Katrina survivor builds homes from cargo ship containers to weather all storms

HARVEY, La. (WGNO) — In Louisiana, with his West Bank crew, Josh Clark is in the business of building and rebuilding.

His construction site is inside a cargo container, a big steel shipping box built to withstand a typhoon in the ocean.

WGNO Good Morning New Orleans features reporter Bill Wood finds Clark at his headquarters in Harvey, La.

That’s where they turn these transportation contraptions into homes.

You get a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room and kitchen.

Clark practices what he preaches.

Home Sweet Home for him is one of his cargo container creations.

He lives, these days, down the Bayou, about an hour down the road from New Orleans in Cut Off, Louisiana.

But when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, he was in the French Quarter.

He was a writer and still is.

After Katrina, he moved to a solar-powered Louisiana log cabin. That was until Hurricane Ida destroyed it in 2021.

Then he headed west to the California Coast. He figured it would be a more peaceful place to write books.

That was until the wildfires. He made it through the fire. It was the mudslides a few days after that left him homeless again.

“I’ve taken it all, earth, wind, water, fire,” said Clark tells.

Bill Wood asks, “didn’t you want to just give up?”

He says, “No, I wanted to keep building, I wanted to find something sustainable other people could live in.”

And that’s what he’s doing with ARK Container Homes.

He says it’s “where beauty meets strength.”

You’ll see Clark and more on our WGNO Special called Hurricane Season 2025-Your Questions Answered.

It’s Friday, May 30 at 6:30 p.m. on WGNO and on Saturday, May 31 at 9 p.m. on NOLA 38 – The CW.

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