumps air dried by heating it to ~140 deg. F into the building. After it's dried out, if the building doesn't have commercial power, the external AC is pumped into the building. AC units have been blasting away for days at stores selling furs, etc., & for some reason a store selling children's clothes. Maybe they've got some kinda biological collection in there too; it seems like the cost of the AC unit for days would be more than just writing off the stock. Buildings are mainly dehumidified & AC'd ASAP to stop mold growth.
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