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A street sign leans over a hurricane-flooded street in New Orleans.AP Photo by Brian Lawdermilk

Houmas Take Direct Hit From Gustav

By Victor Merina

The United Houma Nation, Lousiana's largest tribe still struggling to recover from devastating storms three years ago, took a direct hit Monday morning from Hurricane Gustav, which lashed tribal communities with dangerous 110 mph winds and a feared storm surge of 10 to 14 feet.

The National Hurricane Center reported that Gustav’s center struck the Gulf Coast near Cocodrie, La., a bayou town in Terrebonne Parish. The landfall site is located 40 miles south of Raceland, La., where Houma Principal Chief Brenda Dardar Robichaux is sheltering about 20 other tribal members in her home.

"Our spirits are up and we're safe," said Robichaux in a telephone interview from her home. "Although smaller trees are falling down all around us, the 60-foot oak trees are bending but not breaking and the cypress trees are leaning but haven't broken. Magnolia branches are down and there are tree limbs everywhere."

Robichaux said that as the worst of the storm hit the area, there was a "tremendous howling sound" from the winds and the group had to switch to emergency generators when the power went out shortly after dawn.

Robichaux said she had yet to hear of any injuries or specific damages suffered by tribal members from the storm but pointed out that the hurricane's path included communities in Terrebonne and LaFourche Parishes where many of the Houma Nation's 36,000 members live.

Thomas Dardar, a Houma tribal official who evacuated to Gonzales, La., near Baton Rouge, said he had been monitoring fire department reports and been in contact with authorities responding to emergency calls. He learned that some rooftops were ripped off buildings in Terrebonne Parish and that broken trees and debris littered streets.

Despite initial reports that a levee had broken, Dardar said there is no evidence that was the case. "As of late this morning, none of the levees had been breached," he said.

For the many of the Houmas who had joined a mass evacuation out of harm's way over the weekend, they were still adjusting to a new life in makeshift shelters in unfamiliar towns.

Vonda Trahan and her parents along with two young children are ensconced in a Methodist church in Jena, La., where they are using a recreation center and Sunday school classrooms for temporary shelter. She and her family spent the night sleeping in their cars at a Wal-Mart parking lot before finally finding the church the next day. Now her husband and 13-year-old son have joined her at the church along with dozens of other Houmas who had made the trek to escape Gustav's path.

"They are treating us really great," Trahan said of the church reception. "We are so thankful."

Another group of Houma tribal members received a warm welcome in Conehatta, Miss. — located about 60 miles east of Jackson — where they were given a place to stay at a local boys and girls club. The Conehatta, one of eight tribal communities of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, opened their doors to the first wave of what is expected to be some 100 Houma tribal members fleeing Louisiana.

Wilma Simpson, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, said that when the Houma sought help for evacuees, it was Beasley Denson, the Miko or tribal chief of the Choctaw who granted permission.

"Anytime when other tribes need assistance in whatever needs to happen, they tend to look to him for guidance," Simpson said of Denson. "At this time he was willing to open our doors to the Houma tribe without any hesitation."

The Associated Press reported from New Orleans:

Hurricane Gustav slammed into the heart of Louisiana's fishing and oil industry with 110 mph winds Monday, delivering only a glancing blow to New Orleans that raised hopes the city would escape the kind of catastrophic flooding brought by Katrina three years ago.

That did not mean the state survived the storm without damage. A levee in the southeast part of the state was on the verge of collapse, and officials scrambled to fortify it. Roofs were torn from homes, trees toppled and roads flooded. More than 1 million homes were without power.

The nearly 2 million people who left coastal Louisiana on a mandatory evacuation order watched TV coverage from shelters and hotel rooms hundreds of miles away, many of them wondering what kind of damage they would find when they were allowed to come back home.

Keith Cologne of Chauvin, La., looked dejected after talking by telephone to a friend who didn't evacuate. "They said it's bad, real bad. There are roofs lying all over. It's all gone," said Cologne, staying at a hotel in Orange Beach, Ala.

One community in southeast Louisiana was fearful their levee wouldn't hold. As many as 300 homes in Plaquemines Parish were threatened, and the parish president called a television station to issue an urgent plea to any residents who were left to flee to the Mississippi River, where officials would evacuate them.

