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Katrina Coast: Mile after mile of devastation

When Al Frank looks out at the Gulf Coast — much of it still the wiped-out, washed-away wasteland Hurricane Katrina left behind five months ago — it blows his 80-year-old mind.

"I go down to the edge of the street and look south at the water, and everything looks just as pretty as ever," said Frank, nodding toward the sun-dappled Gulf from his camper in Pascagoula, Miss., parked on an empty lot where his beachfront house once stood.

"Then you do an about-face and look north, and everything is demolished and gone." He points at the trailers and collapsed houses and cracked concrete slabs that have replaced what once was his neighborhood. "And this goes on for 100 miles west. It's just as bad on this one spot as it is anywhere from here to New Orleans."

Then he added: "It's a shock to go a few miles north of here and see people living lives like nothing ever happened. It's another world."

The rest of the country resides in that other world, and many who live beyond the Gulf Coast believe recovery from the deadly hurricane that made landfall way back on Aug. 29 is well under way, if not largely completed. The blizzard of rebuilding plans from Washington, governors' offices, and various commissions and committees and conferences only encourages that notion.

Yet those who've remained or returned to what's been dubbed the "Katrina Coast" — a ruination that stretches nearly 200 miles from just south of Mobile across Mississippi and into New Orleans and beyond — are left to deal with a recovery that in most cases has hardly begun.

"My sisters call from Atlanta or Nashville and say, 'Are you rebuilt?' " said Toni Henry, a fourth-grade teacher at the swept-away St. Clare Catholic School in Waveland, Miss., where 16 of 20 teachers lost everything when Katrina's eye swept through. Classes are now held in military-style quonset huts. "They think it'll be redone like that" — she snapped her fingers. "But it'll be years.

"We all have the same story," she added. "Gone."

A drive along the Gulf Coast almost five months after Katrina finds survivors suspended between two extremes: total devastation and the wish to come back. It's the wait for a resolution that's killing them.

Tony Pitalo, 56, stood one night outside his trailer in Biloxi, lost in that very thought.

Pitalo stared at the empty lots that once were his house and corner hardware store. They were awash this evening in the neon glow of an open casino across the street. Despite the activity around the Isle of Capri — one of three casinos in Biloxi now open — the nearby neighborhood, practically swept clean by Katrina, was lit only by floodlights rigged around a handful of trailers.

Pitalo shook his head. He doesn't know what he's going to do.

"You kind of want to go to bed and wake up two years from now," he said.

Many survivors are left to reconfigure their lives from inside 240-square-foot FEMA-provided trailers. The grinding day-to-day over these many months amid the rubble and insurance hassles and empty propane gas tanks turning their showers cold is taking a toll, even as almost everyone remains hopeful things someday will return to normal.

Most immediate survival needs are being met. Only a relative few, for instance, are eking out lives in tents anymore, with almost 90,000 Mississippians and more than 70,000 Louisianians housed in travel trailers or other temporary housing, according to FEMA.

A distribution center for free food and clothing in Pearlington, Miss., a tiny deep-woods settlement across the East Pearl River from Louisiana, continues to draw more than 100 locals a day, six days a week, for free food and supplies. In Arabi, La., just east of New Orleans, one family drives over Lake Pontchartrain every Saturday to cook meals for more than 300 people who show up at tables set around idled pumps at a still-closed Chevron station.

Thousands of volunteers — church groups, college students, members of a Pennsylvania Amish community — have joined an army of construction workers crawling across the coast, trying to put it back together one nail, one mucked-out house, one sheet of drywall at a time.

Folks are thankful for all of it. Yet following the initial gratitude of having a roof over their heads, many here are facing a new reality that could grow starker in the months and years ahead: how to pay bills, how to school kids, how to rebuild, whether to rebuild, how to drive one more time past their old house, still in splinters, blocks from where it once stood.

Some handle it better than others. Domestic violence incidents are up 400 percent in Bayou La Batre, Ala. Some survivors fall into paralyzing depression early in the morning; others plunge late at night. Not a day goes by in Pearlington, said volunteer coordinator Laurie Spaschak, without somebody walking into the distribution center crying. There are kids still frightened to take a shower: It sounds like another storm.

