Rescuers Wade Into Coastal Havoc

Louisiana parish officials, soldiers and emergency crews began taking on nature’s anarchy Monday, working to rescue stranded residents and lost livestock, clear debris and return rudimentary order to a coast still under the sway of Hurricane Rita’s floodwaters.

High water edged back toward the Gulf of Mexico in some communities, driven by shifting winds and natural drainage. But much of Louisiana’s coastline lay under seawater, stalling the repair work facing rural governments days after the hurricane blitzed north near the Texas-Louisiana state line.

After an aerial tour, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) said that as many as 100,000 homes had been damaged beyond repair. Landrieu said rebuilding southwest Louisiana would take “the better part of a decade.”

Across the flooded Sabine River, which runs between the two states, East Texas oil communities were drying but beset with their own spiraling problems. The region’s power grid is decimated, perhaps for a month. City officials pleaded for portable generators while evacuated residents began returning, ignoring appeals to stay away.

The region’s fragile plight was underscored Monday when five members of an extended family died in Beaumont, Texas, overcome by carbon monoxide fumes from a gasoline generator while they slept in their apartment. The dead, discovered Monday morning, included a 7-year-old girl, a 9-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, all siblings, said Police Officer Crystal Holmes.

Overall, the death toll from Rita stood at nine.

In southwestern Louisiana, nearly 80% of the homes lay flattened in Cameron Parish, where 10,000 people fled before the storm. Whole blocks of homes were lifted from their foundations by wind blasts and surging waves, officials reported. Public buildings were ruined as well -- an elementary school reduced to concrete innards, a bank disintegrated around an intact vault.

In Calcasieu Parish and other inland communities where water damage was less severe, work crews made their first forays at clearing piles of wind-snapped pines that littered roadways and, in some cases, jutted over crushed rooftops. But with little heavy equipment available and with trees sprawled all around, that task could take weeks.

Closer to the gulf, parishes were awash with floodwaters that slowly receded. In Vermilion Parish, where cattle carcasses and gravestones were awash in the currents, Sheriff Mike Couvillon reported that 50% of the community’s homes were completely submerged. The rest of Vermilion’s houses were badly flooded or standing in gulf water.

Parish officials were eager to start recovery operations, but there was not much else to do but search for stranded residents and stray livestock. “What we had is the equivalent of a 500-year flood,” said Robert J. LeBlanc, director of management operations for Vermilion Parish, home to about 57,000 people.

National Guard rescue teams brought 500 more Louisiana residents out of floodwaters on Monday, most in Vermilion and Iberia parishes. State wildlife agents in boats rescued an additional 200 people, most from Acadia and Vermilion and parts of Jefferson Davis parishes, said Dwight Landreneau, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Landreneau said wildlife agents were moving on to the remote backwaters of Cameron and Calcasieu parishes.

“We have the state covered,” Landreneau said.

Federal relief efforts were also picking up, as National Guard troops moved deep into drying coastal hamlets. A contingent of 4,000 troops headed by Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore had reached Cameron, setting up shelters and distributing ice, meals and water.

“Cameron and Creole have been destroyed except for the courthouse, which was built on stilts on higher ground,” Honore said. “Most of the houses and public buildings no longer exist or are even in the same location that they were.”

In the resort and casino community of Lake Charles, pooled water from the lake began to recede. Emergency crews were canvassing neighborhoods and clearing debris. Power and water service are out, and the town’s airport suffered extensive wind damage. Workers at Conoco Philips were surveying damage to its refinery, and a riverboat casino had flooding. And the Interstate 10 bridge was out after loose barges sailed into the span over the Calcasieu River.

Teams of National Guard troops were aiding dispossessed farmers in an effort to round up as many as 30,000 cattle reported lost after the storm. Near Pecan Island, virtually erased by storm surges, 69-year-old cattle farmer Gerald Patin was on the edge of tears, worried about “250 mama cows” isolated Saturday by floodwaters around his farm.

“The surge came so fast, but we’re hoping they went up onto the hill,” he said.

During a meeting at the courthouse in Abbeville with rural emergency directors and parish officials, Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-La.) said southwest Louisiana’s agricultural and fishing industries had been crippled.

“What we have here are small rural communities, so the long-term impact is going to be much worse for these people, who don’t have the resources of a city” like New Orleans, he said.

As Landrieu and Boustany listened, parish leaders recounted the devastation they had seen. In Vermilion, LeBlanc said, the storm flooded 70% of the parish with water up to 14 feet deep. Officials estimated that 60% of the area remained without electricity Monday night, 60 hours after Rita struck.

About 5,000 homes were flooded in Vermilion, 1,500 of them in the communities of Erath and Delcambre, on the eastern edge of the parish. Although the water was beginning to recede, many roads in the area were unusable. Capt. Scott Desormeaux of the Louisiana National Guard said military police units were aiding local sheriff’s deputies with traffic control, security and distribution of food and water.

Tim Creswell, Vermilion Parish’s shelter coordinator, said 9,000 people had been housed in shelters in the wake of Katrina. Those who fled moved to areas farther north, and about 1,500 to 2,000 refugees from Rita were expected.

