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Snapshots of Port Arthur, Texas

Driving into Beaumont, Texas Sunday night, five weeks after Hurricane Rita struck 30 miles from here, you can still see scars. Four out of five signs for businesses are still blown out, not yet replaced. Highway signs, still leaning southwest, blown over as Rita approached. The occasional business still boarded up. RV parks full with new-looking travel trailers.

There is no catastrophic damage, no miles of flooded houses and flattened buildings. But the damage is here. Our hotel for the night here in Port Arthur has no carpet on the first floor. It was flooded out by a hole in the roof. Sheetrock has been ripped out from the floor, two feet up the wall, exposing the backsides of bathtubs and wiring in the rooms. We're walking on cardboard taped down to the floor. Downed trees are still stacked up for removal on the curb, and there are whole city blocks surrounded by chain link fencing, while the repairs and rebuilding take place. Construction trucks are everywhere, either rebuilding, or looking for work.

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From our New Orleans Bureau

Carl Quintanilla and I are preparing a story for the broadcast concerning Jefferson Parish, which adjoins New Orleans on the west. The Parish president, Aaron Broussard, made the painful decision the day before Katrina hit to shut down the pump houses in the parish, and evacuate the operators to safety. Those of us not from the New Orleans area are quickly learning how important the massive and complex system of pumps and canals are to survival and well being. We're all below or at sea level when we arrive here. If you don't pump out the water, you flood. It's just that simple.

Broussard told us today, "No parish president should have to make the decisions that I had to make during Katrina, where you choose between different values. In this instance, I chose life over property. That was a good decision."

Broussard also told us the head of the National Hurricane Center called his office and flatly said, "This is the big one, get your people out or they will die."

A Hobson's choice: flood the parish, or put your employees in mortal danger. Like so many things we've seen during the past seven weeks, a tough and unavoidable choice.

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Snapshots of New Orleans

There are a few people, and I must say, just a few, that we have seen dressed in what reasonable people would say are normal clothes. Shoes, a button-down shirt, a suit jacket. Most people here, regardless of income level, race, or previous job, are dressing in "survival" mode. This consists of boots, cargo pants or shorts, leather work gloves stuffed in one back pocket, with a respirator mask shoved into the other. They also typically have a case of water and several MREs in the back seat of their vehicle, and rubber boots and a shovel on the floor. What is most astounding about this "survival mode" is who it affects. Waiters, doctors, lawyers, ditch diggers, truck drivers, bankers, all economic and social levels, all races, all ages. Driving through the CBD (Central Business District), the Garden District and the French Quarter, you can almost convince yourself things are getting back to normal, that it's just a missed trash pickup day, or a good sized construction project in the neighborhood.

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Adjusting to the 'new' New Orleans

The city and state here estimate that a million refrigerators will need to be replaced. When the power went out, the food left in them rotted so severely that the stuff became toxic waste, and leached into the plastic and piping. There are hundreds of them on every street, even in areas that are not flooded and only lost power. I think the number will be higher, because most people had more than one, and that doesn't count restaurants that had small models in addition to the large commercial ones.

Unbelievably, traffic is becoming a problem again. I have always found New Orleans to be a difficult place to get around, (the streets were mostly laid out in the 1800's, at least downtown) and for the past six weeks, traffic law abeyance has been interesting to say the least. Driving the wrong way on a one-way, or up the wrong entrance ramp, cutting across the interstate, and going the wrong way on I-10 or the cross-town expressway has been the norm. There were so few people in the city right after the storm, you just put on the emergency flashers and were careful when you got to an intersection. After driving like that for a few weeks, you start to feel like that's the way it should be.

The most interesting thing for the past few days has been the smells. This weekend we were shooting a story next to a five-star restaurant that was being cleaned. Imagine a garbage can, filled with really ripe things, sealed up and left in the Louisiana sun for five weeks. Now open the can and crawl inside. That’s just about every eating establishment in the city, five-star to fast food; all had things rotting in the cooler. Walking through New Orleans was once a joy; you could smell the special of the day from each place, sometimes good, usually excellent. Now the smell of what's cooking fights with the stench of rotting food and garbage.

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