[StBernard] Katrina and Rita destroyed residents' sense of self

[Westley Annis]

Katrina and Rita destroyed residents' sense of self      

Sunday, September 24, 2006 

By DARREN COOPER
STAFF WRITER 

My father had a gift for me when I got home on Aug. 30.

It was called Da Mayor in Your Pocket. It had been given to him by his
brother. It was one of those voice samplers with six buttons in front. Press
a button, and you could hear one of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's famous --
er, infamous -- quotes made on Sept. 1, 2005.

  
This was my first trip back to Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the
state and my family was uprooted like so many pine trees. The scale of
destruction is hard to describe.

It's said that you can't go home again. And I know I can't.

It doesn't exist anymore.

"You gotta be kiddin' me." - Nagin

Slidell is famous for being one of the few locations in the United States
where three interstates converge. There is I-10, which leads you to New
Orleans; I-12, which heads west toward Baton Rouge; and I-59, which runs
north to Hattiesburg, Miss., and roughly parallels the track of the storm.

Slidell is a town of about 35,000, the Camellia City, known for the
plentiful and colorful flowers that dot the landscape. It is where I grew
up.

I got off I-59 and went down Gause Boulevard, the main drag, where the kids
cruise on summer nights. At high noon on a hot afternoon, the strip is full
of grinding construction trucks, and there are more potholes on the road
because of them.

Even though the day I arrived marked exactly a year since Katrina had rolled
ashore and shoved Lake Pontchartrain five miles inland, submerging Slidell,
shattered road signs still dominate the strip. The hollow shells are stark
reminders of the storm's power.

With a lump in my throat and my head swiveling, I drove by my old house. We
moved across town two years before Katrina (everything now is referenced as
"before the storm" or "after the storm"). My old street had Federal
Emergency Management Agency trailers by just about every house, destroying
its woodsy allure. Our neighbors had a pile of swamped Sheetrock piled like
a pyramid out front.

The new owner of our house came out when he saw me pull up, even though he
didn't know me. He said he was one of the lucky ones: 18 inches of water in
the house; only one major tree down, and it somehow missed the house.

He was maddest that one of the cleanup trucks had taken away one of the palm
trees my dad had planted.



"This is a national disaster." -- Nagin

My Uncle Bub, Gene Helmstetter, grew up in New Orleans before moving to
Lacombe - the town just west of Slidell -- in the late '70s. He had the best
organic garden I have ever seen in his back yard and wistfully talked of
supplying local restaurants with his bounty: elephant garlic the size of
fists, sweet onions, five-alarm hot peppers. A trim chestnut tree stood in
his front yard.

His house, however, borders on Lacombe Harbor, one of the many estuaries
that funnel in and out of the lake. His house flooded in 1995, and he lost
everything, including his 1961 Yankees autographed baseball that my mom got
for him on her senior trip. A contractor who specializes in such things
raised his house off the foundation 4 feet (the pictures are something to
behold with his house hanging in the sky), and he was told no matter how bad
it got, water would never get that high again.

Katrina brought 2 feet of water into the house.

He worked at University Hospital in New Orleans, in the basement, as a buyer
and was six months from retirement. He just laughs when you ask about his
old office -- "water was up to the second floor," he says. That tells you
what the basement must have been like.

He was offered his job back, given that he was so close to retiring, but he
turned it down to volunteer at a church. Less than a month after Katrina,
however, Hurricane Rita came, and the water was almost as high in his house
- he has two watermarks. All the stuff he had taken out to save after
Katrina was on the front lawn and was ruined.

Double whammy

Katrina really threw him for a loop, and just when he was getting back on
track, Rita destroyed what progress he had made. He was sick, tired and
didn't think he could rebuild again. Through the church, however, volunteers
from colleges around the country found out about him and came to rebuild his
house (everything but the kitchen, which is still missing cabinets). They
autographed one of the walls in the bathroom with fine brushes.

The chestnut tree is black and dead, but the garden was still lush. He grew
red, white and blue flowers as a show of patriotism. The wind blew down so
many trees that the plants were getting full sun.



"Get their asses movin' to New Orleans." -- Nagin

Dad is living in a comfortable RV in back of his sister's new house in
Hammond. In the most prescient move of his life, he bought it two weeks
before the storm hit, and it was nestled safely in Baton Rouge while he
gambled his life at his apartment in Slidell.

My Aunt Jeanne (whom my dad quaintly calls Sis) and Uncle Allen lived in
Chalmette, east of New Orleans. They lived with my 99-year-old grandmother,
and she and my aunt used to pass the time making crafts and knitting blue
and pink hats for newborns at hospitals.

People know about New Orleans, which flooded after the levees broke, but
east of New Orleans really felt the full force of Katrina. My aunt's house
had water over her ceiling, which then collapsed. Making matters worse, one
of the petroleum tanks in town somehow shook loose, so not only did my aunt,
uncle and grandmother have water in their house, they had oily water. 

