[StBernard] Future of Gulf-hugging communities as unpredictable as hurricane season

[Westley Annis]

Future of Gulf-hugging communities as unpredictable as hurricane season
June 25, 2006

By Teddy Allen
teddy at gannett.com

CHALMETTE -- Ten months after Hurricane Katrina, you drive into St. Bernard
Parish from the east over the bridge and what you've left behind on a
southeast end run around New Orleans is the backside of the city, largely
lifeless and rotting.

The past 10 miles have been empty and depressing. No one is home at the
water-stained Walnut Square Apartments. The Household of Faith Church seems
a still and forgotten shell. The strip malls, stripped. There are few
people, fewer lights or movements marking business. Signs tacked to utility
poles offer help with mold and fumigation problems, but the blocks and
blocks of houses and businesses and apartments seem resigned to just sit
there and soak up the effects of neglect.

 
All quiet on the Eastern Front.

Cross the bridge into Chalmette and there are people and FEMA trailers and a
bit of business, but there are also forgotten cars on the roads' shoulders,
along with busted boats and piles of trash. Traffic lights don't work so
driving is dangerous. Restaurants aren't restaurants at all -- they are
booths like you'd see at a state fair, po-boys being sold from under a shade
tree in a front yard. Your maitre d' is a man in a ball cap and a T-shirt,
his feet on an ice chest, the canopy above him decorated with a sign
offering "20 ribeyes, $20," or a pizza for $10.

How about an outside table right here, along Chalmette's main drag? This
offers as good a view as any of what a place looks like nearly a year after
a natural catastrophe.

A disaster would have been nice. Things would have been back to normal by
now. But not after a catastrophe. There is no rebuilding plan after a
catastrophe of unwelcome water that chased 66,000 people out of this parish
and left more than 25,000 houses in collective ruin. From your roadside
table you see houses still smashed into other houses, as Katrina left them.
You see the water marks along the service stations and convenience stores,
the mounds of insulation and bicycles, the notebooks and furniture that were
people's homes and tools of livelihood and commerce. There's a building for
lease, but the contact number is written on the brick in red spray paint.
There's the realty office -- it's for sale. If you're feeling bent from the
strain of the past year, you could go to this chiropractor's business, but
it's boarded up.

Chalmette offers few options these days. And this is the least
hurricane-affected part of the parish.

Down the side roads the FEMA trailers sit. In them are the people who lived
here and now exist here or live as best they can with resources severely
limited from the events and aftermath of Aug. 29.

Where will these people go?

What are they doing here?

And why don't they leave?

Firmly planted at home

Roots run deep.

But the wind and water of Katrina were enough to rip 76 years' worth of
roots out of the St. Bernard Parish dirt and wash it right out of the
backyard of the house Pete and Janice Savoye had called home for more than
half a century.

For 51 years the Savoyes have lived at 2727 Fenelon St. in Chalmette, a
suburban neighborhood home surrounded by nothing more fancy than all the
conveniences of modern America. A carpenter, Pete built this house, all but
the brick and roof, and then he built his life here with friends and family.

Ten grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren have played here. Countless
crawfish have died in the backyard where Janice had her plants and where
Pete built an inviting patio. He'd even rigged a power fan that would push a
hammock, and he could rest there after working in his garden where he grew
tomatoes, okra and garlic. He remembers the year the squirrels were so bad
he couldn't grow anything.

"Killed 32 that year," he said. "And started eating squirrels instead of
vegetables."

He's a resourceful, organized man. In his sizeable shed are 43 fishing
poles, Tic Tac boxes filled with different kinds of screws, cigar boxes of
bottle caps and wine corks and rubber gloves. Ninety boxes of Mardi Gras
carnival beads. Four dozen broom handles. "You never know when you're gonna
need one," he said.

But some things wood dowels and wing nuts won't fix, no matter how many you
have. For these things, preparation is impossible.

Just before dawn on August 29, Lake Borgne moved with intent toward St.
Bernard Parish as Katrina approached New Orleans. Storm surge pounded parish
levees. Low land became lake bottom.

By 8:30 a.m. Lake Borgne had topped the 40-Arpent Canal levee and filled
Chalmette, including the home at 2727 Fenelon St.

"JoJo can't stand the backyard now," Janice said of the couple's small black
dog. "I guess he remembers what it used to be like."

Now JoJo lives in a travel trailer parked on his masters' front lawn. A
travel trailer has become the No. 1 front lawn decoration in Chalmette.
Parish Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Larry
Ingargiola said 9,000 trailers are in the parish now; slightly more than
4,000 of them are occupied.

