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by Clayton DeKorne
By now, images of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina have been forever etched into the history of the United States. For the people displaced by this vast storm, however, the memory of Katrina is anything but trite. In the weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras-Triumph, La., over a million people evacuated the ruined regions of the Gulf Coast, resettling in every state in the country wherever life could be reconstructed.
During this exodus, refugees who made it to Indiana were directed to Terre Haute, where 27,000 square feet of floor space in the recently completed but still nearly empty shopping center had been loaned to charity groups for use as a sorting and distribution center of much-needed supplies. Displaced victims came from all over the state to accept whatever was available. The surge in donations and recipients was tremendous, recalls Chicago-based Bill Spatz, chairman of Spatz Development, the parent company of Spatz Centers, which owns the shopping center. "I called my son Bryan [president of Spatz Development] in D.C., and said, ‘We gotta do something.' The scale of destruction [from Katrina] is unlike anything we've seen in this country before. We couldn't sit back and just watch it."
The shell of the home was contracted out to a modular home builder that constructs homes in a tornado-plagued Midwest. The homes are framed in steel and sheathed with OSB that is glued and screwed to the exterior walls to create a perfectly rigid shell. Impact-resistant windows and steel shingles complete the package.