"It's overtopping. There's a possibility it's going to be compromised," said Phil Truxillo, a Plaquemines emergency official.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit around 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie (pronounced ko-ko-DREE), a low-lying community in Louisiana's Cajun country 72 miles southwest of New Orleans, as a Category 2 storm on a scale of 1 to 5. The storm weakened to a Category 1 later in the afternoon. Forecasters feared the storm would arrive as a devastating Category 4.

As of noon, the extent of the damage in Cajun country was not immediately clear. State officials said they had still not reached anyone at Port Fourchon, a vital hub for the energy industry where huge amounts of oil and gas are piped inland to refineries. The eye of Gustav passed about 20 miles from the port and there were fears the damage there could be extensive.

The storm could prove devastating to the region of fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns. For most of the past half century, the bayou communities have watched their land disappear at one of the highest rates of erosion in the world. A combination of factors — oil drilling, hurricanes, levees, dams — have destroyed the swamps and left the area with virtually no natural buffer against storms.

Damage to refineries and drilling platforms could cause gasoline prices at the pump to spike. The Gulf Coast is home to nearly half the nation's refining capacity, while offshore the Gulf accounts for about 25 percent of domestic oil production and 15 percent of natural gas output. But oil prices actually tumbled to $111 a barrel as the storm weakened.

For all their apparent similarities, Hurricanes Gustav and Katrina were different in one critical respect: Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast with an epic storm surge that topped 27 feet, a far higher wall of water than Gustav hauled ashore.

Katrina was a bigger storm when it came ashore in August 2005 as a Category 3 storm and it made a direct hit on the Louisiana-Mississippi line. Gustav skirted along Louisiana's shoreline at "a more gentle angle," said National Weather Service storm surge specialist Will Shaffer.

Nagin's emergency preparedness director, Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, said residents might be allowed to return 24 hours after the tropical storm-force winds die down.

Other evacuated areas along the coast may be away from home for longer, said National Hurricane Center director Bill Read. The hurricane will likely slow down as it heads into Texas and possibly Arkansas, and those areas could then get 20 inches of rainfall.

Only one storm-related death, a woman killed in a car wreck driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, was reported in Louisiana. Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.

In Mississippi, officials said a 15-foot storm surge flooded homes and inundated the only highways to coastal towns devastated by Katrina. Officials said at least three people near the Jordan River had to be rescued from the floodwaters. Elsewhere in the state, an abandoned building in Gulfport collapsed and a few homes in Biloxi were flooded.

The ground floor of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on Biloxi's casino row was flooded during the storm surge from Gustav. Hurricane Katrina smashed the casino three years ago shortly before it was to open.

Bobby Tuber, the casino's facility-grounds manager, said the storm put about 30 inches of water in the building but the casino itself, located on an upper level, and was not damaged.

"We're fine. We'll come out all well," Tuber said as he and others used a pump and a large hose to remove the water.

Earlier, reznet reported:

Residents of two Louisiana parishes, home to the largest number of Houma Indians in the state, evacuated their homes and businesses Saturday as Hurricane Gustav threatened to strike the area Monday.

Principal Chief Brenda Dardar Robichaux of the United Houma Nation met with LaFourche Parish (county) authorities and said a mandatory evacuation order was issued Friday for local residents amid concern that nearby floodgates could overflow in hurricane-force conditions.

Officials posted an evacuation schedule on the LaFourche Parish Web site on Friday. Terrebonne Parish issued a mandatory evacuation order Saturday afternoon, and activated an off-site emergency Web site. Most of the 36,000 members of the Houma Nation live in LaFourche and adjacent Terrebonne Parish.

"It's organized chaos here, and we're all concerned," Robichaux said in a telephone interview from LaFourche Parish, where she lives.

Robichaux said many members of the state's largest tribe are still recovering from the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita three years ago.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami reported Sunday night that Gustav was a Category 3 storm with 115 mph winds. Gustav could make landfall Monday morning with a storm surge of 10 to 14 feet, the center said.

The center issued a hurricane warning for the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Alabama-Florida border, including New Orleans and nearby Lake Pontchartrain. The warning area included Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, The Courier newspaper of Houma. La., reported.

A headline ominously warned parish residents to "Get out now, while you still can."

Merina reported from Los Angeles.

Victor Merina is reznet's senior correspondent and special projects editor. A former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter and finalist for the Pulitizer Prize, he also is a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. Merina is a visiting faculty member at The Poynter Institute, where he leads seminars on cross-cultural reporting and writing about race.