"If I get 20 percent of the people back by the end of the year, I'll feel
lucky," he said. "Next year, we're trying for 30 (percent)."

The Savoyes won't be in that number. Pete's 76; Janice, 74.

"Even if we stayed here, we'd have to start over," Janice said.

Katrina left 5 feet of water in the house. Ten inches of "muck" you couldn't
walk through without having the boot sucked off your foot, Janice said.
Twelve people they know drowned.

"Thank goodness, we left when we did," she said.

They stayed in Rayne during the storm and have been in the trailer since
April. "We're one of the lucky ones," Janice said. They had insurance that
will allow them to rebuild in Covington where they and their son -- one of
their Chalmette neighbors -- have bought side-by-side lots. They'll be near
a hospital and convenience stores and shopping centers. There won't be the
people of their neighborhood, but most neighbors have decided not to come
back to Fenelon Street.

"Everybody said Katrina was a 100-year storm. 'Don't ride it out!'" Janice
said. "But Rita was right behind it. We can't have this happen again.
Another storm ... it'll ruin us."

Like JoJo, Janice can't stay in the backyard long. But Pete can, talking
about his collections. One of the cigar boxes among the dozens of neatly
stacked shelves is labeled "MT." The label has never made sense to his
frequent visitors.

"MT," he said. "Empty. Get it? MT."

His eyes are pale blue, transparent almost, and his smile is one an old man
has after a simple joke. He loves jokes, carries a small notebook with punch
lines in his pocket even though, he said, "I can't remember most of the
jokes now." But riding through town, showing visitors the houses still in
the middle of the street after 10 months of cleanup, the traffic signs that
remain flat on the ground, the commodes and easy chairs on the shoulders of
his hometown's neighborhoods' streets, after such a tour, he doesn't smile
so much. His hometown is like the cigar box -- his hometown is empty.

"What you see is crap compared to what we used to have. Man," Pete said. "It
used to be ideal here."

Progress a drop in the bucket

Chalmette today is not much different than it was shortly after the water
receded. The trash, Ingargiola said, "seems just as bad as it was before.
People are constantly removing more and more from their houses."

The crews working are mostly those with government contracts, picking up the
trash, gutting houses, demolishing houses. Progress seems noticeable in the
way a water bucket's level is noticeable after a cupful's been dipped out.

Recently the director of homeland security of a south Louisiana parish
reported that 65 houses were now livable and inhabited in St. Bernard
Parish. "And he said it with a sense of pride," said Sandy Davis, who holds
the same position for Caddo-Bossier.

Post-catastrophe, you take the small victories where you can. A disaster is
a town leveled by a tornado. A catastrophe is a coastline stripped,
survivors stranded for days, tens of thousands homeless, and a question of
whether to rebuild or resign yourself to the possibility that home was taken
away by the most devastating effects of a storm in your country's history.

"We're trying like hell to help the parish come back," said Ingargiola, who
has called St. Bernard home for his 62 years. But every day is unscripted.

"We've never done anything like this before," he said. "The majority of
homes are gutted or will be torn down. Our infrastructure is totally
destroyed. We're trying to rebuild the sewer. We have some water and
electricity. Some locations have phone lines. We have a temporary hospital
that we hope to have up and running permanently in two years."

But most people haven't come back, he said. They have the sanest of reasons.

"They're waiting to see what the hurricane season will do," he said.

Fresh mud's on the repaired levees. How will the levees hold? Most residents
in the 9th Ward and in the communities south of Chalmette are asking the
same question. The answer will come only after nature puts the ball in play.

Some residents who haven't returned are waiting for insurance money or
federal assistance. Some are waiting for or securing a better opportunity
somewhere else, which would be just about any opportunity anywhere else. The
parish is caught in a chicken-and-egg situation: Some residents are too poor
to move, some professionals are too opportunistic to move back, and many
blue-collar workers who want to move back can't without infrastructure.

"Think of what it takes just for a 50-home neighborhood," Davis said. "The
barber shop. The grocery store. The gas station. The school. Until all that
takes place, how do you move residents back? But if you don't get residents
back, how does the tire shop open? It's something we've never been faced
with before. If I had the answer to 'Where do we start?,' I'd be in a lot
higher pay grade than I am now."