Silver pennies

They had neighbors who had stashed $10,000 in their freezer. They rescued
the money, but the bank wouldn't take it because it was considered a
biohazard. My aunt likes to show off the pennies that were found inside the
house after the water receded; whatever was in the water ate away the
copper, so she has silver pennies.

They had a choice to try to rebuild, sell or demolish. By this point, my
grandmother was seriously ill and wouldn't survive much longer. There seemed
to be no reason to ever return.

"Our house was demolished two weeks ago," my aunt said nonchalantly over
dinner.

Not surprisingly, the conversation at dinner almost always centered on the
storm. I asked my aunt if she still sewed, and she said just a little for
her granddaughter, who lives in New York City. My Uncle Allen is working at
Southeastern Louisiana University after retiring from Tulane. He is fighting
his insurance company for his settlement on the house and figured that if he
lost, he was going to need a source of income.



"And let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country." -
Nagin

Lost. That's the best way to describe him. My stoic, resolute father is
lost.

He has made a lot of new friends since the hurricane. His story of survival
stands out in an area in which lots of people have one. He lost his wife,
his home and his mother in a span of three months. He saw the storm go
overhead, felt the force of the wind and stood on top of an air-conditioning
unit as the water pulled at his legs.

He worked at the Army Corps of Engineers for 30 years; you know, the one
everybody is suing? I keep waiting for his name to come up in one of the
lawsuits.

Ask him about the levees breaching in New Orleans, and he says two things in
his imitable Southern drawl. One, the corps worked on appropriations. The
federal government gave the corps money to build levees to withstand a
Category 3 hurricane, and that was what it built. (Katrina was simply
stronger than that.) And two, the corps wanted to dredge Lake Pontchartrain
in the '70s, hollow it out by 20 feet so this could never happen, but
environmentalists fought the idea in court and won.

Dad drove me through his new stomping grounds, outside of Hammond. We went
through several small towns in rural Louisiana: Loranger, Tickfaw,
Independence, Husser, with cows lying in fields, small high school football
stadiums. He took me out to eat at a restaurant that was essentially the
front of someone's house. There, his phone number is written on the wall,
with his favorite order, and the framed article I wrote last year in The
Record recounting his escape from the storm. 

He's out of place, I think sometimes; this is not where he should be. He
jokes and makes small talk with the waitress, but deep down, I think he
knows it, too.



"Excuse my French, everybody in America."-- Nagin

The whole reason for my visit was my mother. She worked at St. Margaret Mary
elementary school in Slidell for more than 20 years as the
receptionist-registrar and do-everything person. After her death in July
2005, the school library was named for her. The ceremony was held Sept. 1.

The school is celebrating its 40th year and doing so without blackboards,
which were destroyed in the storm. But much of the white-brick campus
remained intact, as most of the classrooms were built up on small rises in
the land. They are much better off than the other Catholic elementary school
in town, which was supposed to open without desks or books.

The ceremony was emotional. I saw my Aunt Tesa, who lives in a FEMA trailer
in Metairie, and she yelled at me for not calling. A lot of my old teachers
were there, including my sixth-grade social-studies teacher, Joan Severs,
who took Dad in as he wandered around Slidell looking for someone he knew
after the storm.

My friend Andy picked me up to bring me to the airport in New Orleans. He's
a writer for the Times-Picayune, son of the former sheriff of St. Tammany
Parish, so if there is anyone tapped into the community, it's him.

Fragile span

We crossed the Twin Span, the I-10 bridge, over the snoozing lake. Parts of
the bridge now sit at the bottom of the lake, and it's held together by
temporary pieces that are fragile looking.

There is the satisfying (and, in this case, reassuring) bump as you get off
the bridge and reach land. This is New Orleans East. One by one, apartment
complexes sit completely empty. Gas stations have been blown off their
foundations. No one likes to use the term "war zone," but that is what it
looks like.

The city itself is still standing. The shimmering Superdome, always the
unique part of the skyline, remains, its new roof glistening in the
sunlight. Around it are dark shadows, which never felt ominous before.



"But I am pissed." - Nagin

People are mad. And they don't know whom to be mad at -- the president, the
governor, the mayor, the weather forecasters?

People are confused. Where can they live, work, send their kids to school?

People are overwhelmed. Getting money to rebuild requires form after form;
the government Web site where you filled out the forms you needed crashed.
Insurance companies ensnare you in red tape.

Before the plane took off, I had one recurring thought. It was the same
thought written on my dad's face in the restaurant. It happened during my
uncle's walk in his back yard, and was in my aunt's brief nod at the dinner
table. 

Where am I?

E-mail: cooperd at northjersey.com