Louisiana Counts Storms’ Crippling Costs

From the air, the coast of Louisiana resembles a broken mirror, slivered in shards of landscape and bands of floodwater.

On the ground, the destruction is by now familiar -- whole forests toppled, houses carried off by currents or obliterated by wind blasts, sweat-streaked soldiers and repair crews gaping at the enormity of it all.

Over the last few days, as officials have assessed the damage from Hurricane Rita in aerial surveys across the southern third of the state, an accounting of destruction from last week’s storm and from Hurricane Katrina has begun to emerge.

The numbers are incomplete, but taken together, they tell of a state crippled in two staggering blows: more than 500,000 left homeless by Katrina and tens of thousands more by Rita. About 300,000 people out of work and 70,000 living in shelters. At least 200,000 homes destroyed or heavily damaged. At least $1 billion in agricultural losses caused by Katrina and perhaps more by last week’s storm. A $2-billion-a-year fishing industry erased. As many as 40,000 head of cattle wiped out. And 885 residents left dead by Katrina.

The California-based Risk Management Services projects that the final price tag for repairing the damage from Katrina alone could be in the $125-billion range.

At this point, less than a week after Rita struck, officials can only guess at the second hurricane’s toll on the state’s agriculture, business, housing and residents.

But even the most preliminary numbers hint at losses that are “just pretty staggering,” Bob Odom, Louisiana’s commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry, said Tuesday.

Though the storms struck hardest at Louisiana’s southern region, at least 33 of the 64 parishes have been affected. And nearly every sector of the state’s economy has taken a staggering hit.

New Orleans’ reopened port and its tourism trade are expected to rebound fairly quickly. “The two main things the city had going for it will return -- that’s the port and tourism,” said John M. Barry, author of “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927,” a history of the city’s last great disaster. “And they were on the verge of creating a major biomedical complex. Economically, the pieces are there.”

At least 500,000 New Orleans-area residents have been displaced by Katrina and tens of thousands more left homeless in the countryside by Rita.

Rita’s storm surges submerged fields all over the coast in briny tides capable of choking crops for several planting seasons -- a potential crippling blow to the state’s farmland after Katrina had wreaked $1 billion in agricultural losses.

When Joseph Dyson, 49, returned Tuesday to the obliterated town of Cameron and found his home broken into three sections, his response spoke for the whole beaten state.

“It’s tore up bad,” he said, “like someone dropped a bomb on it.”

There is almost no housing left in Cameron. At least 70% of the parish’s homes are destroyed. Teams of engineers arriving Tuesday to clear debris found only one building intact downtown -- the courthouse.

Cameron had been rocked by eight hours of 120-mph winds and a 20-foot storm surge, according to Theos Duhon, Cameron’s sheriff and tax collector. “The wind played heck with a bunch of things,” Duhon said. “There are homes where there is not a single thing left.”

Louisiana is filled with the detritus of destroyed houses. More than 200,000 dwellings have been destroyed or severely damaged, said Michael Olivier, secretary of Louisiana Economic Development. The acres of ruined property will require an estimated 5 billion board feet of lumber to rebuild, Olivier said.

“To repair all of our homes, we need more than what was lost,” he said.

In Cameron, all but three of the parish’s population of 10,000 evacuated the area before Rita hit. Some, like Dyson, are returning, shocked by the fragments of rubble that sit in the vacant lots they once called homes.

Cameron’s new homeless and tens of thousands of others who were forced from their residences last weekend have joined those in New Orleans who were dispossessed by Katrina.

As of Monday, nearly 50,000 Louisianans were living in shelters elsewhere in the state and an additional 30,000 were housed in shelters scattered across the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of others were living in motels or in the homes of friends and relatives.

To the north of Cameron, in Calcasieu Parish, downed electric and telephone poles are everywhere, stacked in rows in the middle of the road or tilting out of the earth, ready to fall at any moment. The entire parish is without power, and will be for at least a month, said parish President Hal McMillin.

The plant that generates most of the area’s electricity and the 60 transmission lines that send it to homes and businesses were downed or damaged by the storm. Most of the parish has no running water.

Police have set up roadblocks to turn away returning residents, but many have begun sneaking in over back roads.

“They’re hot and thirsty. They have to take care of themselves because we can’t take care of them right now,” said Dudley Dixon, mayor of the Calcasieu Parish town of Westlake.

After days of meetings, memos and more meetings, his town is still a mess, trees everywhere, no power, no progress.

“They keep telling me to wait, to be patient. I’m trying to be patient, but our people are stressed and stretched. We need to start doing something,” he said.

