For Some Victims of Katrina, The Bulldozer Is the Answer

Starting Over in St. Bernard Parish Means Razing Houses

CHALMETTE, La. -- Ronnie Nunez bought the weird pink house in the Battleground Subdivision to entice his daughter and baby granddaughter to come back to Louisiana from out of state. But they didn't stay with him long.

He thought he'd patch up his marriage there. That didn't work either.

The house is a bad renovator's jigsaw puzzle, with three roofs stitched together and an inexplicable interior bay window connecting separate wings. To tell the truth, he never much liked the place.

Soon it will be gone.

A bulldozer is likely to arrive before the new year to scrape away Nunez's house, the first demolition in one of the first large-scale government bulldozing projects in the New Orleans area since Hurricane Katrina's Aug. 29 assault. Someone told Nunez that Katrina means "cleansing," and though he never bothered to look it up, he decided to believe it. The bulldozer will be his personal cleansing agent.

"I have a chance to start over," Nunez, a 61-year-old trucker and former Marine with a penchant for mirrored sunglasses, said one recent cloudy afternoon. "I said, 'Here I am. Take me down.' "

Bulldozing, with its crushing note of finality, is an approach heavy with emotions in post-hurricane Louisiana. It is so emotional that "No Bulldozing" campaigns are being waged to save the sodden homes in parts of New Orleans, where several thousand houses may be demolished soon. The battle over bulldozing is most fervent in neighborhoods such as the predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward, where skeptical residents fear that their communities will not be rebuilt.

But here in suburban, working-class, mostly white St. Bernard Parish, where the destruction was so complete that just 10 of 25,000 houses are inhabitable, there is a headlong rush to the wrecking ball. More than 300 houses have been tagged for a mass demolition project that will begin in the coming weeks, as soon as a monumental tangle of paperwork is unraveled. Yet that's just the start in a parish where the water rose so high -- 17 feet in some parts -- that nearly every house is considered a candidate to be knocked down.

Oil refinery workers and fishermen and suburban commuters line up each day, offering their stucco and brick and wood frames to be pulverized. Parish officials that aren't involved in demolition have grown so tired of interruptions that they post signs on their office doors to divert people who want the local government to wipe away their homes.

Requests by homeowners who want to memorialize their houses' final moments on videotape are piling up. The homeowners' enthusiasm is bolstered by assurances that they will be allowed to rebuild, a contrast with the situation just upriver in New Orleans, where leaders of the city's rebuilding commission have discussed abandoning parts of the city that suffered the worst flooding.

St. Bernard Parish -- known simply as "da parish" in Louisiana because of its inhabitants' syllable-blurring, Brooklynesque accents -- lives in the shadow of the irresistible charm of New Orleans. The parish touches the New Orleans line at the Lower Ninth Ward. The parish -- industrial to the east and marshy to the west -- always felt like "the bastard stepchild" of New Orleans, said Parish Council member Joey Difatta, who lives in one of hundreds of trailers clustered around the St. Bernard government complex.

Residents still bristle because St. Bernard was intentionally flooded during the Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 when the aristocrats in New Orleans dynamited a levee to save the city. "There's a lot of malice that went with it," Difatta said. "We know we were sacrificed for the sake of New Orleans." More recently, St. Bernard gained a measure of infamy during Katrina because more than 30 elderly people died after allegedly being abandoned in the St. Rita's nursing home there.