The Rebuilding: Starting from Scratch

Inside the ExxonMobil refinery offices he commandeered after Hurricane Katrina, where temporary telephone wires dangle from the ceiling alongside sticky yellow flytraps dotted with dead flies and mosquitoes, Henry (Junior) Rodriguez is deliberating on the future of devastated St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans. As he downs a bag of chocolates that constitutes dinner, his considerable paunch on display, the parish president rehearses his upcoming appeal to Congress: with no taxpayers and no businesses, St. Bernard has money for just one month's payroll. Rodriguez wants help from Washington--or else. "Do people realize we produce 30% of the nation's gas and crude down here? Maybe I'll shut down the only refinery in the nation that processes Venezuelan oil," he says.

A couple of miles up the Mississippi, on an aging casino ferry hired by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house homeless parish employees, councilman-at-large Joey DiFatta is echoing that subversive sentiment after hearing some critics in Washington claim that St. Bernard should not be rebuilt at all. "I'll tell you why we need to rebuild this parish. When that bastard up north is paying $5 a gallon because the two biggest oil refineries in Louisiana--both located here--are not producing gas for his fat-cat car, that's when he'll learn about St. Bernard Parish," he says. "They better realize we count. The rest of the nation capitalizes on us, and we're tired of it."

If the rhetoric seems strident, it's only because the situation in St. Bernard Parish is so desperate. Unlike in New Orleans, which is turning on the lights and water spigots, the 67,000 people who live on the peninsula to the east--mostly white and middle-class homeowners--have nothing at all to go back to. Katrina's tidal surge, with waves of up to 25 ft., was so strong, it moved houses--their concrete foundations still attached--down streets. The parish president, who lost his home like everyone else did, figures there is just one habitable house left out of 25,000 in the entire parish. Even the homes that "survived" Katrina are foul with mud, mold and nests of water moccasins. From 50% to 80% of the parish may be so structurally unsound, it will have to be razed.

Rodriguez figures that with only 20,000 to 25,000 residents expected back this year, the parish will have to somehow survive without sales and property taxes for two years. Five weeks after Katrina, there is no electricity and no hope of any in the coming weeks. Not one gas station or grocery store is open. The lone hospital has been shuttered--for good. Sheriff Jack Stephens, who has had to lay off half his department, is worried about keeping the parish's remaining 182 deputies on the payroll. All his communications and tactical gear, along with most of his department's 136 vehicles, were lost. With the National Guard largely gone, his men are stretched thin, answering calls about looters and snakes. "We have lots of reptile infestations," says Stephens, who fled one house after encountering 15 water moccasins. "[That's] not in my contract." His men last week caught beasts of a different kind--an organized gang of looters.