Utility companies had been making headway in restoring power in New Orleans and southeast-Louisiana parishes ravaged a month ago by Katrina. At least 216,000 state residents were still out of power when Rita struck. The new storm’s blitzkrieg through southwest Louisiana blacked out power to 285,000 more customers. Some 350,000 state residents are without telephone service and 24,000 have no gas service.

Trees litter the landscape of the backwoods parishes. In Jefferson Davis Parish, tree branches line the roadway for miles. In Vinton, in Calcasieu Parish, so many trees were blown over by Rita that the entire town smells like a giant cedar chest. On block after block, lawns are smothered under once-towering trunks and cracked limbs.

“They looked better standing,” said Jim Cormier, 47, eyeing a welter of cedars splayed on his lawn and leaning on his roof.

Katrina had cut a devastating swath through Louisiana’s timberlands. At least $700 million worth of trees were downed by the first storm in the southeastern parishes. Agriculture officials have yet to hazard a guess for the destruction to the southwest.

Although much of the downed timber is on private land, Odom is hoping to get federal approval to process much of it in sawmills. But the future of the wind-scoured forests “is my big concern,” Odom said. “It’ll take 30 years to replace most of those trees. Losing that resource hurts us bad.”

The state’s southernmost parishes, Cajun strongholds such as Cameron, Vermilion and Terrebonne, had been vital hubs for farming and fisheries.

Lush sugar cane, cotton and rice fields dominated the bottomlands, and the coast was dotted with fishing villages where families have trawled for shrimp and oysters for generations.

Katrina’s winds and high water caused at least $1 billion in losses to state agriculture, Odom said. Rita compounded the destruction to the region’s farms.

Officials are still working on damage estimates, but they worry that brackish water from the Gulf of Mexico has destroyed the entire sugar cane and rice harvest. Thousands of acres of cane south of U.S. 90 are underwater, he said. At least 60% of the state’s cotton crop was in the fields when the storm surges rolled in. Those crops are also ruined, he said.

Some 11,000 head of cattle appeared to have perished on flooded farms in Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes after Katrina. But Rita’s high tides were even more devastating. As many as 30,000 cattle are missing. Cow and steer carcasses by the hundreds are floating in floodwaters.

Katrina caused at least $200 million in damage to fisheries in southeastern Louisiana. Rita’s implacable storm surges inundated much of the rest of Louisiana’s fishing industry, sweeping away miles of farms, flourishing shrimp and oyster beds and the landings where fishermen plied their trade.

In 2003, commercial fishing in Louisiana reaped nearly $2 billion. The loss of the fishing industry would hit hard at state coffers, which took in sales and income tax revenue of $100 million.

Even the loss of the region’s boat landings will create another ripple of disaster, eliminating as much as $294 million in commercial real estate, said John Roussel, the state’s assistant secretary for fisheries.

Roussel estimates that it will take at least a year to rebuild fishery processing capacity in the western part of the state, where damage to shipping and packing houses was “almost 100%.”

The shrimp industry, which abounded on the central coast, centered in Vermilion Parish, was staggered by Rita. Roussel said all the shrimp processing plants he knows of are underwater. Dockside facilities are demolished, along with ice factories, fueling facilities, marinas and boat launches. Debris jams inlets.

“A small part of the fleet” of fishing vessels in eastern Louisiana survived Katrina, Roussel said, but “as far as shore-side facilities, we were not able to find any,” he said.

Roussel worries that many fisherman, fifth- or sixth-generation operators, had not insured their assets because of high costs and could simply give up on their trade.

“We are going to lose some. There’s no doubt,” he said.

At least 300,000 Louisianans have been displaced from their jobs, Olivier said. When New Orleans evacuated, the state lost its largest population center and its financial engine -- one-quarter of the state’s economy, he added.

State officials have been conferring with New York officials on how to plan post-disaster economic recovery. But the disaster zone in New York after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks extended for 10 blocks. The devastation in Louisiana extends not only through all of New Orleans, but also across 960 square miles of the state, Olivier said.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s rush to revive the French Quarter and the business and tourist sections of the city depends not only on the collective will of business owners but also on the willingness of their employees to return to a city where familiar neighborhoods are in watery ruins.

“The French Quarter and downtown are the parts that the tourists want to see, but it’s the loss of the neighborhoods that’s the real question for New Orleans’ survival,” said Charles Elliot, a professor of Louisiana history at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.

