Jesuit Bend, La. – George Perret is gone for good.
“We’re not coming back,” said Perret, 60, as he surveyed his shattered home in Jesuit Bend, a village in Plaquemines Parish south of New Orleans.
“We’re not going through this again,” he said as he gathered a few possessions and prepared to move to Georgia. “I’m never going to live this close to the river.”
Residents of the parish, a low, marshy sliver of land that extends south into the Gulf of Mexico, were allowed to visit their homes for the first time Sunday since the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed directly overhead two weeks ago.
What they saw almost defied belief.
A coffin swept from an above-ground sarcophagus lay on the pavement of the main highway. A lace-trimmed piece of burial gown dangled from a rusted hole in its side.
A forest was littered with giant blue oil tanks, which had been ripped from their foundations and swept in from half a mile away.
Oil blackened the trees, coated the highway and shimmered in drainage ditches.
A bull stood panting by the side of the road, its tongue swollen, apparently sick from having drunk the fetid waters that surrounded it.
A house pushed onto the highway, with one corner of a minivan poking out from beneath it.
Marshland west of the road, which serves as a storm buffer, is gone.
Government officials say the devastation is nearly complete from Jesuit Bend to Venice, a roughly 60-mile stretch of shrimping villages, oil facilities and marshland. No houses remain standing, and many have been flung from their foundations.
Parish officials had kept residents away, saying the destruction there was so widespread that downed power lines, broken sewer systems and blocked roadways made the area unsafe.
“We didn’t want people getting hurt,” said Benny Rousselle, the parish president.
Merlin Ancar planned to pack a pickup truck with what he could retrieve. He left with a single plastic bag filled with waterlogged clothing and a few pictures.
“You try to keep your hopes up that you can save something – anything – just something to be able to build on,” said Ancar, a shrimp fisherman with Cajun roots.
Perret plans to move to Progress, Ga., where he has family. “It will be safer there,” he said, “than it is here.”
