A Beacon of Hope for Ike victims

NOLA:

When David Breaux returned to his home in Bridge City, Texas, three days after Hurricane Ike, this is what he saw: An empty, ruined coastal town of 8,500 still soaked from a 14-foot storm surge that swirled through every building -- its every street and rooftop thatched with loose marsh grass driven inland from the wetlands just beyond the town.

Think Chalmette after it drained from Hurricane Katrina's deluge.

In the blur of the following weeks, Breaux remembered that he had a cousin "who did some kind of recovery work" in a New Orleans nonprofit agency.

That would be Tina Marquardt, director of operations at Beacon of Hope, the much-honored Lakeview organization that dispensed practical how-to information to bewildered New Orleanians after Katrina.

He called her.

"My first question was, 'How do you get through this? Where do you even begin?' I didn't know where to start."

And so it happened that Breaux, having visited New Orleans twice for hurry-up training on the organizational basics, now is the core of the new Beacon of Hope/Bridge City, a Texas offshoot of the New Orleans group.

It is New Orleans Beacon of Hope's second spinoff. The organization also spawned an affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after disastrous floods ruined that town last summer.

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Beacon of Hope was founded shortly after Katrina in the two front rooms of Denise Thornton's damaged home in Lakewood South.

At first it was just a place with wireless Internet access, fax machines and a coffee pot. It soon became a clearinghouse for practical self-help information: who were the reliable contractors and roofers, how to sanitize a house for mold.

The organization expanded into other homes. Beacon became a place to do laundry, track a building permit and consult a flood map for rebuilding.

Now it consists of 12 resource centers, including a few out of its native Lakeview, Marquardt said.

Its work has evolved along with the recovery mission. Now it helps residents monitor blight in their neighborhoods and shows them how to shepherd abandoned properties through City Hall's code enforcement process.

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Breaux said the work in Bridge City is just beginning.

The town lies just west of the Texas/Louisiana state line, surrounded on three sides by water. Only three miles of low-lying marsh separates it from Lake Sabine, which is more like a bay opening to the Gulf of Mexico. A river and bayou flank Bridge City on two sides.

Breaux said only 13 homes were undamaged by the storm, making housing Bridge City's most critical problem.

Although gutting is nearly done, Breaux said he doesn't believe any houses are occupied in his neighborhood of about 300 homes.

"We've got people living in small travel trailers, tents, some mobile homes," he said.

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It sounds like community organizers who actually do something besides intimidation, extortion and fraudulent voter registration drives. I like the fact that these people are working to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The New Orleans folks are sharing some hard learned lessons.