[Image: View of front facade of home]The sun is shining and a beautiful breeze is blowing as Liz Sigler, sitting on her new front porch, remembers.
“We were able to catch the news channels occasionally, and we saw a helicopter rescuing two people off a roof just a few blocks away," she said. "We couldn’t see our house. But as the helicopter rose into the air and the shot widened, we saw the camelback of our house sticking out of the water. Then we knew. I started crying.”
Sigler was at work at the University of New Orleans on Friday, Aug. 26, 2005. At the time, no one was really paying much attention to some hurricane off the coast near Florida. But by Saturday night, they were paying attention. Liz and Jody Sigler, along with their young daughter, left their Gentilly home in the middle of the night intending to head to Houston. They wound up making what was meant to be a just a "stop over" at a friend’s house in Lafayette. They were there a month.
While in Lafayette, the family searched news channels and the Internet, trying to follow Hurricane Katrina and learn anything about what was happening in New Orleans. By Monday night, they found out the city was flooding, but they didn’t know why.
Two blocks behind their house on Wingate Drive stands the London Avenue canal. Their concern during hurricanes had always been that the waters might top the levee but not that any serious flooding would occur. Never once did they think the levee would fail and their neighborhood would be inundated with water.
Prior to evacuating, the Siglers had moved their vehicles uptown to her mother’s house. One of those vehicles, Jody’s work van, was filled with the tools of his trade as a carpenter. With the reports of looting throughout the city coming through to them in Lafayette, Jody and his sister-in-law went to New Orleans to check on the houses and vehicles of each of the family members. Unfortunately, they were unable to enter Gentilly because the flood waters remained. This was two weeks after the storm.
The Siglers spent the first days and weeks after the storm trying to find addresses and e-mails to let people know they were okay and to check on others. Liz Sigler began to wonder – "Would they let us come back to the city? Do I have a job? What about our bills?"
Another worry was what to do about school for their daughter. The Lafayette school system was already overwhelmed with additional students who had sheltered in the town. Liz Sigler considered putting her daughter in school there, but she chose not to. She thought the family might have to relocate to Baton Rouge, and she wanted her daughter to have some sense of stability and continuity. So she applied for home schooling and was approved. These home-learning sessions helped keep her daughter focused during that chaotic time.
Despite concerns about the levee system and the drama being played out in the media of the dangers of New Orleans, the Siglers wanted to go back and see for themselves what the conditions were. Only then could they make a decision whether to move or rebuild. But in their hearts the decision was already made. They knew they were coming back.
After a month in Lafayette, they were able to return to New Orleans and stay with family. They remained at her brother’s house for the first month and then moved to one of her sisters' house where they stayed through Thanksgiving. Then life in the trailer started.
Because the Siglers had family in Florida who had gone through the aftermath of major hurricanes before, she knew to apply for a FEMA trailer as soon as she was able and to contact her insurance company. Liz Sigler and her sister, whose home also flooded, parked their trailers in their mom’s yard in the Audubon area and started to work on getting their lives back together. Her mother’s neighborhood looked as it always had, and so staying there made things easier on the children.
“It was like a tale of two cities,” Liz Sigler said. “Everything was fine here.”
Meanwhile, the Siglers started gutting their home as soon as the water receded. As they worked, they saw other neighbors coming back. During the gutting process, they spent a lot of time hauling damaged material to the curb. As neighbors saw each other out in the streets, they began to talk, and a bond began to form. Soon they had a core group that was committed to staying, deciding to repair or rebuild their homes and to elevate them. They were there to stay.
Banding together, their small neighborhood group wanted to do things right. They planned to interview contractors, get three quotes, check licenses, etc. They called contractors in for interviews and met them out in the street. Most firms that came were used to moving houses but not elevating them, and the Gentilly neighbors wanted experience.
“I remember we did have one shyster group come in,” Liz Sigler recalls. “We just had a bad feeling.”
Her sister called the Better Business Bureau in Texas where the contractor was from and received the information they needed. This contractor had a history of leaving people hanging.
In the end the Siglers went with a company they had known about before the storm. The company engaged an experienced firm from out of state to assist in the elevation process.
“I remember I went to work one day, and when I came home, the house was raised! They raised it in one day!” she exclaimed.
T[Image: Side view of home]hey raised the house in one day, but it would take much longer for the full process to be complete.
During this time, the Gentilly neighbors re-instituted their neighborhood watch program, and Liz Sigler remembers one meeting in the park across the street. They sat in lawn chairs that had floated in with the flood waters -- detritus from the storm. The overgrown, weed-filled park threatened to engulf them as they sat, but this did not deter them.
This group of neighbors also tried to help others navigate their way back from devastation as well.
“No one knew where to get any information,” she said. “People would drive by and ask ‘who did that?’ and ‘how much did it cost?’”
The Siglers lived in their FEMA trailer for one solid year but camped in their house on weekends once the weather got cooler. By Christmas 2006, the Siglers had electricity at the new house, and they decided to stay there for the two-week break. On the first day back in the trailer, Liz Sigler knew she could not stay there any longer.
“The walls closed in,” she explained.
Because their original second floor was relatively undamaged by the storm, the family decided to move out of the trailer and find a way to live in the new house during construction. The following weekend the Siglers bought their appliances and moved them around as needed to accommodate the construction work. Liz Sigler considers the day they got their couch installed in August 2007 as the day they got their house back.
The Siglers' original house was built on piers three feed above grade. With 11 feed of water in their street post-Katrina, the Siglers knew they wanted to build higher. They decided to elevate the new construction to 10 feet -- just above the waterline on their house. While protecting their home from flooding, the elevation also allowed them to have usable space beneath the first floor. This area is used as a garage with a small walled-off section serving to protect the entry stairway. The front door was kept at grade, and the enclosed stairs provide more security as well. The decision to have their access stairs inside the home also meant they were not infringing on any setbacks, saving time and money that might have been spent getting a waiver from the city.
The garage was left unfinished, and code-required flood vents were installed around the perimeter. In the event that water may top the levees at some time in the future, nothing of value will be ruined on this level.
While the original footprint remained the same, the Siglers took the opportunity to change the interior layout for better functionality and flow. They also added porches and a huge deck in back, which provides comfortable outdoor space and therefore increases their overall living space. Other neighbors had also built porches, and Liz Sigler sees a lot more people sitting outside and visiting. She feels she is closer to her neighbors now than she ever was.
When Hurricane Gustav threatene[Image: Front door and garage]d in late summer 2008, evacuating for the Sigler family was much different than their Katrina experience. In evacuating for Katrina, the Sigler family (as did many) expected to be back in their home in a few days. They did not take much with them. Their seven-year-old daughter left, and consequently lost, all of her stuffed animals. Walking in their old house after Katrina one day, Liz Sigler came upon her daughter holding a photograph and crying. It was a mangled photo of her stuffed animals from before the storm.
So in preparation for Gustav, Liz Sigler handed out plastic bins for each family member to pack clothes and any items of importance. She brought her paperwork, her laptop and any photos they had left. Her daughter’s bin, though, was suspiciously much lighter than the rest of the family’s. It contained no clothes, but was filled with all of her replacement stuffed animals. And tucked away, her daughter still had that mangled photo from three years before.
Sitting on her porch here in fall 2008, Liz Sigler waved her arm to indicate the larger area.
“Look at this,” she said. “It’s like a slum in some areas of the neighborhood, but we remember what it was like before. These are our houses. We’re building a little oasis here.”
Liz Sigler offers two pieces of parting advice for other homeowners who are rebuilding:
- Check out your contractors
- Be patient (it never moves fast)