Sunday, April 29, 2007

Road Trip - Rehab Progress

Here's my sister's house six weeks after Katrina, taken early on the first of many days spent dumping all of her water-logged posessions.




Here's the house this week, jacked up a few feet to comply with new insurance requirements. Note that the houses on either side have been demolished.

4 comments:

velvet said...

Wow, that's quite a rehab job! I'm glad to see that she's on her way to settling back in again. I can't even imagine what she's gone through.

Bernie said...

I've seen some of what she's gone through and I still can't imagine it. And lots of people there have it much worse.

DeeJay said...

This was so remote from us here in the UK and although we saw all the pictures and really felt for all those caught up in this terrible disaster it will never be the same for us as for those that lived it or even saw the effects first hand.
I am glad that things are obviously improving and moving forward.

That is one hell of a repair job! Did they really just jack up the original construction to that new height?

Bernie said...

Yes, they really jacked it up. Amazing. The house was built 3 1/2 feet up (about 1 meter in the UK?) and now it's 8 feet up. Houses in that neighborhood are now required to be elevated to at least 5 feet but a standard size for the forms for those concrete posts is 8, so it was actually a little cheaper to go up to the standard 8 foot height. The house originally was mounted on piers similar to what you see in the photo, only shorter ones. The brick in the other photo was just a facade.

A sad irony: if the exact same flood were to occur again with the house at this new height, there would still be more than a foot of water in the house.