Trucking Through Disaster
The moon is full again on the I-10 corridor through the Gulf Coast. It shines on the polished hoods of the big trucks that are simply passing through. And it provides welcome light for those driving the mud-caked dumps and storm relief trucks plying the interstate nearly three weeks after Katrina darkened the sky and the lives of hundreds of thousands.
The stark moonlight distorts the twisted billboard girders along I-10 between Gulfport, Miss., and Slidell, La. They are like tar now, hardened black rivers of tar against the sky. The moon shines on it all and shows the Mississippi bayou to be a primeval place that has fared better against the weather than the great civilized settlements of Gulfport, New Orleans, Slidell, Pascagoula. The wilderness under the Pearl River Bridge looks as it always looked – solitary, wild and simple.
The coastal towns have become wildernesses of another sort, vague reminders of human settlements left uninhabited and uninhabitable.
Absence of Road Signs
For the traveling souls who use I-10 – America's southernmost, sea-to-sea four-lane – the ripped open communities are seldom visible. Running through Mobile and on into Mississippi and Louisiana, what you notice mostly are a few snapped off trees, the absence of road signs and the mangled steel superstructures of billboards turned to tar.
If you know what you're looking for, you can see the Knight Transportation terminal at the Long Beach exit in Mississippi, and the Rocking C Truck and Trailer shop behind the Love's, both relatively unscathed, both bursting with post Katrina business.
Kevin Knight, president and CEO of Knight Transportation, says all his terminal personnel moved to Kansas City, but had returned to the Gulfport terminal by the third week of September.
"We have been shipping water and food donated by customers to our 300 employees at the Gulfport terminal. For every donated load, we haul one load for that customer free of charge. Albertsons, Gatorade, Quaker Oats and Kellogg's are a few of our customers who have donated. All this was driven by the ideas and work of our employees."
Long Lines At The Pumps
At the same exit, the Flying J has long lines at the gasoline pumps as well as the diesel islands. Chris Bauman, the general manager, says his facility was never out of fuel. "But we had no power for five days and couldn't pump a drop."
Bauman says they are running full bore now, catering to relief workers and local people. Diesel sales were down by a third, he says, but there is no shortage of fuel and he expects business to be better than ever as truck traffic on the interstate returns to normal.
Lynn Lawrence, a Flying J waitress, says she is busier than ever in the restaurant. "Local folks come in because all their food has been ruined. Customers tend to be generous these days," she notes. "My tips are up nearly one hundred percent."
Further west, toward the center of the storm damage, you need to look closely to find your exit. There are few signs. You need to keep in mind there won't be any fuel or food after 7 or 8 at night – at least from Gulfport to Slidell. You need to know the twin spans have been rearranged by Katrina and your only westbound choice is I-12. You can connect to I-10 in Baton Rouge and truck on through. The Petro and the Pilot in Hammond are open 24 hours and there's plenty of everything. So it's not bad if you're passing through.
But if you live here and run local, you need to get fuel when the lines are shorter. You might want to have cash – that is, if you can find a bank that's open or an ATM that works. That's because your credit cards don't necessarily rotate the tumblers on the gas pump.
You will want to go and get your bottled water or be prepared to boil some. You will want to make sure your shrimp Po'boy got its stuffings from LA or New York. You might want to make sure to read the Emergency Food Safety Inspection Forms on the door to make sure the restaurant has returned to normal hygiene.
At the TA in Slidell, the 24-hour world of trucking has been cut in half. It is buffet only in the restaurant, and the machine that gives out shower tickets is working overtime. There aren't enough people to run this place all day and all night – the same problem facing owners of the Flying J in Gulfport and most other businesses that have managed to reopen.
At the counter, the conversation is about the fate of friends. "Bobby's house had water up to his chest in less than 10 minutes. He swam out a window and stayed on the roof for three days with a jug of water and some beef jerky," one driver says. Others were smarter – or luckier. Buck Buckley, an owner-operator pulling for Werner, took his W-9 and headed north to Shreveport, where he waited out the storm. "When I got home, I found I'd lost 25 trees and some shingles. I was very lucky," Buckley says.
US 11 Bridge A Parking Lot
Four and a half miles farther west, the I-10 twin spans across Lake Ponchartrain have been cut and the US 11 bridge is limited to 15 tons. The FEMA trucks cross it with typical 40-ton gross, but that's FEMA and that's Katrina. Maybe if you're deadheading, you're legal. But trying to use it will only get you jammed up on the bridge waiting in a long inescapable line to get to the checkpoint on the other side.
