[StBernard] A washingtonpost.com article

[Westley Annis]

Here's the link:
<http://tinyurl.com/lqset>

Here's the story:

After Katrina, New Fear Along Coast
Once-Confident Residents Now Wary in Face of Hurricane Season

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 30, 2006; A01



VIOLET, La. -- When the floodwaters of Katrina reached the second floor of
his home, Jesse Reed decided it was time to flee. He grabbed a shotgun,
climbed onto the roof from a second-floor dormer window and jumped into his
bass boat, which he kept nearby just for that purpose.

The 51-year-old, an outdoorsman and a plumber by trade, was proud of having
ridden out previous storms with a certain woodsy elan.

Now, he says, "I wouldn't stay here for a goddarn hard rain."

All along the coast of the southeastern United States, even in those places
untouched by its rage, Hurricane Katrina has obliterated long-held
certitudes. Last year's destructive storm eroded the almost innate
self-confidence of residents who once viewed hurricanes as tempests that
could be weathered, not unimaginable catastrophes.

On the verge of what forecasters say will be a "very active" hurricane
season, the result is a hovering fear. The wariness is a key but often
unspoken cause for the slow recovery in towns wrecked last year -- residents
are too afraid to return -- and a source of widespread anxiety everywhere
else along the southeast coast.

Tony Fernandez, a sheriff's office official for St. Bernard Parish here,
said that throughout the community there is a new reverence for "nature's
strength and fury."

"Before we were all like doubting Thomases -- we had to see it," he said,
shrugging. "Now we saw it."

The new faith is pervasive. Since Katrina, emergency managers from Houston
to Biloxi, Miss., to Charleston, S.C., have chucked or revised evacuation
plans that were long thought to have been adequate.

Dillard University in New Orleans has moved the start of classes from
mid-August to late September to miss most of hurricane season. Some Florida
residents have banded together to buy enormous generators capable of running
entire households.

And civil engineers from around the country are similarly gripped by a new
sense of the perils. They have reported widespread and long-standing flaws
in the New Orleans levees, called for investigations into every levee in the
United States and identified flaws in the dike that keeps Lake Okeechobee
from overflowing South Florida.

"Katrina was a defining experience for many people, and that's no less true
for engineers," said Steven G. Vick, a Colorado engineer and one of the
investigators who reported that the Lake Okeechobee dike is unsafe. The news
spurred state leaders this month to create an evacuation plan for thousands
of nearby residents who had long thought there was nothing to fear.

"You just don't do engineering in the same way after you've seen New
Orleans. You don't take it as an abstraction, lines on a map," he said. "You
recognize that you're dealing with people's lives."

While federal, state and local leaders have assured an anxious coastal
public that every possible measure is being taken to avoid the calamitous
evacuations and bungled responses during the last season, there are clearly
unbridgeable gaps in the preparations.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff expressed concern last week
that the "greatest vulnerability" remains in areas that were hardest hit
last year because the ubiquitous trailers that house storm victims cannot
withstand high winds and because work on the protective levees has not been
completed.

In Louisiana, about 200,000 people are living in 100,000 trailers, and a
scattering of them dots this flood-wrecked town.

After Katrina passed by, Violet was inundated in a matter of minutes by
water flowing over what was left of the levees protecting it from the
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. The surrounding area of St. Bernard Parish
took some of Katrina's worst punishment.

Nearly every one of the 27,000 homes in the parish was severely flooded, and
residents have taken to a rueful joke: One guy says, "How'd you do in the
flood?" And the other guy says, "Not bad, just four feet -- on the second
floor."

Of the several thousand people who did not evacuate, many languished for
days without adequate food, water and medical supplies, and today, debris
and wrecked houses still line roadways. Many stoplights don't work, and most
businesses remain closed.

"We're living in a monument to why you need to get out when a hurricane is
coming," Fernandez said.

On Friday, at Our Lady of Prompt Succor here -- the only Catholic church of
eight in the area to have reopened -- parishioners will fast and pray for
safety during the hurricane season, responding to a statewide call by the
bishops of Louisiana. Churches elsewhere in Louisiana and in Florida have
held services to ask for God's mercy this season.

"There's a tremendous anxiety here," said the Rev. William Maestri,
spokesman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans. "We have to avoid despair, and
we have to avoid the presumption that God will handle everything. We have to
offer hope."

The specter of Katrina, combined with the warnings from the National
Hurricane Center last week predicting eight to 10 hurricanes this season,
has created an atmosphere of suspense and vulnerability.

St. Bernard Parish leaders announced last week that in the event of a
hurricane, they will call for evacuations 24 hours earlier and store
emergency supplies on higher ground, and that they had decided it is too
dangerous to open any local shelters.

Because so many now say they will obey evacuation orders, the fear is not
for lives but for the community itself. Many people are not returning. Fewer
than 1 in 10 houses in Reed's neighborhood have trailers out in front; the
others are unoccupied.

Despite assurances by the Army Corps of Engineers, many here believe the
levees are inadequate.

Last week, Corps contractors were repairing the levees damaged by Katrina,
piling them up to 20 feet with dirt floated in on barges, but officials
acknowledged that even once that job is complete, another storm like Katrina
could inundate the area again. More funding for the levees is pending before
Congress.

Among those distrustful of the levees -- and not returning -- is Warren
Duvieilh, 47, an electrician. He and his wife and daughter, all natives of
the Violet area, have moved north of New Orleans. He rode out the storm at
home and when the flood came, ran to the second floor of a house next door,
where he was rescued 24 hours later. Then, like hundreds of others, he was
stranded for days at a nearby improvised evacuee camp, where water and food
had to be rationed.

"We've been married for 26 years and we lost everything," Duvieilh said. "No
one could ever imagine the water could get that high. I'll never doubt it
again."

Most of his family's friends, he said, have already moved out of harm's way.

"It is very difficult for some to leave," he said. "But they don't feel they
could go back and risk everything again."

When Katrina flooded this small town, Jesse Reed rescued neighbors with his
boat before heading toward dry land a few days later. Like a hardy few, he
is planning to give the area one more chance. But just one.

"If the water comes back," he said, "I ain't coming back."

Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report from Washington.

-----Original Message-----

Westley,
Can you make a tiny URL for the Post link?
 


 

	-----------------------------------------------------
	
	After Katrina, New Fear Along Coast
	
	By Peter Whoriskey
	
	VIOLET, La. -- When the floodwaters of Katrina reached the second
floor of
	his home, Jesse Reed decided it was time to flee. He grabbed a
shotgun,
	climbed onto the roof from a second-floor dormer window and jumped
into his
	bass boat, which he kept nearby just for that purpose.
	
	To view the entire article, go to
	
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/29/AR2006052901
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