Going Home Again, Months Later

Residents Allowed Back Into Lower 9th Ward Homes For 1st Time Since Katrina

(CBS/AP)  A husband and wife who waited three months to see what Hurricane Katrina did to their neighborhood finally returned Thursday to find their blue, wood-frame house sitting in the front yard, three 3 feet off its foundation.

Louis Phillips and Donna Williams were among those allowed access to the Lower Ninth Ward, the last section of the city to reopen since Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29.

The Lower Ninth Ward, one of the city's poorest areas, is part of the 40 percent of the city still without power, three months after Katrina hit. Thousands of residences were destroyed in the area.

Residents were allowed in for the day to collect what belongings they could before leaving. Until now, people had been able to view the destruction only on bus tours.

A long line of cars waited to pass a checkpoint at a school where the Red Cross was handing out water and snacks and providing mental health counselors to those who wanted them. Police officers and firefighters warned those entering that there was still dangerous debris and buildings on the verge of collapse.

Williams first tried to enter a house next door that the couple had been renovating, but she stopped at the front door.

“There's a lot of debris and dirt and nails on the floor,” she said, fighting back tears.

Phillips tore the door off the other residence, entered and began tossing out clothes still in plastic dry cleaning bags, along with bits of furniture destroyed by floodwaters.

“Don't throw them out here,” Williams said to her husband. “I don't want to look at them.”

“I just lost my son in March, so I’d just like to get some pictures,” Ninth Ward resident Anna Firstley told reporter Lucy Bustamante of CBS affiliate WWL-TV in New Orleans.

Firstley only recognized her house from the outside. "I won't come back here… that's for sure," she said. But got what she came for when she found two photographs of her son and mother.

Across the street, her neighbor wasn’t so lucky. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” Rose Solomon said. “I’m mad I couldn’t get in sooner. Why did they keep us away?”

Frank Wingate, who had returned to inspect his mother's property, found her refrigerator balanced on the edge of a rooftop where it had floated during the flood. It was held partially in place by some of the few power lines that had not snapped during the storm.

“I don't think you're ever prepared,” said Greg Pigford, a Salvation Army chaplain who accompanied some of the returning residents. “You can see it on TV, but when you see it for the first time up close, what was your home, it's a jolt.”

At one intersection, the twisted remains of a yellow wood-frame house sat on Antonia Jackson's front lawn.

“It's from somewhere down the road,” Jackson said.

She surveyed the destruction in her yard and sighed. “Everything's gone,” she said.

Darlana and Alfred Green weren't sure the pile of wreckage in the median of Tupelo Street was their house until they saw the Spiderman sheets from their children's bedroom.

Darlana Green said she and her three children were in the house Aug. 29 when floodwaters lifted it off its foundation. They were rescued three days later, and the house eventually collapsed in a heap.

Picking through the debris, they found a water-swollen family Bible and a uniform that one of their daughters used to wear to school.

Despite the destruction, she said she was happy about where she ended up, what she described as a nice, neat rental house in Allen, Texas, far from the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward.

“She was a blessing to me,” Green said of Katrina. “Everything was falling apart here.”

The Greens have no intention to return, and they see little future for the neighborhood.

“What can they do with it but bulldoze it?” Darlana Green said.