c. 2005 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Two days after Hurricane Katrina left St. Tammany Parish a demolished landscape of blocked roads and shattered trees, the Rev. Waylon Bailey was feeling the full weight of the disaster.

That’s when he beheld an astonishing sight: a huge yellow trailer _ a mobile kitchen dispatched from a Southern Baptist center 175 miles distant _ picking its way through the wreckage to set up in the parking lot of Bailey’s Covington 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 then, Southern Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans and hundreds of volunteers from unaffiliated churches have poured tens of millions of dollars in private relief and volunteer labor into metropolitan New Orleans.

Sometimes sleeping on bedrolls or cots in borrowed churches, they deploy daily to prepare food, spread tarpaulins over damaged roofs, saw trees off homes or rip out sodden wallboard. Others hand out household cleaning kits, distribute debit cards for gasoline and household goods, and sometimes provide a partner for prayer 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 Katrina effort, many church relief officials said, dwarfs any previous faith-based domestic relief effort in memory, including that which followed the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks.

So far, the Catholic Church nationwide has raised more than $90 million, said John Keightley of Catholic Charities USA. That’s nearly three times what it raised after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Thirteen Southern Baptist mobile kitchens working in southeast Louisiana are about to reach a landmark of 10 million meals, four times the previous records, set in the Sept. 11 recovery and after last year’s cluster of Florida hurricanes, said Robert Reccord of 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.

And Islamic Relief, a Muslim relief agency, committed to raise $2 million for Katrina victims.

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 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.”

“Every organization out there is being pulled beyond what they ordinarily do,” Keightley said.

“This is a major, major catastrophic disaster, and it’s going to take five years minimum, maybe a decade, to get people back into shape,” said Gordon Knuckey, an official with the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

“I know we’re settling in for at least five years.”

In the world of church-based disaster recovery, two months after Katrina represents 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 longer-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 stationed near Lakeview.

As a result, the Salvation Army has purchased a warehouse in LaPlace to store food for its massive distribution program. “That’s a three-year commitment,” spokeswoman Capt. Deb Osborn said.

Much of that food goes daily to Hutto’s sprawling supply depot in the parking lot of First Baptist Church of New Orleans, just off Canal Boulevard, 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 to bring back to homeowners’ own work sites.

At First Baptist, forklifts rumble among eight semi trailers loaded with food and paper products. Dozens of pallets are stacked high with shrink-wrapped canned chili, soup, peaches, red beans and soft drinks.

Elsewhere in New Orleans, teams of Methodist volunteers are spreading out from churches doubling as relief centers to help homeowners clean and secure their ruined houses.

Joan Hoffman, the former mayor of Henderson, Ky., and seven members of Henderson’s First United Methodist spent a week ripping out drywall from a hospice nurse’s flooded home in Lakeview. They finished a seven-day tour Friday (Oct. 28), repairing a crumpled fence and clearing trees from Rosita Shields’ back yard.

The Kentucky team arrived at Aurora United Methodist Church last week ready to work, hauling their own tools and food in a rented trailer, representing in spirit many more who could not come, said David Park, a hospital lawyer.

“Someone at the church handed over his credit card. He said (to) use it for gas, coming and going,” Park said.

“We feel changed. We’ll go back different than we were going in. We’ve gained much more than we’ve given,” Hoffman said.

Kathy Powers, a staff member at Aurora who receives the volunteers, had similar sentiments. “Most people speak of feeling a real compelling call,” Powers said. “It’s a feeling that this is what God wants me to do, and many say it’s so strong they simply cannot say no.”

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.

“Seventh-day Adventists are not just good, but famous for handling soft goods, distributing clothing and such,” said Todd Hamilton of Catholic Community Services, the social service arm of the Diocese of Baton Rouge.

Mennonites, Lutherans and members of the Christian Reformed Church in North America are accomplished volunteer builders, some say.

Methodists and Catholics excel at long-term case management, their social workers counseling damaged families for months at a time, experts say.

Indeed, the breadth of the Katrina disaster has pushed the Catholic Church to expand its accustomed role of long-term help into short-term relief as well.

While evangelicals flood a disaster zone with early, high-profile help, the Catholic Church’s model calls for the opening of fixed disaster centers a few days or weeks later, where victims can collect food, clothing and apply for financial relief, local Catholic Charities spokeswoman Beth Millbank said.

Recently, the church has been disbursing $100,000 a week in financial aid, not counting food and other supplies, Millbank said.

“Our model traditionally has been as a second responder, but Katrina has been incredibly unprecedented,” she said.

“One thing we’re talking about in Catholic Charities conference calls is to begin to reposition ourselves as first responders,” said Gordon Wadge, president of Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of New Orleans.

“We’re going through a huge paradigm change as an organization.”

MO/PH END RNS

(Bruce Nolan writes for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)

Editors: To see dozens of photos depicting faith-based responses to Hurricane Katrina, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject (Katrina) or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.