Katrina Victims Endure Makeshift Lives
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September 2006
WAVELAND, Miss. -- All that remains of the life Leigh and Philip Hart had before Hurricane Katrina is crammed into a 240-square-foot travel trailer parked where their house used to stand.
The four children have to wait 20 minutes between one another's baths because the water heater is so small. The family dinner hour is gone because there is no room for everyone at the table. There is nowhere to hang clothes or store toys, and nowhere for a teenager to go for a moment alone.
The Harts have tried to make the trailer a home. They installed a temporary screened-in porch at the front to give them more space. They added a portable swimming pool so the kids could spend more time outside. They recently bought a washer and dryer, eliminating the $40-a-week trip to a self-service laundry.
"I'd call it chaotic," said Leigh Hart, 36. "You've got four kids who want to eat and hang out, and there is no comfortable place to be in here. It's hard, very hard to live like this."
This is not where the Harts expected to end up a year ago when they were living in their remodeled, 100-year-old, 1,500-square-foot home. But this is the legacy of Hurricane Katrina. Nothing in the Harts' life, or in the city of Waveland for that matter, is anything like it used to be.
When Katrina made landfall last August in this city of about 7,500 people some 60 miles east of New Orleans, it washed away almost every home, every business and even City Hall. As the first anniversary of the storm approaches, everything except for the bustling Wal-Mart seems suspended in time.
Along the Mississippi coast, tens of thousands of people still live in the 38,295 trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They are parked in vacant lots, on beachfront property once graced with antebellum homes and in front yards near gutted houses that are being repaired or have been abandoned.
In the weeks after the storm, people complained that the FEMA trailers were hard to get. Now they are everywhere. School is held in trailers, including classes of the local community college. City business is conducted in trailers. And at the end of the day, almost everyone goes home to a trailer.
Many people who thought they had insurance coverage found that they did not. FEMA has paid out more than $1.2 billion in assistance to more than 274,000 households in Mississippi. But in Waveland, one of the places hardest hit by the storm, people still are struggling to rebuild their homes and get their lives back on track.
SBA OKd $2 billion in loans
The Small Business Administration has approved $2 billion in loans to more than 30,000 homeowners. Still, many families will not be able to rebuild because they cannot afford it or they can't meet the stringent guidelines for rebuilding in a flood zone.
It does not take much for Leigh Hart to burst into tears when she talks about her family's future. Her husband tries to comfort her, but he doesn't have the answers either. Still, Philip Hart, 39, considers himself lucky and does not want anyone's pity.
"Only in America would they be running to bring you a camper when you lose your home," he said.
But even the trailer is temporary. After 18 months, FEMA will ask for the trailers back or require residents to start paying rent. The Harts have decided they will ask for an extension to remain in the trailer rent-free.
On the counter next to a sink of dirty dishes is the just-completed blueprint for the home the Harts plan to build if they can get a state grant and a $50,000 SBA loan. But right now there is hardly any money for daily necessities, much less to build a $175,000 three-bedroom, three-bath dream home.
Leigh Hart recently quit what she called the best job she ever had, as a manager at the Sonic drive-in. Her children--4 1/2- year-old twins Brailyn and Cooper, 7-year-old Erica and 16-year-old Laryn--needed her at home, she said.
"The kids were acting out, fighting with each other and crying at the drop of a hat," she said. "I had to make a choice."
Philip Hart worries that schools are not yet up to standard. He worries that he has not been able to save enough money from his job as a laborer at a chemical plant to send his daughter Laryn to college next year. He is sad that his children will never know Waveland as it was when he was growing up.
"I grew up on the water, fishing, swimming and crabbing," he said. "I would like for my kids to have that experience. It was a good one."
`That's important to old folks'
Not far from the Harts, Dorothy Ruth Crosby lives in a FEMA trailer parked in her son's front yard. At 76 she had to start life over, and she has decided to make the best of it.
"This is mine and I can do what I want with it," she said. "And I want it to look homey. That's important to old folks."
Crosby gave up her three-bedroom home in nearby Bay St. Louis, which was severely damaged in the storm, for a two-bedroom trailer. She turned the second bedroom into a pantry, where she stores materials for the crafts she makes and sells. The bed takes up most of the space in her bedroom.
Her front yard is filled with homemade ornaments--a ceramic duck, a birdbath and colorful pots. A small wire fence surrounding the property keeps her small dog in the yard. She offers a guest a bar of lilac soap she made that morning and asks if anyone would like a cold drink.
Most days her son, Glen Crosby, 49, and his wife, Shawne, 45, work on their storm-ravaged house. Church volunteers helped with some of the repairs, and the younger Crosbys plan to do the rest themselves. But they have no idea where they will get the $60,000 needed to finish it.
Glen and Shawne Crosby also live in a smaller trailer parked on the lot. A third trailer is used for storage. But for newlyweds, it is a "miserable" life," said Shawne, who has a disability that keeps her from working. Her husband used to have a good job as a card dealer at the Imperial Palace casino in nearby Biloxi. Now he works clearing debris.
"There is so much claustrophobic clutter," Shawne said, bursting into tears. "We are living on top of each other."
But her mother-in-law, Dorothy Crosby, has decided to look at things differently. At her age, she said, there is no need to worry about the past.
"I used to take everything for granted," she said. "Now I just take everything one day at a time."
[This article first appeared in the Chicago Tribune on July 28, 2006. It is reprinted here with permission.]
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