[StBernard] Relocated, reconciled and reunited

[Westley Annis]

Relocated, reconciled and reunited
A Miami Herald contributor lived just outside New Orleans until Hurricane
Katrina forced her to abandon everything she knew and owned. Now a resident
of Cooper City, she tells the story of her family's devastation and ultimate
survival.
BY JULIE LANDRY LAVIOLETTE

Special to The Miami Herald

NEW ORLEANS - While tourists party on Bourbon Street, a nearby community
still struggles to emerge from the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina
nearly a year after the storm.

Less than four miles from the French Quarter sits battered and beaten St.
Bernard Parish, where I lived with my husband and children before Katrina
devastated nearly every one of its 24,000 homes.

I live in Cooper City now, where we moved to be near my youngest brother,
Adam, and his wife, Courtney, who took us in after the storm. For eight
months, they generously opened their home to us as we sorted through the
chaos that had become our lives.

In June, my family and I returned to Louisiana to visit relatives and see
our beleaguered hometown.

My mother, Adeline, and I drove my children, Ian, 6, and Chloe, 4, for a
three-week journey to see relatives scattered throughout the Gulf Coast. My
husband, E.J., flew up for a long weekend so we could see his parents.

We found not much had changed in 10 months.

On Aug. 27, 2005, my husband and I threw a few changes of clothes in a
duffel bag and loaded it into my car. As we pulled out of our driveway, I
glanced back at my brick and stucco home.

Little did we know we had spent our last night there.

Two days later, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the New Orleans area, sending
flood waters from three directions. About 65,000 people were left homeless
in my community alone.

St. Bernard Parish, a soup bowl-shaped hamlet protected by a poorly designed
and built levee system, took in 20 feet of flood water in some areas.

The force of the water was so great it sent barges over the levees and into
neighborhoods, toppling houses like so many dominoes.

My house, only nine blocks from the Mississippi River, took in five feet of
water, far less than those who found lawn furniture dangling from their
second-story gutters.

Immediately after the storm, St. Bernard Parish was left to its own devices.
Fishermen grabbed their boats and rescued neighbors from rooftops.
Firefighters and police officers broke into convenience stores to get
provisions to feed survivors. And, yes, neighbors floated their dead on
mattresses to get to higher ground.

Meanwhile, my family and I were holed up in my brother's Miramar home,
waiting for news. Every day we heard a more chilling tale about the storm's
destruction.

My in-laws' wood-frame house floated up over their azalea bushes and landed
in the street. A dead body was found in my mother's house after it was
looted by people who used it as a refuge. Coffins in the cemetery where my
father is buried popped out of the ground and drifted onto the highway. A
great-aunt drowned in a nursing home that administrators chose not to
evacuate.

About six weeks after the storm, officials began allowing residents back
into St. Bernard to assess the damage.

People lined up at dawn on the first day with rental trucks, eager to pull
out what they could. Most left that day, empty-handed, in tears. Nearly
everything that wasn't destroyed was covered in mud or mold.

As recommended, E.J. wore protective clothing to protect his body from the
mold that had been festering for more than a month.

He called me that night, his voice shaking.

Our hardwood floors were covered in a blanket of mud. The plaster walls were
crawling with a green fuzzy mold. Our antique furniture had simply fallen
apart. Heaps of furnishings lay in dirty piles, as if someone had stirred
them through the filthy water with a spoon.

MOLD AND DEATH

Everything smelled of mold and rot and death.

E.J., his mother, Merle, and father, Erwin, picked through the debris and
saved what they could -- amazingly, our wedding china and crystal and some
photo albums I had stored in the top of closets. My biggest regret was
losing my children's baby books, with their hospital bracelets and other
memorabilia. I had forgotten to place them up high, and they had fallen into
the muck, destroyed and unrecoverable. It pains me to this day.

Ten months after Hurricane Katrina, mountains of debris line St. Bernard
Parish's major thoroughfares. Rows of gutted houses sit among those that
haven't been touched since the storm. A ghost town of battered buildings lay
like rubble in the streets.

SLOW COMEBACK

There is no library, no grocery store, no post office. There is no Wal-Mart,
no McDonald's, no hospital.

But slowly, the community is coming back.

Dozens of Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers fill the parking lots
around government buildings, now gutted and being repaired. Church groups
serve hot meals and dole out provisions under huge tents. Volunteers from
around the country clean out houses and offer medical care.

Only about 10 percent of the parish's population has returned.

Before Katrina, St. Bernard's population was more than 65,000. It was a
community that had thrived for more than 200 years.

SO MUCH LOST

Most St. Bernardians never left. They were born there, they grew up there,
and they died there. So when the parish was wiped out, it destroyed more
than anything an insurance policy could replace. It destroyed a legacy of
families -- the schools I attended as a child, my church, the grocery
stores, the libraries.

My husband's family lost 31 homes to Hurricane Katrina. My extended family
was just as large, if not larger, and were scattered from one end -- the
coastal fishing villages of Delacroix Island -- to Arabi, where we lived.

Forty years before Katrina, my mother and father lost their Delacroix Island
home to Hurricane Betsy. I was 9 months old and my parents evacuated to
higher ground. Eight feet of flood water left us stranded in a small boat,
clinging to the second-story window of a stranger's house.

When my parents returned to their own home, it was gone -- all but the
concrete front steps. How do you lose all of your earthly possessions twice
in your lifetime without losing your mind? In St. Bernard Parish, thousands
did.

Today, people ask why I moved to South Florida. ''We have hurricanes here,
too,'' they say.

The answer is simple. I came here to be with the commodity I left behind --
family. I came to be with Adam, Courtney and their children, Hailey, 4, and
Gabby, 2. I came to be with my mom and my brother, Freddie, who are here
now, too.

Family has kept me sane these 10 months, and my family will keep me grounded
as we warily watch and pray through another hurricane season.

Julie Landry Laviolette was a lifelong resident of St. Bernard Parish before
Hurricane Katrina sent her packing. Laviolette earned a master's degree from
the University of New Orleans and was an editor and columnist at The
Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans for 13 years.