Gary Huettman is a rare find in St. Bernard Parish. For one thing, he doesn’t have an accent at all! For another, he actually moved away from the area for many years. Mr. Huettman came back a few years before the storm, and was living with his two teenage sons in the house that he had grown up in and had since inherited from his parents. The storm came and, like everyone else in the parish, they were wiped out. Mr. Huettman had a heart attack and continues to have health problems, so he was unable to go back to his original job. 

Mr. Huettman used the money he got from his insurance company to buy materials, and he was able to get volunteers to fix his roof and rough wire his house, but then he ran out of money. Even though he works for Road Home, he's unlikely to get any money, and if he does, it won’t be much, so without the St. Bernard Project, Mr. Huettman would have a much longer road home. We contacted him to let him know we were going to be working on his house, and he said it was the first piece of good news he had heard in the last six months. Imagine his surprise when we told him that we would have a crew at his house just a few days later!