A Hurricane of Activity

One Year After Katrina, Teens Still Find Plenty of Ways to Help Fix Up the Gulf Region

The smell is what 15-year-old Jenna Garrett remembers. "It was horrible -- like rotten eggs times one hundred. And the muck was up to your mid-calf."

"The worst was in the bathroom," said her friend, Joseph Schindel, 14. "It was like manure roasting for 10 months."

The two Maryland teens and others from their Waldorf church spent five days in June gutting a house in Louisiana that was ravaged when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore along the Gulf Coast one year ago today, flooding much of the region.

The two-bedroom house in St. Bernard Parish, where Barbara and Jonnie Lopreore had lived for 37 years and raised their family, sat underwater for days, perhaps weeks. By the time Jenna, Joseph and 18 others in their youth group at St. Charles Church of the Nazarene arrived to help, "pretty much just furniture was the only thing left intact. The rest was all gone," said Joseph's brother, Daniel, 16.

'She Was So Touched'

Team members, who ranged in age from 12 to 22, pulled down rotting walls and shoveled tons of gook into wheelbarrows to be hauled away. The teens wore disposable suits and respirators (devices that filtered the air they breathed) that they threw away each day. They worked in 45-minute stretches for more than six hours at a time.

Almost nothing of the family's belongings could be salvaged. "She lost everything," Barbara Lopreore's daughter-in-law, Jane, told KidsPost. Even so, "she cried [because] she was so touched by what these kids did, and was only sorry she couldn't be there to thank them."

No thanks necessary, say the St. Charles teens, who joined the growing ranks of young people who themselves have flooded the Gulf region in recent months to help hurricane victims pick up their lives.

More Helping Hands

About 30 kids from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington spent their spring break in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Bayou La Batre, Alabama -- two towns hit hard by Katrina.