Rescuers find more survivors, more damage
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-27 08:22

Houses in the marshland between Cameron and Creole were reduced to piles of bricks, or bare concrete slabs with steps leading to nowhere. Walls of an elementary school gymnasium had been washed or blown away, leaving basketball hoops hanging from the ceiling. A single-story white home was propped up against a line of trees, left there by floodwaters that ripped it from its foundation. A bank was open to the air, its vault still intact.

"We used to call this sportsman's paradise," said Honore, a Louisiana native. "But sometimes Mother Nature will come back and remind us that it has power over the land. That's what this storm did."

While residents of the Texas refinery towns of Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange were blocked from returning to their homes because of the danger of debris-choked streets and downed power lines, authorities in Louisiana were unable to keep bayou residents from venturing in on their own by boat to see if Rita wrecked their homes.

"Knowing these people, most of them are hunters, trappers, farmers. They're not going to wait on FEMA or anyone else," said Robert LeBlanc, director of emergency preparedness in Vermilion Parish. "They're going to do what they need to do. They're used to primitive conditions."

And many were finding that conditions were, in fact, primitive. Across southwestern Louisiana, many people found they had no home to go back to.

In the refinery town of Lake Charles, National Guardsmen patrolled the place and handed out bottled water, ice and food to hundreds of people left without power. Scores of cars wrapped around the parking lot of the city civic center.

Dorothy Anderson said she did not have time to get groceries before the storm because she was at a funeral out of town. "We got back and everything was closed," she said.

Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said its teams used small boats to rescue about 200 people trapped in their homes. In Chauvin, a steady stream of people were brought by small boats from flooded sections of Terrebonne Parish. Some cried as they hauled plastic bags filled with their possessions.