A habit of helping

Local church lends a hand in New Orleans over Spring Break
Hurricanes can leave devastation that takes years to repair, and the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is a prime example. Complete neighborhoods must be built from the ground up and it takes many hands to do the work.

Members of Crystal Lake Baptist Church of Leander have a habit of helping. Seven members spent a week of March in New Orleans helping to build a neighborhood of new homes in the Upper Ninth Ward. Several members of the team from Leander have significant building experience.

Richard Vickers, who is on staff at the Leander church, spearheaded the group along with another group from First Baptist Church in Salado.

“I went because I wanted to help the displaced people of New Orleans after Katrina,” said Vickers. “We have lived there and my wife and I both went to seminary there. Our daughter who was living there when Katrina hit, lost everything. She relocated to Atlanta for a while, but is back in Louisiana and living in Ponchatoula.”

Vickers added, “We built brand new homes. The homes are all pier and beam construction. All the houses were in different stages of completion when we arrived. The level of the floors ends up to be about three feet off the ground, so steps or ramps are required. The piers of treated wood and termite protection were already in place when we arrived.”

His crew mostly worked to frame up the interior walls. The next crews would bring in and install the roof trusses, after which would come the interior drywall and flooring material.

The Leander crew had accommodations at Oak Park Baptist Church in Algiers, across the river from the work site. A couple of the women worked in the kitchen there to feed everyone part of the time, and worked at the home sites other times.

Vickers noted that there were lots of spring break students working from all over the country. “It was amazing to me that so many of the Habitat for Humanity group were college students on spring break who chose to spend their time off working,” Vickers said. “The daily average of workers was 300 to 500 people and probably two-thirds of them were college students.”

On the one day it rained, the Crystal Lake Baptist crew moved inside to work at the New Orleans Mission where the roof was blown off in the hurricane. Huge amounts of water caused extensive amounts of damage to the interior of the mission. The crew worked there to repair the mission's third story sub-floor material.

Other crews that week worked to clean debris away from the Lower Ninth Ward, which is still overwhelmed with piles of various natural and structural materials. Vickers said that ward is not ready for any new construction yet because the debris is so excessive.

Vickers said there will be another opportunity to return and work more on the homes in a city in great need in July.

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