Everybody needs a pass. There will be some brand of smokey waiting there to ask you what your business is in New Orleans. There is no place to deliver freight in the city anyway. It is a dead city, sealed and locked down tight, like the grave of an unknown soldier. If you were loaded and headed for New Orleans or Gulfport when Katrina hit, you may still be waiting in the half-world of Slidell or Long Beach, where the Love's and Flying J do their best for 12 hours a day. Some fleets, like Landstar, have gotten into the city to staging areas at the Superdome and elsewhere, but few have been able to find a way into the neighborhoods to deliver their water, ice or other relief. Some trucks have gone in escorted by military patrols.
Except for the twin span, the road has not been damaged. It is still the same bad road it has been for years, lumpy, washboard pavement. The coops seem to operate fewer hours, like the truckstops, but that is a minor blessing on a road made miserable by the fury of a cyclone.
Katrina is not an evil thing. It has no malevolence for the race of humans who choose to live near the water's edge. It carries no ill will for the drivers who ply their trade among the bayous and on the transcontinental highways. There is no one to blame and the look of the people here is not one of anger. There was no one at whom to be angry until the rescue effort came too late and the displaced remained irretrievably lost. The storm turns the whites of some people's eyes a mottled grey. They laugh when you ask how they're doing. And when they tell you their house is full of stinking mud, or flattened into sticks, it is with a resignation one must hope is never replaced by the nothingness that is their only remaining possession.
Trucks Become A Haven
In some ways, it's lucky to have a truck here. Used to living in their power units, drivers continue to do so, moving as need be to escape the weather, find an open fuel stop, a shower, a place to eat. Restaurants open late and close early, motels are booked solid, food and places to sleep are hard to come by.
Soldiers wander in and out of truckstops with assault rifles on their shoulders. Police cars from Chicago, Indiana, New York, line up to buy fuel. At times it seems there are more rescue workers than people to be rescued. Little cities of tents pop up anywhere there is enough earth to drive stakes. Beyond the car lot at the Slidell TA, half a dozen tents huddle between the road and the buzzing concrete lot where the fuel pumps are working overtime.
From the TA at the 190 and I-10 intersection, it is five miles to the shore of Ponchartrain. If you lived there, you might as well have built your house in the middle of the gulf. Route 11 runs along that shore, linking up with I-10 across the lake closer to New Orleans. On the Slidell side, businesses and homes have been blown away or have suffered the worse fate of being left standing in condition only to be bulldozed or looted.
Plywood signs warn off the would-be thief with short, pithy death threats like, "You loot, we shoot," and "Looters – come in and die."
Trucks are sunk in deep pools of fetid water and mud. The road is lined on both sides with 10-foot-high piles of rubble, the remains of homes shoveled out for a removal effort that has barely begun. Even brick homes have been destroyed, the walls crumbled to disclose living rooms, bedrooms, remnants of life. There are plenty of trucks on this road. They have FEMA signs in the windows and they are loading debris – about 80-million cubic tons of it in the Gulf area – and carrying it to landfills hastily created and already bulging. There will be plenty of work for dumps and dump trailers, waste haulers and demolition contractors. The misfortune of the many will be the windfall of the few in that segment of the local trucking industry. By the looks of Route 11 through Slidell alone, the cleanup will take a long, long time.
Further from the shore, the more stately homes have also been damaged. Whole neighborhoods have disappeared. Others remain. In one, two moving vans are loading the worldly possessions of a family long since departed. Blue plastic tarps on the roof are the only visible sign of damage, and the furniture being loaded appears to be in decent shape.
400,000 Jobs Lost
The lucky ones have the means to make such decisions. Most do not; 400,000 jobs have been lost in the Gulf Coast. It is likely many of these jobs will go begging when normalcy brings back businesses because so many in the workforce will choose not to return to the area.
The few have been able to relocate and send for their possessions while the many must begin at the beginning in a distant and unknown part of America.
For those who stay or return, there is a kind of timelessness that overtakes the rituals of daily life. The days of the week blend into one another, as if the night were a mere bruise on the skin of an endless day, when the extinguished past is entirely visible and inescapable.
The weekend passes and the week begins along the interstate and in the ruined neighborhoods. The sky is blue and the roads fill with every kind of cop car and rescue vehicle. The private passenger cars – perhaps the only possessions of storm survivors and preserved by their flight – have become all the more indispensable. They become bedrooms, they know the way to the rescue kitchen for your breakfast in styrofoam, or your shopping excursion to the parking lot in front of the Piccadilly Circus, where the Salvation Army has spread out clothing on the concrete. Your little girl will have fun there, running through the piles of clothing, looking for a dress for the first day of school – whenever that will be.
