Journalism students tour Katrina ruins for stories

IU graduate student Koran Addo expected to see some "shocking things" on his class visit to the Katrina-ravaged South. He expected to see some "devastation." \n"But it was more shocking than I could have imagined," said Addo, who recently visited the hurricane-affected areas with his public affairs reporting class. "It was really almost too much to take in all at once."\nIU journalism professor Carol Polsgrove and her class returned to Bloomington Nov. 14 after a six-day trip through areas of the South destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.\nThe class of nine students conducted interviews and tried to take in the devastation they found, traveling from Jackson, Miss., to the Gulf Coast and eventually to New Orleans.\nThe students are in the process of writing articles for possible submission to various publications, including the Indiana Daily Student, the Bloomington Herald-Times, other Indiana newspapers and possibly national publications.\nStudents wanted to find stories that were "off the beaten path" of mainstream media. Some students toured American Indian homes, finding people that had received little or no support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.\n"They still hadn't gotten any FEMA trailers, so they were living in their moldy houses," Polsgrove said.\nOther students investigated the tent cities and some of the more ravaged towns.\n"It was tragic, seeing neighborhoods deserted, seeing death tolls written on the sides of houses," Addo said.\nSome students took photographs of damaged areas.\n"One student took some photos in a moldy house without her mask on, when the family invited her," Polsgrove said.\nThe conditions in some of the more devastated areas were hard to take, some students said.\n"The mood, every day, just went downward, going from town to town," Addo said. "Some places didn't exist, some places were just wiped off the map, and other paces were just ghost towns."\nStudents said there is so much destruction that it is hard to see how the rebuilding process will work. Much of New Orleans is still without power. FEMA gave some people trailers for shelter, but citizens of New Orleans can't park them on their lawns because of power outages.\nPolsgrove said the lack of housing is hindering the rebuilding process.\n"It's hard to see how New Orleans will get going when there are no places for workpeople to stay," she said.\nMany of the roofs that were destroyed have not been repaired, and there are still large piles of debris littering the landscape. Polsgrove said many of the areas closer to the Gulf of Mexico were wiped out, but reinforced train tracks created a dike to stop the flow of some water inward.