Rita: The Gulf's Other Hurricane

A year after Hurricane Rita, the grave at Ebenezer Baptist Cemetery sits empty, half-filled with stagnant water, its vault and casket yanked out of the ground and carried north by churning floodwater from the Gulf of Mexico.

Across southwest Louisiana, cemeteries still bear scars from Hurricane Rita. Six-foot rectangular holes in the soil. Hunters and farmers make grim calls to the coroner after stumbling across caskets miles away from the graves.

"We could be recovering caskets, from here on, for years," said Charlie Hunter, a coroner's investigator working in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes. "It's going to be a long process."

Rita also wreaked havoc on the living. Coastal towns splintered in the waves, tens of thousands of cattle drowned, hundreds of homes were smashed by tornados and crushed by snapped pine trees. Two men drowned in Louisiana; scores of people died in Texas while fleeing the storm, including 23 elderly patients in a bus explosion.

As the region marks Category 3 Rita's one-year anniversary this weekend with a series of commemorative events, the recovery is more apparent in urban areas than in rural communities and the environmentally sensitive coastal marsh.

For example, Lake Charles, the largest city in southwest Louisiana, is humming along. Tons of storm debris have been hauled off, the petrochemical industry has returned to pre-storm output, blackjack cards are dealt and slot machines clang in the casinos.

"I think the recovery here has gone remarkably well, remarkably quickly, at least in the phase we've been through," said Michael Kurth, an economist at McNeese State University, co-author of a state-sponsored study on Rita and its aftermath.

But the recovery is far from complete. In addition to the roundup of storm-tossed caskets, wildlife-rich coastal wetlands — whose ducks and geese attract hunters from around the world — remain cluttered with washing machines, chemical tanks and other storm debris.

Rice farmers can't plant their crops, fishermen lost their vessels, family homes are being rebuilt and raised off the ground as protection against the next storm's surging waves.

"We've been working for a year on making things look normal, but we're still at a defining moment for coastal Louisiana," said Randy Roach, mayor of Lake Charles.

"The heart and soul of this state is the coast: it's the joie de vivre, the shrimp boats, the seafood, and that way of life has been forever changed," Roach said.

Rita struck near the Texas border Sept. 24, 2005, almost a month after Hurricane Katrina blasted southeast Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Its 120-mph winds and 9-foot storm surge shattered coastal towns and caused extensive wind damage farther inland in Lake Charles and Port Arthur, Texas.

While Rita's impact was overshadowed by the desperation of post-Katrina New Orleans, some consider Katrina and Rita two parts of one disaster in a state whose economy was shaky before either came ashore. Rita's $10 billion economic impact can't match the still-growing effects of Katrina, estimated at $150 billion-plus.

"They were one storm: Act 1 and Act 2," Roach said. "Two of the most powerful hurricanes to hit the United States — and they hit Louisiana's coast in less than 30 days."

Rita inundated roughly 2,000 square miles of marsh and farmland in Louisiana, according to Kurth's study, causing pastures to transform from lush green to dead brown. The state Agriculture Department estimates Rita caused $2 billion in farm losses, including roughly 30,000 dead cattle and acres of land suffocated by salt water.

Because of the salt, this year's rice crop in coastal Vermilion Parish will be about a third of normal, said Andrew Granger, an agent with Louisiana State University's AgCenter.

"That is going to be a lingering problem for quite some time," Granger said.

Rice farmer Kirk Broussard of Vermilion was unable to plant crops in the spring, six months after the storm, because of the salt. His irrigation source is gone for now. The storm clogged the canals that surround his 525 acres — normally flowing with fresh water from the Vermilion River — with marsh grasses and other debris. The trapped, briny water is unfit for watering crops.

"Some of the canals are choked to the top, you can almost walk across them," he said.

Like thousands of people across south Louisiana, Broussard's home life was also disrupted. Rita pushed three feet of Gulf water into his house, forcing him to strip it down to a skeleton, discard the sodden wood and rebuild.

To keep flood insurance at a reasonable cost, he paid to have the house moved off the plot, raised five feet higher — from 8 feet to 13 feet above sea level — then moved back. The new elevation cut his flood insurance rate by half — and provided some assurance that his home won't be inundated by another storm.

"I'm 46 years old, so I might see this again, another storm, and I didn't want to go through all that again," he said. "We put the house up at 13 feet, but the next storm could still get us. We're just taking a chance that doesn't happen."

Broussard marked Rita's one-year anniversary with a homecoming. Three weeks ago, he finally moved out of his Rita home — a trailer supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency — and moved his wife and two children back into his newly restored and raised house.

"Things have been tough, but now we're back," he said.

Such disruptions, in turn, created headaches for business owners — trouble finding people who could take time out from home repairs to go back to their jobs.

For nearly a year, Dan Schaad, owner of the Pujo Street Cafe in downtown Lake Charles said he struggled to keep the restaurant running because no one was interested in a job busing tables, working the kitchen or taking orders.

By July, they finally started responding to his help-wanted newspaper ads.

"Only since then have we had a steady stream of applicants coming in," he said. "I think we might have turned a corner."

Though lifestyles and the economy are showing positive signs of recovery, restoring the graveyards will take longer.

"In the marsh, duck hunters going to their duck blinds, they're still finding caskets," said Hunter, the coroner's investigator.

Hunter said his office has recovered 325 caskets and human remains the storm pulled up from the earth in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes. One casket was found 34 miles from its grave, he said.

Of those recovered, 240 have been identified and returned to their graves.

Local funeral homes have started putting metal bracelets on the deceased, and attaching metal discs to vaults and caskets, stamped with the deceased's name, before burial.

That will make it easier to identify disinterred bodies when the next storm comes.