Banding Together for Bad News

The streets of St. Bernard Parish, a working-class suburb of New Orleans, are coated with viscous marsh mud and spilled oil. Dogs trot through empty streets, their ribs showing, and tadpoles have begun to breed in pools of water left by the flood. But the families? The families are intact.

That much was clear Monday, when about 3,000 residents of the destroyed parish packed the marble hallways of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge, about 80 miles northwest of their homes.

Three hundred had been expected, but the crowd overflowed into conference rooms and cafeterias and onto the steps outside. All afternoon, the grand lobby rang with the sound of old friends finding each other. They were crowing with delight, running across the room to hug one another, remarking on how their children had grown.

“This building was supposed to close at 4:30,” Marian McKin, a Senate security guard, said as the clock showed 5:15 p.m. “I’m just waiting for the beer truck to pull up.”

Alongside the joy of reunion was the worst news imaginable about the fishing and oil production towns strung along the marshes and bayous outside New Orleans. Henry “Junior” Rodriguez, the parish president, put it bluntly.

“I hope you remember what St. Bernard looked like when you left,” he said, “because when you go back, you won’t recognize it.”

It will take at least four months to clean the parish, officials said, and anyone visiting sooner will have to wear rubber gloves, boots and masks to protect themselves from spilled oil and mud infected with E. coli bacteria and hepatitis.

Some questioned whether St. Bernard would ever again be what it had been for so many generations -- a knot of old families where you could expect to find a cousin or a grandparent on most every block. Most of its 66,000 residents have scattered now, and on Monday, it wasn’t clear when they would gather again.

Bryan Frichter, a dentist, programmed 149 numbers into his cellphone. Russell Palazzolo scribbled down numbers in a spiral notebook.

“The thing is, this is our life,” said Palazzolo, waving his hands toward the crowd. “This is what we live for. Chances are, we’ll never see these people again.”

For the first week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall Aug. 29, the fate of St. Bernard Parish disappeared beside the calamity of New Orleans. Not until Sept. 3 did media reach the town of Chalmette, where residents told of a 25-foot storm surge followed by six days spent in desperate isolation as they waited for state and federal forces to reach them.

Among the 56 bodies that have been recovered were 20 elderly people who drowned together in a one-story nursing home, St. Rita’s. A group of 22 residents were found bound together in a Chalmette subdivision, probably trying evacuate to safety. Bodies will probably be found in 10 more locations, Sheriff Jack Stephens said.

State Sen. Walter Boasso said 30,000 homes had been destroyed.

At Monday’s meeting, Rodriguez rebuked New Orleans media outlets for neglecting the parish after the storm; journalists from Japan, the Canary Islands, Spain and Sweden, he said, had shown more interest.

A man in the audience began shouting at cameramen who were blocking residents’ views.

“Why wasn’t you there when we needed you?” one man said. A woman in the back of the hall called out: “Ask the movie people to move! They won’t move!” The shouting grew so loud that the meeting was halted for a few minutes.

People in St. Bernard, a predominately white, working-class area, long have felt like stepchildren to New Orleans, a city beloved by tourists for its languidness and decadence. Many of the men who gathered at the Capitol had muscled forearms, tattoos and deep sunburns. St. Bernard’s residents mostly are descended from Acadians or from the “Islenos,” Spanish-speakers from the Canary Islands.

They’re the kind of people who “don’t complain very much, they just do the work,” said the Rev. Herb Kiff, pastor of San Pedro Church in Chalmette. “They know how to eat, they know how to drink, they know how to live.”

Parish officials took pains Monday to compare their residents’ behavior with that of survivors in New Orleans, where there was widespread unrest.

“Was there looting in St. Bernard? You bet there was,” Boasso said. “Let me tell you what it was. It was the Sheriff’s Department, the Fire Department and the city councilors going out in 6- or 7-foot waters to get food to people.”

Stephens, the sheriff, described an “apocalyptic” night when he rode a boat down a main thoroughfare and nearly hit his head on a traffic light. He said he could hear automatic weapons fire from the direction of New Orleans, and felt like he was on another planet.

But the evacuated residents of his parish waited patiently at the port, some so weak they had to lie on bare cement.

“Through all of that, people lay on that cement never complained,” he said. “It was the most heroic ... thing that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”

St. Bernard Councilwoman Judy Hoffmeister said that seeing the destruction in the parish was “like watching the death of a loved one, the death of a community.” She begged residents at the meeting to return to the parish when it reopened. “People, please, please stay with us,” she said. “We’re coming back again.”

But Alicia Necaise, 30, who was calming her 2-year-old son outside the hearing room, said she didn’t think she and her family would return.

Kiff, the reverend, shrugged. He was rounding up parishioners, one by one.

“If they go back, I’ll go back,” he said. “If they leave, I’ll leave.”