After Katrina, A Lonely Homecoming
Two years later, just a few residents of a tightknit Louisiana community have returned to their ruined neighborhood.

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 26, 2007

ARABI, La. -- Honie Bauer was the first to move back.

It was seven months after Hurricane Katrina, and she figured others would follow her return to the block of little brick houses they'd all abandoned during the flood. She plunked a FEMA trailer down in her front yard. She mucked out the house. She put up drywall. She laid tile.

The pull of her tightknit community in St. Bernard Parish, or at least her memory of it, was powerful.

"This is home, and I just had to be here," said Bauer, 35, a hospital office manager and a native of the area. "I was going to do whatever it takes."

But while Bauer was charging in, most of her neighbors on the city block bounded by Rowley Boulevard, Fawn Drive, Badger Drive and Fox Drive, were in the midst of a completely different maneuver: They were retreating.

Today, nearly two years after the storm, 11 of 14 properties on the block stand vacant, and in interviews, all but one of those who left indicated they have no intention of returning. Far from rising from the devastation of Katrina, this slice of St. Bernard Parish remains a desolate and depressing place.

It is a scene repeated in flood-ravaged neighborhoods elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, especially parts of the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly and New Orleans East. In St. Bernard, most of the 67,000 residents have not returned. The massive desertions are evidence that Katrina's destructive effects are no longer acute but chronic and that, as evacuees set down roots elsewhere, many close-knit communities blasted apart by the storm may never return.

House after house in Bauer's neighborhood sits abandoned, most boarded up, their darkened facades still bearing the spray-painted symbols that rescuers scrawled on each house to record the dead. Other structures have been demolished down to the concrete slab. In some yards, the grass grows shoulder-high.

Dingy white pump trucks regularly rumble through, stopping at manholes, dropping tubes down and sucking the sewage out of the parish's broken underground system. And in a neighborhood that once enjoyed backyard cookouts for New Orleans Saints football games, those few children who have returned are now forbidden from going barefoot -- there's too much broken glass out there -- and they complain of having no friends to play with.

"It's like the apocalypse over here now," said Phyllis Puglia, a 52-year-old lawyer and former resident of Fawn Drive. "People are afraid."

Exactly who is to blame for the persistent abandonment is a matter of argument here.

Some point to the FEMA-led rebuilding bureaucracy, which has proved unequal at times to the challenge of rapidly rebuilding the vast wreckage. Others cite paperwork delays plaguing the state-run "Road Home" program, which -- eventually -- is supposed to distribute federal funds to homeowners.

But the faltering recovery is also tied to the almost primal fear of another inundation. While the Army Corps of Engineers is making massive improvements to the earthen mounds that keep the floodwaters out, many who suffered their failure in Katrina are reluctant to trust the engineers again.

But whatever reasons people have chosen to stay away, their absences are having a staggering effect on St. Bernard Parish.

Neither the Sears, nor the Wal-Mart, nor the Kmart in the parish has reopened. The only hospital and movie theater are closed. So are the two skating rinks and seven of the eight Catholic churches. The neighborhood still lacks phone lines and cable connections.

"The United States is not a Third World country," Anna Simpson, 55, a former neighbor, said in exasperation. "This shouldn't be happening here."

Connections Across Generations

The origins of St. Bernard Parish lie in farming, fishing and shrimping, but by the 1950s, it had evolved into a more conventional suburb of New Orleans.

The population, which was predominantly white and Catholic, was not particularly affluent, but 75 percent of people owned their homes, many of them modest brick houses set close together.

Residents were remarkably clannish. Many people in St. Bernard could boast of having parents or a sibling living within a few houses, and many families had been there for generations.

Darren Dupont's house on Fox Drive was next door to his father's. Phyllis Puglia's on Fawn was a block away from the house she grew up in.

Honie Bauer's father, brother and two sisters had all lived within a few miles of one another, some within walking distance.

Now her brother and sister and their families are living in her three-bedroom house on Fox -- nine people, four dogs, two cats and a ferret -- as they rearrange their lives after the storm.

Tall and outgoing, Bauer speaks with the r-less regional accent particular to St. Bernard, which here is pronounced something like "Sayn Bin-odd." She seemed surprised that families elsewhere might be far-flung geographically. "We all get along," she explained.

"We don't know any other way -- I just don't know any different," she said. "For me to not live near my family would be a struggle."

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.

"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.

"We were treated like criminals," Anna said.

It got worse when the appraisers came back and said their $130,000 house was worth $92,000. They haggled and months later got the figure up to $109,000. Then, at last, in April it came up to $130,000. Deducting the flood insurance they had, the program would yield them about $40,000.

More than four months later, they haven't seen a check. The paperwork is still being processed, they've been told.

"I'm furious at the process," Daniel said.

"I feel like I have aged 10 years," Anna said. "It's unbelievable how difficult this has been."

"We call it the Road to Nowhere," Daniel said.

'We Lost Everything All at Once'

When Mark Benfatti, an affable restaurateur who has left St. Bernard, mulls over what has happened to his life, he often thinks of "Gilligan's Island."

"You know, when the hurricane was coming, I packed for three days," he said. "And, just like Gilligan, I never got home."

Benfatti and his wife, Donna, like thousands of people from St. Bernard, have moved to one of the communities on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

Many of those who fled for the north shore find it more affluent but more impersonal, too, and Benfatti sorely missed seeing familiar faces.

So, earlier this month, he and his wife hosted a $25-a-head St. Bernard reunion party. After renting a hall and a band, they wondered if anyone would show up.

More than 750 people got tickets, filling the hall, and then the Benfattis closed the waiting list after it reached 50. The party was supposed to start at 8 p.m., but the parking lot began to fill at 7.

"If somebody dies, you miss that person. But you still got your job, you have your neighbors, you have your family," Benfatti said. "Here we lost everything all at once. We can never put back the community."

News assistant Jill F. Bartscht contributed to this report.