By Alan Freeman
'Marsh rats' set to rebuild area devastated by hurricane. Wrath of Rita crushes Cameron Parish -- but not its many resilient residents.
SULPHUR, LA. -- Dwight Guitry bristles when a stranger suggests that Cameron Parish may not be the best place to rebuild his life after another hurricane shattered the isolated region on the Texas-Louisiana border.
"This is my home and this little hurricane ain't going to stop me," said Mr. Guitry, a fishing-camp operator who's desperate to get back home to the nearby town of Hackberry to survey the damage wrought by hurricane Rita.
Mr. Guitry and about a dozen other residents of the town have congregated at the northern end of Ellender Bridge, which spans the Intercoastal Waterway and where the Cameron County Sheriff's Department has erected a roadblock to stop anybody but essential service personnel from getting into the parish. Even getting to the bridge along Highway 27 is a dangerous drive across downed transmission lines lying like metal spaghetti on the roadway, the poles that carried it at precarious angles or shattered on the ground.
Cameron Parish was ground zero for hurricane Rita, its fishing villages and coastal towns devastated by the wrath of the storm.
"Holly Beach is no longer there. The only structure left there is the water tower. Holly Beach is now just a sand flat," said Randy Hunt, an officer with the Sheriff's Department who's manning the roadblock. "In Cameron, the court house survived but the school is destroyed and the library is gone. It's just a big mess."
In Hackberry, where Mr. Hunt's own home sustained extensive damage, the Catholic church was virtually destroyed and coffins from the adjacent cemetery have floated away.
For Cameron Parish, a marshy region of alligator-infested bayous, oil terminals and fishing villages populated with Cajuns with surnames such as Bergeron, Daigle and Thibodeaux, Rita was not the first uninvited visitor to try and destroy the place. Forty-eight years ago, hurricane Audrey hit the same region, killing 390 people, making it one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history.
That was before the days of accurate weather forecasting, so many of Audrey's victims died in their beds. With that knowledge and the collective memory of the 1957 storm, most people evacuated from Cameron Parish on the eve of Rita's arrival and none of its 9,200 residents died.
Jeff Moore was one of the few holdouts. "I'm pretty hard-headed," declared the 20-year-old barge employee just after landing here on an aluminum boat from Hackberry; he had ridden out the storm in his home with his work buddy Jack East. "It was pretty intense, pretty rough. You could hear the shingles popping off the roof. You could hear the tin coming off our out-buildings. There was a lot of shaking." Asked if he would repeat the experience, the young man didn't hesitate a moment. "I sure wouldn't do it again."
James Devall also rode out the storm in the wheelhouse of one of the tugboats he operates with his three brothers, which they had moored beneath the bridge at the home base of their industrial barge company, Devall Towing.
"It sounded like a tornado. It was something else. I prayed a lot of rosaries," said Mr. Devall, who was seven years old when Audrey hit. "It just rang and rang. It was so powerful, I thought something would burst."
Ignoring the sheriff's order to stay out of the parish, Mr. Devall snuck into Hackberry and discovered that his home had survived, except with a hole in his living room and water in his kitchen. At the roadblock, the policemen have relaxed their rules and allowed residents with cattle through the line to try and save their animals, many of whom are marooned in the sea water that the storm surge brought in.
"I still have five horses in my pasture," said Bodie Jenks, who works at an oil storage depot in Hackberry. "They haven't had any water in three days." Temperatures are hovering at 100 F.
Mr. Jenks sees no reason why he and other residents of the parish shouldn't rebuild. "It's either fight the hurricanes here or fight the tornadoes up north."
David Reeves, dressed in the blue jumpsuit of the oil-services firm he works for, was also anxious to get through the roadblock to check on his house. Asked if he would rebuild, he smiled and nodded enthusiast- ically.
"It's home. We were born and raised here. We're marsh rats."
Developments
The death toll from Rita reached at least nine after five members of a Texas family were found dead in a Beaumont apartment, victims of carbon-monoxide poisoning from a generator used during the storm, and a 43-year-old man and a 56-year-old woman in Liberty County, Texas, died when a tree crushed their mobile home.
A steady stream of people were brought by small boats from flooded sections in Terrebonne Parish, La., where nearly 9,900 homes were severely damaged. The Office of Emergency Preparedness said the floodwaters were going down in most areas.
More than 110,000 people living in Beaumont, Tex., were urged not to return home, since water, electricity, telephone and sewer services will not be restored for weeks.
About 300,000 customers were without power in Louisiana, and 250,000 in Texas, a number cut in half since the storm hit.
At least 16 Texas oil refineries remained shut down, but just one faces weeks of repairs.
U.S. President George W. Bush urged Americans to cut back on unnecess- ary travel to make up for fuel shortages. "We can all pitch in by being better conservers of energy," he said, but that didn't mean curtailing his plans to return to the region this week. He also said the government was ready to release fuel from its emergency oil stockpile to alleviate high prices.
The army used Blackhawk helicopters equipped with satellite- positioning systems to search for up to 30,000 head of roaming cattle amid fears as many as 4,000 may have been killed in Cameron Parish alone, where ranchers on horseback struggled to herd animals into corrals attached to pickup trucks.
Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. The Globe and Mail Newspaper.
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