By Monday, it was apparent in many coastal communities that water from Rita’s storm surges, which came in as high as 15 feet, could linger for days. Even in southeastern Louisiana, along the Barataria Bay in Jefferson Parish, water was 2 feet deep in many houses.

In Lafitte, Mike Weaver, a medical equipment technician, returned to his place to find water that rippled over his shoes. Quickly, it was up to his calves, then his knees, then his thighs. He turned back, grimacing. “I’m not even going to try.”

In houses where the floodwaters had subsided, residents scrubbed their floors with bleach. Others loaded flat-bottom boats with garbage bags bulging with family photographs and dry clothes. They paddled away, silent in disbelief.

Some residents complained of difficulty in getting officials to pay attention to their plight, grumbling that central New Orleans hogged officials’ attention. They had little patience for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, criticized for its lagging work after Katrina and which is trying to mend its reputation by speeding aid to Rita’s victims.

“How are we supposed to phone them with no phones working down here?” said one woman who would only identify herself as Mathern, a common family name in the area.

Similar complaints were voiced in Lake Charles on Monday during a meeting of parish and emergency leaders with FEMA’s director, R. David Paulison, and Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, the head of the agency’s Katrina relief effort. When a woman ticked off several complaints, the officials paid heed, saying the agency was responding well.

“We’re going to stay here to make sure they get back on their feet,” Paulison said. In the later meeting in Abbeville, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, the brother of Sen. Landrieu, praised the agency’s response after Rita, saying it was moving faster than it had after Katrina.

In southeast Texas, beleaguered officials of coastal towns were pleading with federal and state agencies for generators to replace shattered electric systems that could take weeks to repair. Dick Nugent, the mayor of Nederland, went on CNN to beg officials to cut red tape and provide his town and nearby communities with generators.

“Our application has been sitting there for two days now,” Nugent said.

Cities such as Beaumont and Port Arthur have lost much of their utility infrastructure and face a massive cleanup of snapped trees and power lines.

While Houstonians returned home by the thousands Monday, avoiding the widespread traffic congestion that afflicted last week’s mass evacuations of 2.7 million people, East Texans grappled with localized flooding and power outages that threatened to prevent the return of basic services for weeks.

Several houses caught fire in Beaumont on Monday, but fire officials said there wasn’t enough pressure in the broken lines to get through to their hoses.

“We’re having a difficult time,” Holmes said. “People are angry. They want to return, and we don’t have the infrastructure to support them. We have no sewer system. We have no fuel.”

Long lines of cars stacked up outside the city from the east, west and north, but residents were told that they could not come home. The town is only sparsely populated, but residents are finding ways to access the city each night, authorities said.

In Port Arthur, National Guard troops and local authorities were trying to hack their way through downed trees and limbs to access some neighborhoods.

Police Officer Rocky Bridges said residents would not be allowed in until at least the end of the week. Only a handful of power company crews had even started work on the city south of Beaumont, where the grid was severely damaged.

Authorities were trying to evacuate everyone who had not left before the storm, and closed all entrances to the city.

“Everybody is being turned away,” Bridges said.

In New Orleans, officials stressed the opposite message. Mayor C. Ray Nagin dusted off his plan to reopen the city, inviting people in the unscathed neighborhood of Algiers to return and “help us rebuild the city.”

Nagin also invited business owners in the central business district, the French Quarter and the Uptown section to inspect their property and clean up. But he gave no timetable for reopening those parts of the city to residents.

Arthur Roger stood on a tall ladder, trying to scrape and peel off the tape he placed around the 14-foot glass doors of his Arthur Roger Gallery to protect it from the hurricane in the heart of the French Quarter.

“This is going to take some work,” said Roger, 50, who lives nearby.

He was among the very few shop owners who returned to survey the damage.

He wants to reopen the shop by Nov. 15.

“You want to show some normalcy to the outside world,” Roger said. “You have to let them know that you’re around, or they’ll forget about you.”

Simmons reported from Abbeville, La., Gold from Beaumont, Texas, and Gaouette from Lafitte, La. Times staff writers Stephen Braun in Washington, Mai Tran in New Orleans, and Susannah Rosenblatt and Ellen Barry in Baton Rouge, La., contributed to this report. Times researcher Lianne Hart in Houston also contributed.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Recovery continues

In Hurricane Rita’s aftermath, rescuers scoured flooded areas for trapped residents, and Army helicopters searched for as many as 30,000 stranded cattle. About 300,000 customers in Louisiana and 250,000 in Texas were without power.

*

A. Beaumont and Port Arthur: Residents blocked from returning to their homes because of debris and downed power lines.

B. Calcasieu Parish: Under 3 feet of water.

C. Cameron Parish: 80% of buildings leveled. Up to 4,000 cattle perished in swamped fields.

D. Cameron: Much of town destroyed.

E. Creole: Much of town destroyed.

F. Jefferson Davis Parish: Partially underwater.

G. Vermilion Parish: Thousands of cattle stranded; 50% of homes submerged; shrimp boats hurled onto land.

H. Pecan Island: Authorities trying to rescue hundreds of cattle.

*

Sources: Associated Press, Times reporting, Bloomberg, ESRI, TeleAtlas. Graphics reporting by Joel Greenberg