Sunday night, there are plenty of long-haul guys waiting to run. They will all be headed east out of the TA in Slidell, at least until the I-12 and I-10 intersection three or four miles east. Maybe it's easier to get on down the road than wait around in a truckstop that has run out of coffee by 6 in the evening. On I-12 there will be plenty of coffee. It is two hours west from there to the Lafayette scale. Beyond that to the Texas line should be clean and green.
Headed east across the Pearl River into Mississippi, you need to watch for the slow-moving pickup trucks dragging piles of furniture in old one-axle wagons, headed somewhere else. Except for the pile of abandoned refrigerators, washers and dryers lying on the berm, there is very little debris.
Coast Road Inaccessible
If you're going to Gulfport, you probably know you can't get south of the railroad tracks on 49, where the casinos and the Mississippi State Pier once did business. The coast road, 90, has been undercut by water anyway, and only the FEMA trucks carting away the casinos can use it. There are military checkpoints at every intersection along the tracks and a 6-foot wide swath of concertina wire has been laid the length of Gulfport's business section and on into Long Beach to the west.
Monday morning, three weeks after Katrina came ashore, Dupre Transport in Lafayette, a premium tank operation, is getting back to normal. Dupre's Chalmette terminal, near the industrial canal on Paris Road in New Orleans, has been wiped out. The Dupre operation lost eight trucks of its own there and one borrowed from Shell. The thick mud has dried now and the trucks are piled in jackknifed disarray in three spots where the terminal once stood. Swamp grass and mud cake the inside of cabs. Forty employees are out of work, according to Keith Delcambre, director of sales and marketing. Delcambre also says Dupre is making a concerted effort to help those 40 families replace clothing and homes.
"We have also set up a new operation in Baton Rouge where most of the employees from Chalmette work now," he says. Delcambre believes the storm's toll will be felt at the new facility for some time. "We won't be productive there for awhile," he says. "Our length of haul has doubled and traffic caused by relief efforts and refugee travel on the interstate causes a lot of late deliveries. We're trying to accommodate everybody, but we just can't do it," Delcambre complains.
Besides losing eight trucks, Dupre has had to contend with the commandeering of two other trucks by FEMA. Commandeered trucks and scavenged fuel by DOD has cut productivity at some private businesses, Delcambre notes, adding fuel scavenging might, at some point, cut into the public supply. In the post Katrina time and resources warp, the allocation of fuel and equipment will certainly run toward helping the relief effort, leaving the less affected public to be understanding when the pumps run dry.
Ice Man Gets $900 A Day
Just down Paris Road from where the Dupre terminal stood, three 379 Petes sit with their reefers running, filled with bags of ice. All three have FEMA authorization taped to their windows. They have been here since Sept. 7, a week after Katrina flooded this portion of New Orleans.
Owner-operator Kyle Clapp looks around at nearly deserted streets and intones, "There is nobody in charge here. We're getting $900 a day to hand out ice and that's all we know. There aren't too many people left, but the ones who are have plenty of ice."
Dennis Simmons, an owner-operator from Pikeville, Tenn., says he has worked for FEMA before and got hooked up to do relief work here through old connections. Both owner-operators are happy with their $900 a day work, particularly since they are burning only reefer fuel. Both admit to a common affliction of truck drivers – the boredom caused by inactivity.
"Now they've told us we have to be gone by 5 tonight," Simmons says. The boredom and the gravy train have ended and the people of St. Bernard's Parish will have to find ice somewhere else.
Natural disasters have a way of turning one man's deprivations into another man's fortune, creating a topsy-turvy world in which normal economic and personal expectations no longer apply. Some in trucking will simply pass through and feel lucky. Some will find their trucks ruined, buried in mud, and will make other plans – once the grief and desperation subside.
Eventually the Gulf region will return to some semblance of normalcy and the FEMA trucks and DOD trucks will go back to their old work, if it is there. The owner-operators will get help from equipment manufacturers, most of which have pledged support in a variety of forms. And trucking companies will begin to deliver something other than relief supplies.
But even the visitor to this region will find it difficult to forget just how much all of us are dependent upon forgiving weather and a solid earth to survive, and perhaps, to prosper.
Storm continued...
