Hurricane's Forgotten Victims

They raked oysters and trapped blue crabs and sold their catch out of a shack beside their home. They rented beach cabins to college students on beer-chugging getaways and to adventurous tourists who came to alligator country from as far away as Britain and Germany.

"We worked hard, we lived hard and we laughed hard," Loretta Meaux said.

That life blew to pieces in September, when Hurricane Rita slammed into the Louisiana coast with 120-mph winds and a 20-foot wall of water. Holly Beach, a sliver of sugar-white sand affectionately known as the "Cajun Riviera," was all but wiped off the map.

More than four months later, the former community of about 200 residents, roughly halfway between New Orleans and Houston, remains a surreal scape of concrete foundations, aluminum picnic benches and frying pans half buried in sand. Without outside help, all the sweat and muscle the families can muster will never be enough to bring back Holly Beach.

The Meauxs live in a small RV bought with a $16,000 insurance settlement they received for their destroyed home. They collect $98 a week in unemployment. They wonder how they will get back out on the water to earn a living before their meager savings run out. And like many others in Cajun country, they increasingly question whether the rest of America knows, or cares, about the depth of their region's devastation.

"We're not looking for no handout, but we need some help over here," Loretta Meaux, 52, said as she prepared a pot of chicken and sausage gumbo. "All the talk is about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. We love and respect New Orleans. But we're people too."

On Sept. 24, a little less than a month after Katrina devastated New Orleans, Rita ripped across the southwest Louisiana coastline, battering port towns where generations had made a living in the commercial fishing and oil and gas industries.

A handful of people died as a direct result of Hurricane Rita, and politicians and the national news media quickly shifted their attention back to the calamity caused by Hurricane Katrina, which killed hundreds. But in the east Texas towns and rural Louisiana parishes that Rita mangled, misery still runs deep.

In the three parishes on Louisiana's southwestern tip -- Cameron, Calcasieu and Vermillion -- roads, bridges, utilities, schools, government buildings and businesses were heavily damaged. Few homes remain standing or habitable.