• The flight from low-lying communities battered by storms almost annually is evident in Pointe-aux-Chenes and the island to its west. A drive down the road with Sandy Chaisson is like stepping back in time, as the 1997 South Terrebonne High graduate points out blown-out homes abandoned by families long ago. There’s a vacant gingerbread house left to rot in the mud a decade or so ago, an elevated trailer gutted by drug dealers and wasting away, a brick home on a concrete slab with the windows blown out and few signs of life.


    On Island Road, the only way in and out of Isle de Jean Charles, the widespread destruction is breathtaking. On one section of the street once populated by American Indian families such as Sandy’s mother, Velma Naquin, and Johnny’s mother, Mary Danos, five homes in a row are vacant, as if the people who lived in them up and left and never looked back. The island where native families settled centuries ago to take advantage of once-lush forests full of mink and muskrat and water brimming with shrimp, crabs and oysters is surrounded on all sides by the Gulf of Mexico, which creeps ever closer.


    Rita wreaked such misery on this island of about 30 families that even Sandy Chaisson could not help but gasp when she drove her truck onto the muddy road curving through the neighborhood. Only a bomb dropped from the sky could cause such total wreckage, she said. Houses were ripped in half and ceilings torn open. Rotting horses were sprawled sideways on the levee. Residents walked in a quiet daze, barefoot and somber.