People who’ve been to New Orleans to help and some headed this way shortly read this blog to keep up with the local situation. Which makes me want to say two things: 1) what you read here is a tiny sliver of the way things are here. Sorry. So much is going on all the time. And 2) I try to sift through everything and report the most important.

The headline in Monday morning’s paper reads, “Need for house gutting seems endless in N.O.” I’ve reported here that Steve Gahagan and Tim Agee of NAMB’s Operation NOAH Rebuild are no longer taking requests for house gutting. They say we have a backlog of hundreds and finishing them with volunteers will take months. Steve adds, “We don’t want to promise something we don’t do. If we agree to gut your house, we want to be faithful.”

Stephen Bradberry of a community activist organization called ACORN was on radio recently offering their free house-gutting services. Since then, they have received a thousand requests, on top of the thousand or so homes already on their waiting list. A thousand homes is a full year’s work, he said. But they’re still accepting applications.

Reporter Valerie Faciane writes, “Phones are ringing at other agencies offering the same services, but many have had to close their waiting lists for lack of volunteers, raising the specter that ruined housing is going to be a feature of the New Orleans landscape for some time to come.”

Bradberry says he is convinced that a lot of displaced residents learned for the first time by his radio broadcast that the city had imposed an August 29 deadline for homeowners to start the process of rebuilding their homes or risk having them demolished.

At the moment, volunteers are almost non-existent in the city. The United Methodist agency here has gutted 185 homes and has 994 on a waiting list, but does not have a single volunteer scheduled for September. They say at the current rate, completing the houses on their list would take 3 to 4 years. The good news is that 20 volunteer teams have signed up from October through December. More are needed.

A spokesman for Operation Blessing, the relief agency of Pat Robertson’s Virginia Beach ministry, blames mainstream media for distorting the situation on the Gulf Coast. People throughout America think no progress is being made because the media does not report the success stories. Some are led to believe people in the affected areas do not deserve help because they’re not helping themselves.

The Operation Blessing spokesman, Bill Horan, said, “The last time we had 300 volunteers a day was during the college spring break season, but lately we have been struggling to get 50 volunteers a day.” Recently, he said, their organization sent e-mails to 55,000 supporters throughout this country and Canada, urging them to volunteer for at least one week and sign their friends up to come also.

Operation Nehemiah reports gutting over 2,000 homes which has saved homeowners some 10 million dollars. This organization, based at the Carrollton Avenue Church of Christ, has brought in 9,000 volunteers from every direction. They still have 800 homes on their waiting lists. Founder Fred Franke said, “If I had 200 volunteers a week, I could get those houses out in two to three months time.” However, at the present rate, he’s looking at 6 to 8 months.

Catholic Charities’ Operation Helping Hands reports receiving 60 to 70 calls a day from homeowners wanting to get on the gutting list. So far, their volunteers have gutted out 842 homes, with another 1168 on the waiting list. Just finishing the present list will take another year, a spokesman says.

Here’s Valerie Faciane’s report on NAMB’s Operation NOAH Rebuild…

“Operation Noah Rebuild, part of the Southern Baptist Convention, has gutted 450 homes, with more than 300 on the waiting list, said office manager Dianne Gahagan. ‘We’re trying to gut out the houses where the homeowners will return to live in their homes,’ said Gahagan. She said volunteers are now working on the houses of homeowners who submitted applications in June. ‘We’re finding that folks are wanting to be part of the rebuild process, but we still need gut-out teams to come because there are so many houses on file,’ Gahagan said. The organization is not taking any more applications for gutting. She couldn’t estimate a completion date for the gutting process, saying it depends on the availability of volunteer labor.”

The complete article and a chart listing the various gutting-out/rebuilding organizations and “where they stand” can be seen by going to www.nola.com and checking out today’s Times-Picayune.

Which reminds me: our Baptist Association’s website www.bagnola.org is up and running. Check it out.