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thedrifter
09-11-05, 06:30 AM
Katrina wiped out entire towns in vulnerable part of Louisiana
BY JAMES JANEGA
Chicago Tribune

YSCLOSKEY, La. - (KRT) - This town is no more. Neither are Delacroix, or Reggio. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, neither are most of the towns and fishing hamlets of rural St. Bernard Parish.

The uniformity of the destruction is astonishing. This town is worse than Reggio. There is nothing left whole in Yscloskey but a coiled hose and a fluorescent light bulb.

"Awful," said Henry Rodriguez Jr., parish president, as he rode Saturday on recently cleared roads and viewed the disaster damage with the sheriff and the director of port operations.

"It looks like a war zone," he said as they stopped their black sport utility vehicle on the road between what was once Yscloskey and Reggio.

Blocked by receding waters and foul, sticking mud, emergency workers and parish officials had to wait until Saturday to see this part of the parish and how badly it was affected.

The devastation they found was total. Waves wiped entire towns from the map.

The storm could not have found a more delicate, vulnerable part of Louisiana, where much of the nation's seafood and a good chunk of its oil are produced. The state is second only to Alaska as a producer of seafood, with most of the oysters gathered here coming from waters off devastated St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.

Likewise, with major oil refineries in Meraux, Chalmette and Belle Chasse, the two parishes account for a quarter to a third of Louisiana's 59-million-barrel-a-day oil production and some 14 percent of its natural gas output.

Saturday, the oil refineries and pumps hidden in the bayous of St. Bernard Parish were silent. The fishing fleets that supply the nation with sweet oysters and fat shrimp were in pieces, or landlocked behind drying mud and splintered debris.

Of more immediate concern, the towns that once supported the industries were destroyed. And it looked less as if they had been wrecked by water than by a bomb. In Reggio, trophy rifles and shotguns rusted on a roadside where water had hurled them. Washing machines lay in a nearby ditch, covered in cracked, drying mud. Clothing hung in the branches of live oaks beside Spanish moss, and someone's sour mash whiskey collection lay unconsumed but covered in papery, peeling filth.

Houses nearby were now piles of cinderblocks_a tiled kitchen sink beside a corroding lawn mower, a boy's bicycle tangled in a window frame.

The only thing to survive in Reggio was the San Pedro Pescador Catholic Church, named for St. Peter the Fisherman. But water had found its way into the second-floor sanctuary, defiling the carpets and coating the wooden pews with mold.

The crucifix stayed in place, though it was unclear who would worship there if nothing else in the town was left standing.

There were none of the chemicals and fetid sewer stench of nearby Chalmette and Meraux, as they struggled with a filthy, three-and-a-half-square-mile oil spill over what was once a bucolic middle-American neighborhood.

In southern St. Bernard Parish, this was where the sea washed onto land, treetop high and crashing horribly, when Katrina roared ashore Monday.

Television sets dangled by cords from tree branches and fishing nets - dozens of them - wound around cypress trees and splintered homes. In places, there were no homes, just cinderblock stairways leading to nothing.

"How'd you like to come back to something like that?" Rodriguez asked. But no one answered.

Snowy egrets fluttered like angels over the silent devastation. Oysters were washed onto the town's single road.

Officials believe most of the people evacuated these towns before Katrina hit.

If they had not, their bodies would be buried under rubble crushed into such small pieces that emergency workers have had trouble marking them. There was nothing big enough to write on for the crews who passed through carrying cans of neon orange spray paint to mark the locations of the dead. In places, responders marked trees nearby but found no dead.

If there are corpses yet to be found, they could have been washed into the endless swamps and palmetto marshes around the towns. It will be weeks before the living will likely return to this part of St. Bernard, parish officials say.

Later Saturday, Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., rumbled down deserted roads in amphibious vehicles whose racket could be heard for miles in the awful silence. National Guardsmen from Colorado and firefighters from around the country have been following in order to search more thoroughly for survivors or victims.

The Marines pulled up Saturday in a cul-de-sac in Yscloskey (pronounced why-KLOS-key by locals). But there was no one to save, and nothing left to protect.

Gone is the pleasant canal crossroads where the fishermen built their houses on stilts, their back porches serving as docks for their pirogues and motorboats. Their working boats are there, but in pieces - clogging bayous and canals, or sitting upside down on roadways or in trees.

It is the same in Delacroix, once home to generations of fishers and trappers on the southern Louisiana bayou. Heavy pilings remain where houses were built to survive massive flooding.

But they were no match for the horizontal mudslide that blasted through the cypress trees, came in through windows and down hallways of the few houses that weren't blown completely apart.

The mud kept flowing across the parish route that ends there, dumping its load of tree branches and livelihoods into a clot that closed the bayou and canal, once as important a lifeline for the town as the road.

A post with a sign reading "Fire Station No. 12" had fallen into the water, but it wasn't clear where the fire station had been.

Crab traps, a few with dying crabs still in them, were stranded on Delacroix's roadway berm.

Unlike other nearby areas where rescuers are fanning through neighborhoods looking for people, here the only emergency equipment brought in so far was a backhoe on a flatbed truck.

Ellie