Roughly six months after Hurricane Katrina I traveled to South Louisiana to do volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity and to make photographs of what I saw. I wrote the following at that time: "Nothing prepares you. What struck me most was the violence of the flood. This was not a slow rising of the water but a sudden wall of water that obliterated lives and laid waste to a city. These images, made in February of 2006 a few days before Mardi Gras and a full six months after the storm, serve as further evidence of the scale of the disaster and the utterly pathetic government response."