A Company Town on The Mississippi

"Look at this," Labrosse says, pulling down the air filter in her trailer covered with gray silt. "We have to take this down and wash it all the time."

The air in St. Bernard Parish is an invisible galaxy of dust, spores and mold. Six out of 10 patients who visit the temporary medical trailers have respiratory problems, according to Paul Verrette, medical director of the Department of Homeland Security in the parish.

Nancy Bird, wife of a Domino worker, won't let her child live in the trailer park because of environmental concerns. Besides the air quality, Bird worries about soil contamination from an oil spill during the hurricane not far from the public school that has reopened.

"I don't understand the common sense of letting kids live here," says Bird, who lives elsewhere in Louisiana with her son while her husband stays in a Domino trailer.

But many have no choice.

One night after dinner, as a cold wind blows across the trailers, Freddie Meyer's daughter, Megan, 11, and Devin LaChapelle, 12, are kicking rocks with their sneakers. "I can describe this place in three words," Devin says. "Dusty, dirty and boring. It's not normal."

"It's not home," Megan says.

As the refinery's engines grind above them, Devin and Megan walk along the fence and across the street to the levee. The lights of New Orleans burn across the river. The kids trade evacuation stories. Megan says that when they got back to her house, her parakeet was dead and his head was sticking up through the top of the cage. "He was trying to breathe while the water came up," she says.

Devin evacuated to New Mexico. "The people gave us clothes," he says.

They shiver in silence, then turn back to the trailers.

'We Are Close-Knit'

On the fourth floor of the refinery, the mechanics stand near the windows on a smoke break. Meyer and Wayne Dear glisten with sweat. Then it's back to the darkness of the machinery, where the No. 2 Syrup Pumping Pot and huge centrifuges that spin the water from the raw sugar groan and wheeze.

The sour smell of fermented sugar still lingers. Raw sugar is brought in from Texas or Louisiana and refined here: washed, purified, spun, dried and emerging in snowy crystals that fill 2,000-pound totes bound for Kellogg or 5-pound packages bound for Wal-Mart. With storm-damaged machinery, Domino is only able to produce half its product run. New mechanical palletizers have not come in yet, so sugar is loaded onto pallets by hand, slowly, rhythmically, in a pace the workers calibrate to help them last eight hours.