BAKER, La. – By today, families displaced by Hurricane Katrina will move here into a “mini city” of neatly spaced rows of about 600 white RV trailers that was a week ago a 65-acre cow pasture outside of Baton Rouge.
A team of 200 engineers, plumbers, laborers, draftsmen and city officials have worked around the clock to install water and sewer pipes to the grassy fields, converting the area into what some evacuees working on the project call the “City of Hope.”
More than 330,000 families have applied for housing vouchers.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has set up some trailers in the driveways of homes destroyed by the hurricane so that residents can remain on their property as their permanent homes are rebuilt.
But the bulk of trailers and mobile homes will be set up on large state-owned properties, the first of which is the one here about 10 miles north of Baton Rouge. A spokeswoman for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the state has identified 52,000 acres it can use for setting up temporary homes.
“They’re nice, but some people say they’re awfully small,” said Jessie James, 57, of the RV city being set up a mile away. James is a New Orleans resident now living at Baker’s City Hall, which has been converted into a shelter. “I would use the RV temporarily, but I want my family to go home,” she said.
Stephen Saucier, an architect who is one of the lead project managers of the RV park in Baker, said local officials are doing more than just setting up rows of homes. They are trying to erect a semblance of a community with a large kitchen hall that will serve three meals a day, grassy areas for picnic tables, basketball courts and laundries.
There are two kinds of homes that displaced residents will get.
FEMA has purchased or ordered 125,000 travel trailers, the kind of RVs that are towed behind a truck. Each of them costs between $16,000 and $20,000 and is at least 30 feet long and contains a stove, a refrigerator, an air conditioner, a furnace and a bathroom with a shower.
The agency has also purchased or ordered thousands of manufactured homes, for about $30,000 each. They are similar to the temporary offices used at construction sites. They are 60 feet long and contain the same amenities as the travel trailers.
Meanwhile, churchgoers gathered to pray at the historic St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, convening in the building described as the “soul of the city” for its first Sunday Mass since Hurricane Katrina hit more than a month ago.
Relief workers and crews continued the massive task of continuing to pump out the floodwaters. Water was still being pumped from the heavily flooded lower 9th Ward. Officials expected the pumping to be completed by midweek, said Mitch Frazier, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Electricity had been restored to about 29 percent of New Orleans customers and about 98 percent of Jefferson Parish customers, said Chanel Lagarde, a spokesman for Entergy Corp.
As of Friday, the state health department reported 932 deaths in Louisiana from Hurricane Katrina. Mississippi’s death toll was 221.
Storm update
* Otis weakened from a Category 1 hurricane to a tropical storm Sunday and headed north toward an unpopulated stretch of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula.
* Tropical Storm Stan formed before dawn Sunday and plowed into a marshy stretch of land on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. The storm could re-emerge into the Gulf of Mexico today, where it was projected to gather strength again. The storm was expected to dump up to 15 inches of rain in some areas of the Yucatan peninsula and Belize.
No immediate reports of damages or injuries were received in connection with either Hurricane Otis or Tropical Storm Stan, Mexican officials said.
Associated Press
New Orleans firefighter Dwayne Seghers wipes his eye as he and fellow firefighters attend the first Mass at the historic St. Louis Cathedral on Sunday since Hurricane Katrina hit more than a month ago in New Orleans, La.
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