RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
Hurricane Katrina struck parts of rural Louisiana even harder than she did New Orleans. The storm made landfall at the mouth of the Mississippi River and obliterated parts of surrounding Plaquemines Parish. As NPR's John Burnett reports a week later, this community of shrimpers, oystermen and refinery workers is still mostly underwater.
JOHN BURNETT reporting:
Think of Louisiana as a boot and Plaquemines Parish as the toe. The little towns along State Highway 23, Venice, Boothville, Triumph, Buras, Empire, Port Sulphur have been erased; they're gone, torn apart, underwater. The Gulf of Mexico currently extends 40 miles further inland.
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BURNETT: The only way you can get around down here is by airboat now. All transportation has been swamped. There's houses in the middle of the road, there's mobile homes that have been overturned and blown apart, boats lying on their sides. They say they're going to have to rebuild everything down here, to start over from scratch.
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BURNETT: The helicopter tour of the county revealed astonishing sights: a huge river barge lifted up and deposited teetering on the Mississippi levee. Mile after mile of inundating orange groves and water, water everywhere. The problem is that Plaquemines Parish, even in normal times, is half wetland. The houses and businesses are strung along narrow ribbons of land along both sides of the river, the development made possible by levees. Think Holland with crawfish. When a 30-foot storm surge roared into the parish last Monday morning, the levees held the water in and they still are, said Plaquemines Parish Sheriff Jiff Hingle.
Sheriff JIFF HINGLE (Plaquemines Parish): We're very much like New Orleans; we're a saucer. So when the water comes over and tops the levees and fills them up, some areas you have 14 feet of standing water, you know. And you're talking about miles and miles and miles of 14 feet of water. See, the pumping plants couldn't handle that capacity; you have to break down the levee to get it out.
BURNETT: Parish employees are using heavy equipment to break the levees and let the water drain out. They'll go back later and patch the earth and berms. Meanwhile, pumping stations must be repaired to lift the rest of the water out of the flooded parish. Bill Sider's(ph) job is to get all the swamped pumps running again.
Mr. BILL SIDER: We've got to have grease, new grease; we've got to have new motor oil; we've got to have new gear oil. So we got to take it out and then put it back in--the right stuff--and then crank it up.
BURNETT: As the pump mechanics drive up and down Highway 23, parish worker Kevin Trumble says they encounter sights and smells.
Mr. KEVIN TRUMBLE (Plaquemines Parish): Caskets floated, dead cows, dead mules, dead--everything dead, total devastation. The smell of death.
BURNETT: Plaquemines Parish has come back before after Hurricanes Betsy and Camille in the 60s, but this is so much worse. The southern-most towns are gone; the orange groves destroyed; the seafood industries crippled. Darryl Bartholomew is a 61-year-old boat captain from the now non-existent town of Port Sulphur.
BURNETT: What is this storm going to do to the fishing industry, to the oyster industry and the shrimp industry down here?
Mr. DARRYL BARTHOLOMEW (Port Sulphur): Destroy it. Destroy it. Because the first thing, the water is polluted and it's going to take a good while before the water gets back to normal, gets clear again. You know, what I'm talking about?
BURNETT: Yesterday, at long last, about 400 members of the New Mexico Air National Guard arrived in the parish to help with the aftermath. Search and rescue is over; rescuers say there are corpses floating in the marsh, but the per capita body count is nowhere comparable to New Orleans. The marquis in front of the Catholic Church bears the parting thought put up by residents before they fled: Our Lady of Prompt Succor, protect us.
John Burnett, NPR News, New Orleans.
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