A mother of three in little Coden, Ala., whose house still leaks and whose 5-year-old's asthma is incited by the new-glue smell in her FEMA trailer, recently scraped together enough money to see a doctor, who prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft. She'd reached the breaking point.

"I've still got my family, but that doesn't fix the problem," said the mother, Rhonda Johnson, 39, who has worked as a relief volunteer since the day Katrina hit. "We're all still here. We're all still together. But now what?"

Parts of the coast are being rebuilt. Houses are covered in scaffolding and nearly restored. Blue tarps bloom atop roofs like some exotic native ground cover, promising more work to come. (Some coastal children this past Christmas worried Santa Claus wouldn't find their houses because all the blue roofs looked alike.) A few beachside hotels have reopened at least a couple of upper floors. "Even got cable in some rooms," said Terry Graham, a maintenance worker at the Gulfport Beachfront Hotel, filled these days with insurance adjusters.

Clarence Mercadal, a semiretired carpenter, was the first homeowner to move back onto his working-class New Orleans East street. Rhythm and blues floated from the FEMA trailer he shares with his wife while he washed his car out front. He'd just returned from a drive through the Lower 9th Ward, the city's most apocalyptic neighborhood. It left his tires covered in post-Katrina crud.

He was happy to be back. His street is still mostly deserted, but he can't wait to start working on his gutted home. He already has a building permit.

"It never crossed my mind not to come back," he said.

But Mercadal isn't so sure about the rest of the city.

"If my house was like the houses I've just seen," he added of his journey into the Lower 9th, "there'd be nothing to come back to. It's un-come-back-able."

The journey starts:

The level of damage and degree of recovery seem to worsen each 10-mile increment west, as if the coast were divided into a grid of thinly sliced disaster zones: damaged, destroyed and obliterated.

So the drive into Bayou La Batre, a fishing village of 2,200 below Mobile, on the far eastern edge of Katrina's wrath, at first looks promising.

Small businesses are open. At a City Council meeting, Mayor Stan Wright, who runs an oyster processing plant, holds a spittoon while he conducts town affairs. Business as usual.

But closer to the water, signs turn more ominous.

Downtown is standing but abandoned. Seafood businesses are closed. Larry Banks, 44, lost the restaurant he ran. Now he works part time, offloading shrimp at one of the few seafood plants still running. "I had to do something to pay the bills," he said.

Across an inlet, more than two dozen shrimp boats, once the town's lifeline, are beached like bathtub toys deep in the woods. Many owners are Asian immigrants unable to afford their retrieval. Some paid for the boats with home equity loans, and now their homes are gone. Only 8 percent of Bayou La Batre homeowners had flood insurance, according to Wright.

Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, many of whom arrived after the Vietnam War, make up one-third of the local population. As a group, they've had a tough time recovering from Katrina. Some don't understand the danger from mold in flooded houses and have been airlifted to hospitals with double pneumonia. Language barriers make filling out paperwork for relief and loans difficult. Some skirt red tape by turning for financial help to relatives in other parts of the country.

"We work together. We stand together," said Them Tran, 53, who lost his grocery store and is still waiting on a loan to build another.

West on I-10 and U.S. 90

to Pascagoula

and Ocean Springs

Blue roofs sprout near the I-10 exit for Pascagoula, a sign that you've entered a new disaster zone. But you don't gasp until you reach Beach Boulevard. That's where the Katrina Coast starts to look like it's recovering from a carpet bombing instead of a hurricane.

"The dividing line between not having bad devastation and just surviving is very distinct," said Mike Torjusen, 51, a ship pilot whose 3,000-square-foot 1898 Victorian house in the neighborhood where he grew up was washed away without leaving a single stud or floor tile behind. He has replaced it with a 30-foot camper.

That line gets finer as you move west. In Ocean Springs, you drive along U.S. 90, a mile or so from the water, and except for the occasional tattered store sign, one could just as well be in Sandy Springs.

Even the downtown, quaint and leafy, looks intact — until you turn down a small slope and find a neighborhood of houses scrubbed clean from their foundations. Or turn north off U.S. 90 into otherwise nondescript neighborhoods of standing houses that would be perfectly normal were it not for the trailers parked in front yards and the houses' gutted interiors.

The disaster relief center inside Christus Victor Lutheran Church on U.S. 90 expects to be helping these victims for as long as a decade.

