The Bleeding Coast

In Battered Parish, Officials Bear the Brunt of Neighbors' Anguish
By DAN BARRY

CAMERON, La., June 28 — They convened a meeting here the other night in just about the only building still intact. They recited the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the elected officials of Cameron Parish tried again to govern in the protracted wake of chaos.

Six part-time members of the Cameron Parish Police Jury, a sort of county legislature, sat in a semi-circle in the dank Cameron Courthouse, where a calendar in the deserted basement is paused at September. One member is a farmer, another a carpenter. A third maintains portable toilets. Three wore baseball caps; all wore that look of forever-lost sleep.

Just outside the courthouse, flatness and emptiness: stores gone, subdivisions gone, people gone. Inside, a brief talk about taxes provided a nostalgic whiff of the comfortably mundane — until the discussion turned again to removing more storm debris, demolishing more buildings and trying to recover from the time-stopping September visit of Hurricane Rita.

In an audience dappled with the red shirts of the Army Corps of Engineers and the blue shirts of FEMA, a woman called out that her elderly momma still needed help with debris removal. Another woman, begging for help with the mosquitoes that envelop the parish, seemed to direct all of Cameron's pain and frustration toward the elected and appointed officials assembled before her:

"By God," she said, her voice shaking, "you better answer me."

And what could those officials do but nod and say they would take care of it?

James Doxey, the police juror representing Cameron town, would take care of it, and so would Tina Horn, the parish administrator, and so would Clifton Hebert, the emergency operations officer. Their own homes were washed away, too, but they would take care of it.

Pain and frustration are as common here as the mosquitoes that beat against cars like raindrops. Hurricane Rita — not Hurricane Katrina, but her less famous sister — all but ruined Cameron Parish, where about 10,000 people lived amid pasture and marshland in southwestern Louisiana 40 miles south of U.S. 90.

This place prides itself on its role in providing oil and seafood to the rest of the country, on its Gulf Coast wildlife, on its Cajun self-reliance. Still, nine months of cleaning up, of fighting insurance companies and of deciphering federal regulations — of wondering who will come back — have taken a toll on the people and those who serve them.

I don't have any answers, any plans or programs. I simply ache for these people.