Rita's remnants

As New Orleans reels from effects of a second storm, Texas town endures tragedy and region cleans up

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF WRITER

September 27, 2005

Rescuers combed the soggy, battered landscape for victims of Hurricane Rita yesterday as authorities tried to block over-eager residents from returning home to towns ill-equipped to handle them.

The death toll from the second devastating hurricane in a month rose to 10 with the discovery in a Beaumont, Texas, apartment of five people - a man, a woman and three children - who apparently were killed by carbon monoxide from a generator they were running indoors after Rita knocked out the electricity. In Texas, a couple was confirmed killed by an uprooted tree that fell on their home, and another man was electrocuted as he tried to connect a generator.

Tens of thousands of head of cattle were also feared dead from the Category 3 hurricane, which left a swath of destruction along the Texas-Louisiana border, obliterated many small towns and disrupted domestic oil production for the second time in a month.

Rita brought additional misery to New Orleans when some of the newly patched levees sprang leaks from Rita's force, re-flooding New Orleans' Ninth Ward. Parts of the neighborhood were under 6 feet of water yesterday, said Mitch Frazier of the Army Corps of Engineers, which was hoping to have it pumped dry in about one week.

In other parts of New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish, some residents were allowed to go home for the first time in nearly a month.

"With Hurricane Rita behind us, the task at hand is to bring New Orleans back," said Mayor C. Ray Nagin, as he reopened the neighborhood of Algiers, which had electricity and running water, to residents. Nagin also invited business owners in the French Quarter, Uptown and the central business district to come back to inspect their buildings and begin cleaning up.

Some returns were far from joyous.

Mohammed Mehmood found his Texaco station in Algiers wrecked by looters as well as Katrina. His gas pumps were vandalized, his computers did not work and his ceiling was about to collapse. "I have no money. They broke and stole everything," he said.

As Owen Pascual stood on the front stoop of his wrecked home in St. Bernard Parish, he said, "There's nothing you can save."

In areas hardest-hit by Rita, such as the Texas refinery cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur, and Lake Charles, La., officials blocked highway exits to prevent people from returning too early. They warned that downed power lines and streets covered in fallen trees and wrecked houses made it too dangerous for residents. They were unable to stop those who returned in their own boats, often to scenes of shocking ruin.

An estimated 80 percent of the buildings in Cameron, La., population 1,900, were leveled. Farther inland, half of Creole, population 1,500, was in splinters. "I would use the word destroyed," Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said of Cameron and Creole, adding that in Cameron, only the courthouse, built on stilts, remained standing. "Most of the houses and public buildings no longer exist or are even in the same location that they were," Honore said.

"I had a little piece of paradise, and now I guess it's gone," said L.E. Nix, whose home on the edge of a bayou in Louisiana's Calcasieu Parish was swamped.

Throughout the area, ponds glittered with dead fish washed up by the storm surge, and bloated cattle carcasses blocked roads. Remarkably, no deaths had been reported in Louisiana as a result of Rita, something officials attributed to the heeding of evacuation orders by residents fearing a repeat of Katrina. That storm killed at least 1,079 people, most of them in Louisiana.

Texans also evacuated by the millions, and there were fears their mass return home would lead to gas shortages. President George W. Bush said he was willing to tap into the country's strategic oil reserve as he did after Katrina to boost energy supplies, and he urged Americans to conserve gas. He planned to visit the refinery cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur today.

"We can all pitch in by being better conservers of energy," Bush said. "People just need to realize that the storms have caused disruption."

Staff correspondent Martin C. Evans contributed to this story. It also was supplemented with wire reports.