"It's sad to see people like this," said center coordinator Amy Bearson. "It's multiple problems piled up. People have lost jobs, cars, homes. We're just trying to give them hope."

West on I-10 and

The casinos are a surreal sight in this upside-down world. Most are closed, with holes ripped through them, or in the case of the Grand, still beached like an abandoned cruise ship sent sailing by Katrina across the road.

But the Isle of Capri opened before Christmas and does a bang-up business. Inside its windowless gaming rooms, the trailers and barren lots across the street seem a million miles away.

"I'm still amazed when I drive by these neighborhoods on my way to work. I look across the street and I have to say to myself, 'There were houses there,' " said Gisela Ferrer, a casino floor supervisor whose house in Ocean Springs was flooded.

"But when you work in here" — she could barely be heard above the dinging slot machines and yelping crowd huddled around a craps table — "you feel back to normal."

Across the street, Barbara Barhonovich, 50, chain-smoked in her pajamas on a patio her husband built beside their trailer. The three-bedroom house that used to be there is gone. So is the building where she worked as a cook for senior citizens, a couple of blocks away. So are all the houses of neighbors behind and beside her.

People here have up days and down days, often on the same day. This is a down day for Barhonovich. A casino company just signed a deal with two dozen residents several blocks east on Cadet Point to buy their lots for about $240,000 each.

"Maybe I'm a little jealous and feeling sorry for myself," she said. "But you know what? I got a right to. Nobody else is."

Barhonovich and her husband have gotten a little more than $30,000 from their insurance company for the house she has lived in for 29 years. They don't know what they're supposed to rebuild with that. So for Barhonovich and others here, the casinos have become their last gamble.

"I wish they'd buy this place," she said. "It's like a cemetery around here. I wouldn't even pack up. I'd take my keys and my purse and my 13-inch TV. And I'd be gone."

West on U.S. 90 to Long Beach and Pass Christian

It's a largely childless coast. The sound of kids' laughter and squeals is rare. The children who remain seldom venture unsupervised outside, their yards and streets still littered with debris.

"What are they going to do here? Ride their bikes? I don't think so," said Sally James, the librarian in Pass Christian. Once a picturesque coastal town, Pass Christian's city hall, police department, municipal court, bank, real estate office, restaurant, convenience store and library are all now housed in trailers on one downtown block.

Still, pockets remain where parents and children are staking out new lives in their scrambled environments.

Students from two flattened Catholic elementary schools have merged inside a converted skating rink.

With parents desperate for a school after Katrina blew through, the Long Beach Knights of Columbus took the insurance money it got from its destroyed Second Street building and bought the inland rink in Long Beach from an elderly couple looking to unload it. It was a local institution: Just about every kid, parent and teacher has skated to the Hokey Pokey there. Some kids have even nicknamed the school St. Roller Rink.

With labor and materials donated, "St. Roller Rink" opened just five weeks after Katrina. Mass for St. Thomas the Apostle Church is held in the largest part of the converted rink, which doubles as a music room. The rink's old powder blue flooring peeks through carpet pieces that line the hallway and classes.

There was a house at one end of the rink, and that's been retro-fitted, too. The school library is in the old dining room. The art room is in the kitchen. The old bathroom is used for storage.

"I've got classrooms, I've got desks and I've got reading books," said second-grade teacher Cindy Hendon. "What else can I want?

"We've come a long way," she added. "We had nothing. A woman came in with pens one time and everybody yelled 'Pens!' We'd get excited over staples and pens."

Waveland and Lakeshore, hit by Katrina's eye, are gone.

"This is my slab here," said Kenneth Finnegan, 41, standing on a slab that used to support his Lakeshore house along a remote part of the coast.

A neighbor sat in a lawn chair beside his trailer across the street.

"That's his slab there. All these slabs" — Finnegan motioned down a whole street of slabs — "they were all houses."

He pulled on a water hose hooked up to a slab across the street. He was hosing down his slab.

"It'll come back, no question," he said. "You can't keep people away from the water. It's like bugs to a light. Whether it makes sense or not."

West on Miss. 604

Tiny, remote and set deep in the woods, Pearlington felt like the edge of the world before Katrina leveled it.

Now it looks all gone. Two stone coffins remain scattered outside a town cemetery. People still point to trees they clung to as their houses washed away. They don't identify them as pines or oaks. "That's my tree," they'll say. "That's my wife's tree. That's my daughter's tree."

