A Company Town on The Mississippi

'We Know How to Survive'

The rules of the trailer park are simple: all dogs on leashes, alcohol in moderation, no loud music and all firearms must be licensed. The trailers are parked atop a thousand tons of white gravel spread in a field next to the refinery. The air is dust-choked from a fleet of backhoes and Bobcats laying sewer lines. Kids pedal around the beeping vehicles. The monotony is sometimes broken by the occasional crab boil or fish fry if the weather is warm.

Residents have tried to personalize their territories with barbecue grills, and some have built little patios from wooden sugar pallets. Freddie Meyer has gone all out: hanging plants, lawn ornaments, twinkling lights and a pair of regal lion statues more fit for guarding an estate than a 30-foot Palomino camper.

"We know how to survive out here," says Meyer, a 41-year-old wiry, gregarious native of the St. Bernard Parish shrimping town of Violet.

Inside his trailer are his wife and three kids, ages 17, 14 and 11. The hours of greatest comfort are when everyone is lying down asleep. But Meyer is not complaining. "We needed our jobs," he says, while the kids stand four feet away in the living room and the television blares. "Without our jobs, we can't live. This is a company. They want the plant running. The only way they can get the plant working is workers."

The effects of Domino Sugar's comeback reach beyond its gates. The 700 living in trailers are helping St. Bernard Parish kick-start its economy again. The children -- about 35 -- allow the school system to hire back a teacher. The chain of revival even includes a small deli near the refinery. Domino lent the owners of the Arabi Food Store a trailer so they could renovate the flooded deli and get back to delivering po' boys to the factory gates. "Domino was our biggest customer," says owner Debbie Smith, readying her store for a grand reopening. "And they need us."

Still, Domino managers acknowledge the fragility of what they have created.

"We know how to make damn good sugar," says Mickey Seither, vice president of operations. "We don't know a whole lot about running a trailer park."

'They are Fighters'

Built in 1909, the refinery is a red-brick colossus on the Mississippi, chugging and puffing 24 hours a day. Inside, the iron stairs are sticky from decades of sugar, sweat and steam. The oldest of Domino's four plants -- the others are in Baltimore, New York and California -- the refinery in St. Bernard Parish was processing 6.5 million pounds of sugar a day before the storm. About 75 different products were produced, packaged and shipped from the site. Domino pays an average wage of $17 an hour with benefits; most employees are men, and many have worked here for more than 20 years.

The bonds of loyalty to each other and to the company were tested with Katrina. Ten employees volunteered to stay inside the refinery to keep the electricity and pumps working during the storm, but they lost communication with the outside world. As St. Bernard Parish slipped underwater, the employees were trapped for several days.

When Maraia, the plant manager, returned, the refinery was in ruins. Motors and pumps were submerged, and water had flooded mammoth sugar sheds, one containing 32 million pounds of raw sugar that turned into a lake of syrup. Dozens of vehicles were buried under melting mountains of sugar. The wind had blown out 450 of the 2,200 refinery windows. Cleanup seemed impossible: There was no power to suction the water or lift the 10,000-pound motors from submersion, and most of Domino's workers had evacuated and were scattered across the country.

Domino's parent company is American Sugar Refining Inc., which is owned by Florida Crystals Corp., which has its headquarters near West Palm Beach, and a cooperative of sugar cane growers. The company leased a barge and docked it on the river behind the refinery. All Domino employees were kept on the payroll, but only 20 were brought back initially. Fighting mosquitoes and heat, the men worked 12-hour days using only diesel generators, brute strength and physics to hoist and lift submerged machinery. They slept and ate on the barge, earning time-and-a-half for every hour worked.

"They are fighters, in a good way," Maraia says. "I think they felt they were on a mission. They knew that if they wanted to live here again, they had to have a job here."