This article about post-Rita times in Cameron Parish was in the New
Orleans
Times-Picayune this morning...thought you'd want to pass it down the
line.
MW


MAKING THEIR OWN WAY
Despite the devastation delivered to lower Cameron Parish by Hurricane
Rita, and
costly new building codes, many residents are determined to live out
their days in
this coastal community -- even if it's in a trailer home.
Monday, June 19, 2006
By Brian Thevenot
Staff writer
CAMERON -- Curtis "Crab Man" Tregle, 67, a lifetime fisher, lost three
homes to
Hurricane Rita: his own and two rental houses. His children and
grandchildren, who
used to live right next door, have moved away from this coastal hamlet
to higher
ground.

He now works and lives with his wife in a 12-by-20-foot green metal box
right on the
edge of the Calcasieu shipping channel, a stone's throw from the Gulf
of Mexico. He
intends to spend the rest of his life here, running his crab traps in
the morning
and drinking beer in the afternoon.

But that may take some doing. Rita left lower Cameron Parish in utter
ruin, and in
order to reduce the chances of it happening again, state and federal
officials have
imposed costly building and flood-elevation codes that -- combined with
a rapidly
evolving economy -- could make the area off-limits to the working poor
who have long
called it home.

Tregle's first impulse is to try to get around those codes. To that
end, he's going
to move his temporary home-office a few feet to the south -- onto a
dock hanging
over the water.

That way, he says, he'll have to satisfy only the Coast Guard.

And that's only half of his plan: As a creative alternative to
requirements from the
Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for handling household
sewage, Tregle
has purchased an "Incinolet" -- a $1,700 self-contained toilet that
burns waste with
electric heat. It has become his most prized possession. A cartoon logo
on the
outside of the box depicts an old-school outhouse being struck by
lightning bolts.

"That's worse than 'Boudreaux,' huh? I went from a $70,000 home to a
$1,700 toilet,"
he says, comparing himself to the mythic character who's the butt of
Cajun jokes.
"Don't worry about me. If a hurricane comes in the Gulf, I hope it hits
Cameron
again. I got nothing to lose. I'll take my toilet with me when I
evacuate. I bought
a trailer for it."

Many residents of lower Cameron Parish, destroyed by Rita's 15-foot
storm surge and
Category 3 winds, have adopted an attitude similar to Tregle's. After
nine months of
bureaucratic frustration, many say they'd just as soon tell the
government to keep
its money and the maze of new rebuilding rules tied to it.

In contrast to New Orleans, where residents seethe with anger over the
collapse of
federally maintained levees, residents of Cameron Parish don't complain
much about
the amount of federal money being offered to the region, or the pace at
which it's
being disbursed. They're generally thankful for what they've gotten,
and they're not
asking for the nation's taxpayers to make them whole, they say. They
just want a
reasonably affordable regimen of building regulations and insurance
rates so they
can get to work doing their own rebuilding.

In Holly Beach, one of the last relatively unregulated, undeveloped
"poor man's"
beaches in the country, residents now must contend with new parish
rules requiring
them to own larger plots of land in order to install septic systems.

In Holly Beach and elsewhere in lower Cameron, residents fret over the
cost of
building storm-proof homes on 15-foot stilts -- which they dub "bird
houses." Before
the storm, Cameron had no building codes at all.

Permanent trailer park

The biggest fear, residents and public officials said, is that the
heightened costs
of compliance and insurance -- on top of what they call an unjust
denial of
countless insurance claims -- will keep many longtime residents from
returning. And
they worry that those who do may be reduced, like the "Crab Man," to
living in
essentially disposable homes or camper trailers that can be moved if a
storm
threatens.

"It's turning Cameron Parish into a trailer park," said Clerk of Court
Carl
Broussard. "We saw what Rita did, and we want to rebuild the right way.
But you just
can't afford to do it right."

Adding to their frustration is the sense among many Cameron residents
that they
should be getting FEMA's payout of up to $30,000 to cover the cost of
complying with
the federal requirement to raise their homes. Not so, says FEMA: If the
damaged
property already met the higher elevation requirements before the
storm, there's no
such payout -- even if the house was destroyed.

Those who can afford to raise their homes to qualify for federal flood
insurance
still may be priced out of rebuilding because of astronomical costs for
private
homeowner's insurance. Broussard said he recently got quotes ranging
from $6,500 to
$24,000 a year, and some carriers have pulled out of lower Cameron
Parish
altogether.

Before the storm, one of Broussard's employees, Lisa Stewart, lived in
a spacious
home 13 feet above sea level. She met FEMA flood elevation requirements
-- and thus
was ineligible for a FEMA cost-of-compliance payout to fix her ruined
home.
Moreover, she's had trouble even finding a contractor. The upshot:
She's downgrading
her plans.

