Hackberry: Population Zero

HACKBERRY, La. — Roger Thibodeaux gunned the engine but lowered his voice.

"What we're doing here is illegal," he said. "But we need to know what's in there. We need to know what the rest of our lives are going to be like."

Thibodeaux, 43, and Mike Daigle, 52 -- two grizzled friends who live hard and work hard, one on a drilling rig, the other on a shrimp boat -- had driven as close as they could Sunday afternoon to the region where Hurricane Rita cast a wall of water into Louisiana. Like thousands of others, they pleaded and cajoled, but authorities told them they could not go home.

So Thibodeaux and Daigle fetched an aluminum skiff and dropped it off the side of the road, just beyond sight of a roadblock. Their voices hushed, they turned left over Choupain Road, then left again over the front yard of Judge Broussard's mama's house.

Half an hour later, they made their way to Hackberry, a town of 1,700 people and one coffee shop in southwest Louisiana. They stepped onto the shore, plunging into dark, gooey mud and devastation.

Remarkably, Rita appears to have killed no one in Louisiana. But in several small towns, the massive storm surge that followed the hurricane carted away something most locals thought was more enduring: their way of life.

In Hackberry, all 750 homes were damaged, and most were destroyed. Fish, their cloudy eyes bulging toward the sun, are rotting in the mud. The storm seems to have picked up most houses and let loose their contents like a salt shaker -- soggy checkbooks, potted orange trees, a child's bedpost with stickers reminding him to brush and floss.

"It was a nice place to live," Daigle said as he waded down Channel Drive to the home where he and his wife of 32 years raised their two children.

"Everybody kind of knew everybody here. On a Saturday night, we might go walking and meet people. One night one will cook, and another night somebody else. Sometimes somebody might get a sack or two of crawfish, and we'll all head over there and have a nice time. Now I don't see but about four houses that people are going to be able to even live in. How are they ever going to be able to rebuild?"

Neighboring towns did even worse.

To the southeast, Cameron -- a port providing employment to hundreds in the area -- is gone. A historic courthouse that was one of the few structures to survive Hurricane Audrey in 1957 sustained heavy damage.