3 years after Katrina, cast out again

Lorraine Autman, 63, who had already checked in to the Chase Suites hotel in Baton Rouge, returned to the trailer park Friday to finish packing. Most of her neighbors had left, and all that remained were a trail of discarded possessions: a yellow-handled mop, a potato peeler, a deflated birthday balloon, oyster shells, Mardi Gras beads and an empty Fruit Smiles carton.

Inside the trailer, she found the air conditioner broken and the empty refrigerator crawling with tiny roaches.

"I'm not going to miss this place," she said.

All she wanted to do was get back to Chase Suites and turn on her faucets until her bathtub was high. The tub, she said, would ease her worries about how to pay $1,100 a month rent on a fixed income of $756.

"It's the long-term perspective that makes you stress," she said, as she trudged over a field that was already beginning to look more like a pasture than a metropolis of the dispossessed.

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jenny.jarvie@latimes.com