The only life downtown is a tent city for church relief workers. A makeshift coin laundry sits in a school parking lot. The school is closed. Volunteers hand out food and clothing from a converted gym they've christened "Pearl Mart." Katrina's waterline is marked inside on a basketball backboard.

And then ... through the trees, near a bank of the river that separates the town from Louisiana's bayou prairies, the bright orange of new lumber almost glows in the dreary landscape.

Elbert Walters, 48, is rebuilding his auto repair shop. He was born in Pearlington. So were his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. He and his wife, Melinda, married 30 years, didn't know what to do when their house and repair shop, open since 1980, were destroyed.

Nothing was left. The cradle both Elbert and his great-grandfather were rocked in as newborns was found a block away in the top of a tree. The Walterses didn't have insurance.

"The downside is knowing I lost over a hundred years of family history," Elbert said. "The upside is I still have my family. And with my family and the help of the Lord, I can rebuild."

So Elbert and a friend from Bush, La., milled logs out of the town's downed trees. Elbert poured a new slab foundation and framed the shop. He and Melinda live yards away in a FEMA trailer; Elbert plans to build them a new house when the shop is done. "I have to get the shop back up and making money," he said.

Elbert stays focused on the rebuild. He just got phone service for the trailer. An electrician was coming to figure out how to wire the shop. He's determined to open by March.

He knows Pearlington will never be the same. There's no mayor — there is a fire chief — and folks here say they're often overlooked when it comes to getting government help.

"Sometimes I think Pearlington is last to get anything," Elbert said. "But this is one boat and we're all in it together. It's not 'Is your house bigger than my house?' The only thing you can ask somebody who was hit by Katrina is 'Does your FEMA trailer have a pushout or bunk beds? A camper toilet or a real toilet?' "

He laughed. Then he blew out a big breath. "I just wish I could go one day without thinking about this storm."

West on I-10

A lot of people in Mississippi resent New Orleans. They sympathize with the city's residents, but also think the rest of the country associates Katrina recovery aid with New Orleans and forgets about Mississippi.

It's hard to convince folks in New Orleans of that.

"It don't look like they're doing anything in this area, not that I see," said Brenda Slack, 61, decked out in a white plastic suit and mask as she hunted for her late husband's Bible inside her demolished house, on her demolished street, in the demolished New Orleans neighborhood known as the Lower 9th Ward.

Slack has moved to Stockbridge, Ga., near one of her sons. This was the third time she'd returned. It's probably her last.

"It's just shocking," she said from inside her second-story bedroom, where the waterline runs 4 feet up a wall blooming with mold. "I don't want to come back."

The destruction here isn't worse than in Mississippi. It's just more concentrated. It's as if all the mashed houses and overturned cars and uprooted trees that are strung like a broken necklace along the Gulf were picked up and put down in one place.

Driving down streets that still look as though they were precision-bombed one house at a time, it's hard to imagine anybody wanting to rebuild. The neighborhood's proposed razing by city officials set off a firestorm among residents. "No Bulldozing" signs are nailed up here and there, including on the doorway of a house whose roof slopes into the street.

But the desire to return here — and the frustration accompanying the delay — come from the same place it does in Mississippi and Alabama. This is home. The Katrina Coast is a slice of the South bound by heat and humidity and hurricanes, and generations have shaded themselves and drunk themselves and prayed themselves into an accommodation with it.

"Driving through here hurts like hell," said Daren Stacker, 39, whose 78-year-old father drowned inside his Lower 9th Ward house.

Stacker stood with an older brother in the doorway of the flooded little Charbonnet Street Church of God in Christ, which he once attended. It was the first time they'd visited the neighborhood since their father's body was found three weeks after the storm.

Both brothers lost houses, and Stacker lost his maintenance job with the public school district. He and his wife and three kids live in the hotel where his older brother works. They lived for a while in Houston, but came back.

"I have 16 brothers and sisters. What else is home?" he asked. "Houston was wonderful to us, but it's hard to invest so much in one place, then go to sleep and wake up the next day and see everything gone.

"I see it rising back," he said of his hometown and, by extension, it seemed, the Gulf Coast. "Maybe not as speedy as we want it. But it's going to happen."

Drew Jubera writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: djubera AT ajc.com