"In three or four years," Ingargiola said with optimism, "maybe we'll have
50 percent of our residents back. It's nothing for people in my department
to work 60 hours a week and get paid for 40, but we're doing it because we
want to bring the parish back. Ninety percent of the people affected were
homegrown. Everybody here knows everybody. We're all in the same boat."

There is the occasional sign of normalcy. When Janice Savoye walked JoJo one
morning last week, she noticed something in her yard: her daily newspaper.

"First time since Katrina," she said.

A few blocks over, three teenaged boys sold shrimp on the side of the road.
Brian Cocchiara has been shrimping with his uncle nearly every morning since
the school -- a consolidated parish effort named Chalmette Unified that
operated from November through May -- dismissed for summer. He weighed the
shrimp on a scale that hung from the tongue of his family's FEMA travel
trailer, just feet from the front door of his family's uninhabitable home.
His family is "sticking it out," he said, as are the families of his
friends. But he's heard the grown-ups speak of another possibility, too.

"If another storm comes, what we're going to do is leave," he said, "and not
come back."

Those families are trying, as is Janet Yotcoski and her husband, Richard, a
New Jersey native accustomed to Cajun territory enough to yell "Shrimp!"
when he and Janet saw, with surprise, the roadside sale in progress.

"We haven't had shrimp at home in a while, obviously," Janet said.

The couple weathered Katrina in New Jersey and returned to Janet's home
parish in December.

"We're in a FEMA trailer," she said.

"Just like everybody else," Richard added.

In the meantime, they make the best of things. She works at a store in
Slidell -- many locals commute to neighboring parishes for work -- and waits
for the loan they've applied for in hopes of rebuilding. The couple bought a
washer and dryer and have it sheltered in their mostly destroyed brick home,
by their trailer, and neighbors use this neighborhood laundromat with
regularity. On this day they were coming home from shopping in Slidell
because "there's no place to buy groceries here," Janet said. "It's a shame,
really."

So why stay?

"This is my home; I've lived here all my life," Janet said. "If another
storm comes, I might have to think about it. But this is home and I love it
here. I don't want to move."

Neither does Danielle Santiago, of New Orleans. She and her husband, son and
daughter live in a travel trailer on a Chalmette FEMA site. Since Katrina,
she has lived for a while with relatives in St. Louis and then in Houston.
She gave some thought to leaving for good.

"But you know why I'm not? Because God is my father, and I'll be taken care
of," she said. "You can run, but you can't hide. There are natural disasters
all over the world and people persevere. For 41 years I've been here; my
husband's been here. I plan to go back to New Orleans and stay."

Parish workers and volunteers continue to do heavy lifting daily in hopes of
making the transition quicker for the Santiagos and thousands of others.
More than 500 volunteers a day, helpers from "all over the country," remain
at work in St. Bernard Parish, Ingargiola said, and are housed at a parish
"base camp."

But are they cleaning up for nothing? The storm season began June 1.

A parish official in Plaquemines Parish said the state, especially residents
in his area, have learned a lesson from last summer's storms: South
Louisianans will "hide from the wind," but they'll "run from the water."

"In other words," Davis said, "if there's an evacuation order, I don't think
people are going to stick around."

The plan in St. Bernard Parish is for those with vehicles -- which is 90
percent of current residents, Ingargiola said -- to leave on their own with
predetermined, already suggested supplies. Those without transportation will
be picked up by city buses driven by National Guardsmen, driven to
"distribution points," transferred to over-the-road buses and driven, again
by guardsmen, to predetermined shelters north, such as Hirsch Memorial
Coliseum or the now-empty State Farm building in Monroe.

"The plan is a 'living' plan; it changes all the time as we find what might
need to be changed," Ingargiola said. "You have to remember that every
disaster is different, and we have to react differently for every disaster
(or threat). But the plan, as we have it now, will work very well."

Like the weather that threatens it, St. Bernard Parish is on a path
unpredictable. All plans are, for lack of a better term, liquid.

This is for certain, though. Should a storm hit Chalmette any time soon, it
will surge over quiet neighborhoods that feel forgotten. Down street after
street here, no dogs bark, no boys shoot basketball, no girls ride pink
bikes from house to house past well-manicured lawns. A little baseball field
-- the dugouts look as if they were painted last season -- is lonely. No one
has played here this summer. No one will play here soon.

Only the most tenacious or unfortunate have either moved back or remained.
Some likely remain because, like nature, they are indifferent. For whatever
reasons they've stayed, what they are surrounded by now is uncertainty in
the Gulf of Mexico and on the land, and a quietness that follows
catastrophe. There aren't even any birds in the trees.