"I'm just going to get a trailer," she said, then stopped herself. "I
guess they
don't call them trailers anymore, they call them 'modular homes.' "

Ernie Broussard, a consultant directing the parish's recovery, said
parish officials
want to discourage the trailer-park motif in favor of traditional,
permanent
housing. But they concede it's a balancing act that can be tough on
many residents.

"We're looking for a sustainable community that's not going to be
destructive to the
pace of the rebuilding process. That's the balance," he said. "We can't
do
traditional 'stick and brick' construction. We've got to do storm-proof
housing, so
we're looking at some prototype modular materials that are impervious
to rot,
termites and debris -- and insurable."

Little still standing

Though overshadowed by Katrina, the damage Rita wrought in Cameron
Parish roughly
resembles the wrecked parts of lower St. Bernard and Plaquemines
parishes. Wind and
storm surge flattened nearly every building but Cameron's courthouse,
and tossed
huge boats up into the marshes, where many still sit, rotting in the
sun like
beached fish.

All told, Rita knocked down more than 4,400 structures, about 2,000 of
them houses,
in a community of just 10,000 people spread around the largest land
area of any
parish in the state. The parish has retained about 7,500 of those
residents,
officials estimate, though many from lower Cameron have moved north to
more suburban
communities closer to Lake Charles, straining services, businesses and
roads.

In devastated lower Cameron, the coast remains marred by mile after
mile of blight,
even after countless tons of debris have been carted away by federal
contractors and
residents. In one part of town, a public pay phone stood alone in the
middle of a
field, where a store must once have operated.

But if proximity to the Gulf makes for a precarious existence, it also
provides
access to the bounty of natural resources that officials and residents
are confident
will secure the parish's future. In his book about Louisiana Gov. Earl
Long, A.J.
Leibling famously observed that the state "floats on oil like a
drunkard's teeth on
whiskey."

Nowhere is that more true than in Cameron Parish, where 16 percent of
the nation's
strategic petroleum reserve -- 240 million barrels -- is stored
underground in salt
domes, Broussard said.

After construction of three planned liquefied natural gas ports,
scheduled for
completion by 2010, the parish will provide for nearly a quarter of the
nation's
total consumption of natural gas, Broussard said. Each will bring $700
million to
$900 million in construction spending into the parish and a healthy
dose of
permanent new jobs.

Of lesser but still substantial economic importance, the seafood
industry feeds
Cameron Parish.

Business in both industries is booming, in part because of the storm.
As he leans
over the huge tub of crabs he'd collected one recent morning, Crab Man
Tregle
pointed to several in the tank -- with no legs.

"See those crabs? The fish are so thick out there they're eating the
legs off them
when they hang from the trap," he said.

The same goes for the crabs themselves and for shrimp, which by all
accounts are as
plentiful as at any time in memory. Tregle now uses only half as many
crab traps as
before the storm to bring in the same catch.

Even with only one shrimp-processing house back open, most shrimpers
are catching
400 to 500 pounds of large shrimp each night, and peddling all of them
on the street
themselves for retail prices. They might sell another 1,000 to 2,000
pounds of small
shrimp to the processing house, Tregle said.

Meanwhile, the oil and gas economy is steaming along at a good clip,
feeding on high
prices and demand for petroleum, and a construction boom resulting from
storm
damage, government and industry officials said.

Henry "T-boy" McCall, who owns the marine services company Cameron
Offshore Boats --
and one of the few houses on the coast that somehow escaped destruction
-- said he
can't hire enough people to make all the money the oil companies want
to give him.

"My business is better than it's ever been. The day rates are higher.
My only
problem is I can't crew up all my boats," he said. "People don't want
to work, even
though we're paying them twice the money. There's too much free money
running
around."

As for the parish's future, McCall figures it will be much the same,
but with fewer
people because of the costly requirement that houses be elevated.

"The rumor we're hearing is that the government just won't spend the
money if
there's another hurricane down here -- they'll just make it into a
wildlife refuge,"
said McCall, whose beachfront home stood high on stilts even before
Rita struck.

Back near the Crab Man's dock, George Andrade, a boat captain who runs
workers and
supplies to offshore oil rigs, told a similar tale of prosperity.

"That boat never made so much money," Andrade said. "The storm did so
much damage,
offshore and onshore, that there's a lot of construction and repair."

Andrade lives in Mobile, Ala., but spends much of his time in Cameron
working and
living on his boat. Since the storm, Cameron folk have proved an
industrious lot, he
said.

"It looked like a war zone down here," he said. "It's come around a lot
faster than
I thought. I see it in the boats being repaired and re-outfitted.
People really
jumped to get ready to make a living. They haven't waited for the
government or
anybody else to do it for them."

Barren beach

In Holly Beach, a brief ferry ride from the town of Cameron, residents
have made
less progress, not for lack of grit. Once a carefree community that
resident Gene
Reynolds compared to Jimmy Buffett's mythical Margaritaville, Holly
Beach now sits
almost completely empty, save for bent, splintered pilings sticking up
in the air.

