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After Katrina, A Lonely Homecoming
(A.j. Sisco)
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"They're in a hard area -- they really are," said Karen Durham-Aguilera, a Corps official, pointing to a map in her office to illustrate the parish's proximity to the Gulf. "I don't blame them at all for being worried."
The Corps is in the midst of a $14.7 billion upgrade to the levees that protect St. Bernard and the New Orleans area. The fate of St. Bernard may lie in whether residents believe that this time they really will be safe.
"I think the Corps mean well," Dupont said. "I just don't think they can ever guarantee you absolute safety."
Sadness Turns to Anger
Daniel Simpson, 58, is a system programmer at a New Orleans hospital; his wife, Anna, 55, is a nurse. Together they raised three children at their house on Fawn Drive, and they describe themselves as "a middle-class family, doing middle-class things."
Their kids attended the St. Robert Bellarmine School; they played at the nearby playground where Daniel coached baseball, basketball and track; his and her families lived nearby.
"It was wonderful to be there," Daniel said.
They have relocated to Lafayette, but Anna still tears up when they pass the old house on the way to visit friends. "Then I'm miserable the whole way back to Lafayette," she said. "We wanted to be there the rest of our lives."
Now, though, they're mad.
The Simpsons were among the early wave of applicants to "Road Home," a state-run program funded with at least $8 billion in federal money that was supposed to be the linchpin in the rebuilding.
The program promised that homeowners who lacked adequate flood insurance could recoup as much as $150,000 of their flood losses.
But distribution has proven torturously slow, even insulting at times to applicants, making it even less likely that they will return to their homes. Two years out from the devastation, 3,899 of the 16,195 applicants from St. Bernard Parish -- fewer than one-fourth -- have received checks.
To participate, each of the Simpsons had to be photographed and fingerprinted. The extraordinary measures were required to reduce fraud, they were told, but it still rankled.
