How Many Years Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?
by Andrea Boll

Gentilly home owner and NOLAFugees correspondent Andrea Boll takes a trip to the convention center and tries to decipher the flowchart above.

Supposedly, I am rebuilding my house in Gentilly. I’m on the five-year plan—having bits and pieces done by homeless contractors who set up their RVs on my yard in exchange for changing the studs, leveling the house, putting in sub-floors. I am mostly at their mercy because after four years of undergraduate school and three more of graduate work, both in liberal arts, I don’t actually have any skills or knowledge about anything practical. (I can, however, use onomatopoeia to describe the sounds the builders make as they work on my house: SLAM, BANG, WHATAPIECEOFSHIT, BUZZZZZ.) So, like the good student I am, I went to the “Housing Solutions Summit” held in the Convention Center because I thought it would be an ideal place to educate myself on the latest technologies for rebuilding—rumors I’ve heard in the aisles of Lowe’s about materials that are flood proof, frames that will not budge in 200 mile an hour winds, and mold-defying walls.

And really, there was something for everybody at all stages of rebuilding: medieval looking torture machines for elevating a house, windows, siding, air conditioning, lumber, modular homes, roofs, demolition, and even hot tubs. (Can you imagine the joy of being at the hot tub stage?) Neighborhood associations were on hand with their visions, along with FEMA, who offered a CD entitled “Recommended Residence Construction for the Gulf Coast” which will take a post graduate degree in engineering to understand. Entergy was reaching out to its public with goodies: pencils, magnets, bags; I even “won” a little radio. They had an expert willing to showing you how to read Entergy meters (although their computer “read” my meter double during the months I didn’t even have electricity).

But my favorite part of their exhibition was the flow chart “showing” how to get electricity turned on in a FEMA trailer: a labyrinth of different colored boxes and arrows going back and forth between FEMA and Entergy. Ironically, seeing it gave me back a small piece of the sanity lost during my struggle for light because I realized those two months hadn’t been a random, unfortunate odyssey through land of the ultra-incompetent and illogical, but that the procedure was actually designed to be that painful and time-consuming. There was no other way.

It is true: you'd need a Road Home Grant ten times over to build a hurricane-proof fortress.

And the rumors are true: you could build a fortress of steel studs, with walls and floors made with the Green Sandwich Building System of concrete and BASF® Styropor® EPS foam that can withstand not only a category 5 hurricane, but also 8.0+ earthquakes and F-3 tornadoes. You could hire the FutureProof company that helps “clients choose appropriate passive and active systems that optimize a building’s energy performance” and have it treated for mold with the Natural Air™ purifier that uses “ozone and needlepoint ionization.” Unfortunately, to create such a castle, you would need the Road Home Grant ten times over and they, of course, were the one informational booth I never found. Really, the one piece of information from the Summit I can actually use was from the Louisiana Life magazine: the 19 best boudin makers in Acadiana.

It is as easy as changing a lightbulb.

On my way out, I passed one booth with a sign that stated in big red letters, “REBUILDING LOUISIANA IS AS EASY AS CHANGING A LIGHT BLUB.” I didn’t even bother to stop. I may not know much about construction, but after seven years of higher education, I can recognize a faulty analogy.

Andrea Boll is a regular correspondent for NOLAFugees.com.