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After Katrina, A Lonely Homecoming
(A.j. Sisco)
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Those close connections across generations led many to believe that St. Bernard would be one of the first of the flood-ravaged areas to refill with people.
"I knew all along that I'd return," Bauer said.
But as most of her neighbors did, her father, fearing another catastrophe, has left St. Bernard permanently.
"My father thought I was crazy," she said.
Fear Drives Departures
What's left of Darren Dupont's brick house is just the concrete slab it was built upon.
Dupont, 42, a mechanical designer, was born and raised in the neighborhood. Just a year before the storm, he'd bought his first house because it was quiet and within walking distance to a park for his son, Justin, then 10. Less than a block away, too, was the church, St. Robert Bellarmine Catholic, where he had served as an altar boy.
Yet after fleeing Katrina, Dupont decided he would never return.
"My biggest reason for leaving is that I just don't feel it was safe for me and my son," said Dupont, who has moved to Hammond, La. "Never in my wildest imagination did I think something like Katrina would happen. I always knew I lived in a bowl. I just never knew I lived at the bottom of the bowl."
The fear is widespread: Of the 11 households now living elsewhere, nine cited the possibility of another inundation as the primary reason, or one of the primary reasons, for leaving.
As have other residents who were there for Hurricane Betsy in 1965, Darren's father, Erwin, 70, a genial retired air-conditioning technician, has been flooded twice.
"I just didn't want to fight it no more," Erwin Dupont said. "In my mind, Betsy was the benchmark -- I didn't think it could get any worse. But then it did."
St. Bernard extends southeast from New Orleans, threatened by the three bodies of water at its edges: the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River and a shipping channel known as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet -- the "Mr. Go" in local parlance.
