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Even in calm weather, the Gulf Coast is a place where you become aware of just how watery this planet is. Driving on the raised bridges of Interstate 10 or down Mississippi's Highway 90 on a typical, super-humid night, the line between what's land, water, and air seems to melt, like in a Salvador DaIi painting. To those "born on the bayou," and to its regular flooding, that blurry line has long created an illusion of invulnerability. Katrina erased that line completely.
"We've seen many floods over the years," says third generation New Orleans jeweler Coleman Adler, whose flagship store on Canal Street is regarded as the Deep Souths jewelry epicenter. "But what keeps grabbing your eye, what you just can't get used to," says Adler, "is the scale. Just when you think you've seen the full extent, there's another neighborhood up ahead that you never thought would be hit. It's not just hit or damaged. It's water up to the roof It's gone."
"All gone," says Trung Vu, a jeweler from Gretna, south across the Mississippi from New Orleans. Three days after his neighborhood was destroyed by Katrina, two days after his New Orleans store was obliterated by flooding and looting, Vu, who was displaced from Saigon in 1975, was a refugee for a second time. "Empty again," he told a reporter in the parking lot of a Lonoke, Arkansas, Day's Inn, where he spent a night with his family. Asked if he'd ever go back, Vu shrugged his shoulders: "For what, how do you pay for everything?"
Katrina made first landfall near Waveland, Mississippi, 35 miles east of New Orleans. No building within half a mile of the water survived. Katrina also leveled the Highway 90 bridge into town. Rescuers, unable to reach the town until two days later, found only mud-caked survivors in the parking lot of what has been described as a "post-nuclear mall."
Brian Moliere, one of Waveland's four jewelers, was camped amid the rubble of former 100-year-old houses. Moliere had stayed behind as most of the town evacuated. Two days after Katrina, Cain Burdeau, an AP reporter, found Moliere and his dog under a sheet of plastic near the ruins of his home and jewelry store. He and...