“They can jump-start hotels and the restaurant business. But the trick will be [to] get back all the people who make those places work -- the cooks, the waiters,” Elliot said. “If their neighborhoods are gone for good, how do you get them to come home?”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Louisiana’s devastated coast

All of the parishes along the Gulf of Mexico have experienced significant damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with some areas nearly wiped out by raging winds, massive waves or relentless floodwaters. Here is an overview of the areas in the state hit hardest by the two disasters over the last month.

Parish: Cameron

Industries: Oil, natural gas, fishing, trapping and tourism

Population*: 9,260

Main communities: Cameron; no incorporated towns

Damage:

80% of buildings leveled.

Up to 4,000 cattle perished in swamped fields.

Much of the towns of Cameron and Creole destroyed.

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Parish: Vermilion

Industries: Rice, sugar cane, cattle, shrimp, crawfish and alligator farming

Population*: 50,056

Main communities: Abbeville, Intracoastal City, Erath, Gueydan

Damage:

Heavy flooding with 50% of homes submerged.

More than 1,000 rescued by boat and helicopter.

Widespread power outages.

Thousands of cattle stranded.

Shrimp boats hurled onto land.

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Parish: Iberia/St. Mary/Terrebonne

Industries: Sugar cane, oil, salt, Port of Iberia, Avery Island’s Tabasco

Population*: 223,365

Main communities: New Iberia, Avery Island, Morgan City, Houma

Damage:

Town of Delcambre under 10 feet of water.

Iberia Parish flooded south of U.S. Highway 90 and Louisiana State Route 14.

A 9-foot storm surge from Rita pushed water at least 25 miles into Terrebonne Parish, causing widespread flooding south of Houma.

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Parish: Lafourche/Plaquemines/St. Bernard

Industries: Shipping, fishing, livestock and bayou-oriented tourism

Population*: 161,923

Main communities: Thibodaux, Chalmette and Pointe a la Hache

Damage:

Katrina swamped Grand Isle under 7 feet of water and Rita flooded the island town again after residents began to clean up.

Storm surges overwhelmed much of the coast and dealt a crippling blow to the state’s fishing, farming and cattle industries.

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Parish: St. Charles/Jefferson/New Orleans

Industries: Manufacturing, fishing, tourism and services

Population*: 987,681

Main communities: New Orleans, Hahnville, Gretna and Vieux Carre

Damage:

Levee breaks flooded 80% of New Orleans, killing hundreds and stranding as many as 100,000.

Thousands rescued in New Orleans and surrounding communities by boat and air.

Extensive property damage

*Pre-hurricane figure

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Effects on major industries

Agriculture, fishing

Hurricane Katrina cut a swath of destruction in areas that represent a large portion of Louisiana’s agriculture, commercial seafood and fishing industries. Preliminary estimates of losses in revenue resulting from production losses:

(in millions)

Agriculture

Forestry: $611

Sugar cane: $63

Wholesale nurseries: $19

Cotton: $10

Citrus: $9.7

Cattle: $0.9

Vegetables: $2.4

Dairy: $1.0

Rice: $0.48

Fisheries

Shrimp: $72

Oysters: $25

Menhaden:$17

Crabs: $15

Commercial fin fish: $12.6

Turtles: $5.3

Alligators: $3.8

Recreational fishing

Charter fishing: $0.986

Finfish licenses:

Loss of 160,976, $199.5 million value

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Tourism

New Orleans accounts for about half of Louisiana’s tourism--110 million visitors and $5 billion last year.

--Eleven conventions cancelled through March 2006.

--Mardi Gras, worth an estimated $1 billion in tourism, could suffer from a lack of sufficient hotel rooms.

--The Sugar Bowl, which generates $200 million in revenue, may have to move out of state for the first time in its 70-year existence.

--The Superdome is not available for the entire NFL season.

--Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport is operating, on a limited schedule.

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Power outages

Electricity was restored gradually to southeastern Louisiana after Katrina, but now Rita has left several parishes to the west without power.

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Sources: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Louisiana State University Ag Center, Tradeshow Week, New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, Market Watch, www.lapage.com, Louisiana Department of Labor, National Assn. of Counties.

Graphics reporting by Brady MacDonald, Cheryl Brownstein-Santiago, Julie Sheer, Robert Burns, Tom Reinken

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This article was reported by TIMES STAFF WRITERS ELLEN BARRY, STEPHEN BRAUN, LIANNE HART, SUSANNAH ROSENBLATT AND MAI TRAN. It was written by BRAUN.

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Times staff writers Thomas S. Mulligan in New York and Ryan Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.