Year later, Rita victims also rebuild

CAMERON, La. – Some recall Hurricane Rita as the storm that just missed Houston. Others vaguely remember it as the one that came after Katrina.

The widespread anonymity of Rita has somehow reached the point where people along the Texas-Louisiana border – the ones whose towns and crops and neighbors were annihilated by Rita’s 120 mph winds and 20-foot storm surge – have given Rita a new name: the Forgotten Hurricane.

“Nobody says anything about Rita. It’s all Katrina, Katrina, Katrina,” said Paul Martin, 47, whose home in southwestern Louisiana was washed away with the other 35 homes in his neighborhood. “Hey, we lost everything too.”

It was one year ago Sunday that Rita roared across the Texas-Louisiana border and devastated a swampy, brackish area dotted by wooden houses built long before hurricane building codes existed. About 100 people died either during the storm or trying to escape from it – including 23 seniors who died in a bus blaze during the chaotic evacuation of Houston.

Although Katrina cost more in lives, Rita swamped a broad area. More than 600,000 homes across 85,000 square miles were damaged or destroyed, the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates.

Rita forced what could be the largest evacuation in U.S. history. Three million people fled two states. Only Hurricane Floyd, which struck near Cape Fear, N.C., in 1999, comes close.

And while Katrina’s $40 billion price tag is the largest for any hurricane hitting the United States, Rita ranked as the seventh-costliest storm, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Damage estimates for Rita from the institute are over $5 billion.

Many of the hard-hit areas are on a slow track to recovery. People in those areas believe the storm’s timing – hitting just four weeks after Katrina – is a big reason why that recovery has taken so long.

Shelters and apartments around Houston and southwestern Louisiana were already filled by Katrina evacuees, leaving residents there to find temporary housing on their own. FEMA and insurance companies were already deluged with Katrina-related cases when Rita hit.

Martin said FEMA officials told him in January he would get a trailer in seven to 10 days.

“How about seven to 10 months?” he said. Martin received his trailer nine days ago, after spending the past year in a friend’s apartment.

Louis Arceneaux, a Lake Charles, La., high school chemistry teacher, said the damage to his home was about $10,000. He had no flood insurance, and he moved in with his mother after the storm, so he did not receive housing money.

“Rita broke me,” he said. “I can’t afford to teach anymore.”

So far, the calm hurricane season has allowed residents along the Gulf Coast to focus on rebuilding.

Richard and Nancy Burbank are the first Constance Beach family to rebuild their home, a lone structure surrounded by 20-foot wooden stilts that once supported dozens of homes.

“When I came back, I accepted what I saw and immediately wanted to rebuild,” Nancy Burbank said.

For Paul England, a welder at a Port Arthur, Texas, oil refinery, the decision not to rebuild but move 20 miles inland was an easy one.

“I won’t move back down here,” he said. “Rita scared the hell out of a lot of people.”