Southwest Louisiana struggles after forgotten storm

CAMERON, Louisiana, May 19: Becky Hebert watched as an excavator's bucket chewed into her family home, finishing the job that Hurricane Rita started eight months ago.

The wood-frame house was one of few structures left standing in Cameron, a small southwest Louisiana town that took a near-direct hit from Rita and its 15 to 20-foot storm surge.

But it was badly damaged and in danger of collapsing. She had no insurance on the place.

''People are so depressed right now; it's hard to look around here,'' Hebert said as her three-year-old grandson Jack played at her feet. ''That was a nice home right there. There was a lifetime in that house.'' Hebert could not hold back tears as she recalled years of meeting neighbours at places around the small Gulf Coast town, like grocery stores, a school, a library, all destroyed by what in many ways became America's forgotten disaster.

Now locals in this Cajun heartland hope Washington and the state remember them as they rebuild, nearly from scratch, against the backdrop of new hurricane season.

Powerful Rita slammed the Louisiana-Texas border area on September. 24 as the 10th hurricane of 2005, devastating Cameron, an important oil service and fishing centre, and nearby villages like Holly Beach and Johnson Bayou. Lake Charles, Louisiana, and a large swathe of southeast Texas, both large oil refining areas, also suffered heavy damage.

After an extensive evacuation before landfall, the death toll was 119. Damage was estimated at 10 billion dollars.

Most oil facilities around Cameron are back in operation, but recovery for residents is slow, away from the media glare.

The harbour is still dotted with damaged vessels and debris. Gas stations are frozen in time, their signs blown out and pumps broken and rusting. Concrete pads mark where homes were.

OVERSHADOWED BY KATRINA

Cameron Parish residents understand why government and media attention has been fixed on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hammered the Gulf Coast to the east less than a month before, overwhelming levees in New Orleans, causing more than 1,300 deaths and scattering hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

But it is little consolation.

''I would just cry and pray for those people, but then it happened to us. And it was like no one mentioned our town,'' said Hebert, 53.

About 6,000 people lived along the coast in southern Cameron Parish before Rita, and less than a third have returned. There was talk after the disaster that the region should be abandoned and its people relocated to the north. Now, many residents are bent on rebuilding, despite their vulnerability to the gulf's winds and predictions by some weather experts that storms are becoming stronger and more frequent, said Clifton Hebert, the parish's emergency operations director.

The new Atlantic hurricane season starts June 1, and forecasters predict a busy period for strong storms.

''It's just kind of a way of life. You deal with your locale.

Being born and raised in Cameron Parish, it's just an everyday event,'' said Hebert, who is not related to Becky.

This was not Cameron's first disaster. It was rebuilt after it was nearly destroyed by Hurricane Audrey in 1957.

Brisk energy industry activity with oil at 70 dollars a barrel and construction of three new liquefied natural gas plants nearby are already helping to drive efforts to recover, he said.

'PERFECT, EXCEPT FOR THE HURRICANE'

Just a few miles west is Holly Beach, a strip of sand and popular vacation spot that became known as the ''Cajun Riviera,'' where oil platforms dot the gulf horizon. Here, Rita pulverized vacation homes, crumpled cars and boats and sent everything hurdling deep into the vast swamp.

Sissy Pugh and her husband Donnie are among just a few stalwarts who have returned to claim their spot. Their home is a camper-trailer they can haul away whenever storms threaten.

Pugh, an artist who has lived here since 1999, likes the solitude. She has been fashioning breadloaf-sized mosquito statues out of polymer clay that she calls ''Rita Skeeters.'' ''Mother nature gives you anything you need for whatever crafts you want to do -- where you going to find that at? And the weather's good almost all year around. In my book it's perfect, except for the hurricane,'' said Pugh, 59.

Throughout Cameron Parish, essential services are not being brought back fast enough to support population growth, said Hebert, the emergency director. Some of that may be because of the attention paid to recovering from Katrina, which has been marked by political infighting, he said.

''I'm just afraid that Washington doesn't understand or doesn't realise the impact that Cameron Parish has on the state of Louisiana and the entire country at times,'' Hebert said.

He said the region needs a new health care system after Rita destroyed the only hospital that serves the local population and offshore oil industry, and aid from higher levels of government is needed quickly.

How many parish residents return from temporary homes and government-supplied trailers around Lake Charles and elsewhere to rebuild along the coast is still an open question, however.

''They're definitely still really gun-shy,'' Hebert said. ''A lot of them are not even moving back because they've said, 'We're going to wait a year and see how it goes.' They want to get past one hurricane season.''

REUTERS