"It really was the last poor man's beach," Reynolds said, as he sat on
the beach
with his family, strumming his guitar and trying to think positive
thoughts about
the community's future. "A family of 10 could rent a camp here for $50
or $75 a
night and catch shrimp and crabs in the marsh, and trout and redfish in
the Gulf,
and feed themselves all weekend."

Long ago, the beach was laid out in tiny plots, measuring just 25 by 50
feet, and
many people owned one, two or three of them. Now residents need at
least four in
order to be eligible to put down a septic system that costs about
$3,000. And that's
in addition to the higher FEMA flood elevations and tougher state
building codes.

Before Rita, many residents used cheap, crude sanitation systems
consisting of
little more than a 55-gallon plastic drum buried in the ground
connected to PVC
pipes running into the house, said Eric Monceaux, a property owner and
member of a
newly formed volunteer sewer board. The waste drained out through holes
in the
bottom into the sand, a natural filtration system, he said.

Even before Rita, Holly Beach had secured financing for a community
sewer system.
Since then they've been told it should be built with a capacity to
serve 5,000
residents, at a cost of $5 million. The problem is, there aren't nearly
enough
residents left to pay for it.

On paper, the community has 2,000 lots, even though no more than 1,000
have ever
been developed, said Monceaux, who has bought up a few on the
assumption that one
day the prices will rise. The four-lot requirement limits the maximum
population to
a figure well below 5,000.

"They told us, 'We're not going to give you $5 million so a couple
hundred coonasses
can party on the beach. That won't look good. That's pork,' " Monceaux
said, summing
up the attitude of politicians and regulators.

Before Rita, Monceaux said, you might be able to buy two lots and a
camp for $25,000
to $35,000, making Holly Beach perhaps the nation's least expensive
coastal
property.

And now? The price of land has gone up some, but its value remains
murky, especially
if the owner can't put four lots together. Single lots sell for about
$3,000, but
lots sold in groups of at least four have gone for up to $9,000 apiece,
residents
said.

Monceaux and others figure the beach will change in one of two ways:
Either it will
be bought up at increased prices by second-home owners who can afford
the six-figure
cost of compliance with the new elevation and construction codes, or it
will become
essentially an RV and camper park.

"The RVs are looking better and better, if all you want to do is come
enjoy the Gulf
and catch some crabs and shrimp without putting up a $150,000
structure," Monceaux
said.

Wilford "Sonny" Meaux has rebuilt the only semi-permanent residence and
business on
the beach. He sells shrimp and cold drinks out of a cheap building next
to his
trailer, which sits on the ground. He said he's gotten around the
elevation
requirements because he was zoned by the parish before the storm as a
"mobile home
park," even if he's basically a park of one.

"This is what I don't understand," he groused as he slapped away
mosquitoes with a
T-shirt. "Why won't FEMA let people build without the FEMA codes if
they're willing
to go without (flood) insurance?"

No health care

While residents work through their own rebuilding headaches, parish
officials have
struggled to restore the basic services that will support their return,
namely
health care and education. While New Orleans has struggled with health
care
capacity, Cameron has had no health care at all since June 1 when, to
mark the start
of hurricane season, FEMA yanked a temporary emergency-care facility.
The lack of a
hospital near the coast is no small matter, given the possibly of
life-threatening
injuries to oil and seafood industry workers. Some companies have
threatened to pull
out unless the gap is filled soon, officials said.

The parish soon will ask voters in a hospital district to approve a new
20-mill
property tax for the operation of a new hospital. They believe the
ballot measure
will win easy approval, and plans for the permanent hospital, its
construction
financed by FEMA, are well under way.

Pacer Health, which ran the now-destroyed hospital, will run its
replacement.

Public school students finished out the year on combined campuses, in
some cases
requiring a platoon system in which two groups of students attended for
2 ½ days
each. But that should be alleviated next year, when an elementary and a
high school
in lower Cameron will reopen, said Cameron Parish Superintendent Doug
Chance.

Crab Man Tregle's grandchildren now go to schools outside the parish,
and their
parents have no plans to return to lower Cameron.

Tregle can't see himself anywhere else. After pulling his living from
the Gulf for
more than five decades, what else could he do?

In the heat of a recent afternoon, he piloted his boat away from the
dock and into
the Calcasieu ship channel, heading out to lay his crab traps. He drove
past a dozen
damaged boats, still perched on dry land where the storm surge
deposited them in
September. He shrugged at the baffling sight of a tractor-trailer,
turned over on
the side of the river where there's no road.

"A nice ride, eh?" he said, smiling as a porpoise pulled alongside the
boat. "It's a
good life, an easy life. You make your day in two hours in the morning,
then you
make more crab pots, work on your equipment, drink your beer. You get
to be 67 years
old, it gets pretty hard to find a job making this kind of money. And
you're your
own damn boss."