01:55 PM CDT on Sunday, September 18, 2005

Allen G. Breed / Associated Press

VIOLET -- It had been barely three weeks since Brenda Manuel had seen her street, but St. Bernard Parish seemed to have aged decades.

"It looks like a black and white photo," she said as she crunched through the drying black mud outside her one-story brick home across a highway from the Mississippi River. "There's no color."

Gray. That is how Hurricane Katrina has left this once-lush outpost on the toe of Louisiana, where the people make their living from the fish in the water and the oil beneath it.

Just east of New Orleans, this ruggedly beautiful area of bayous and roads overarched with stately oaks took the full force of the Category 4 storm. A surge as high as 20 feet overtopped the parish's protective levees, flooding most homes and scouring others to their foundations.

Nearly 70 people have been confirmed dead -- half of them in a flooded nursing home that wasn't evacuated.

Officials estimate that as much as 80 percent of the structures in the parish will have to be razed. While large portions of New Orleans are already reopening to residents and merchants, and lights have flickered on in the French Quarter, St. Bernardians are being told not to expect to come home until next summer.

Over the weekend, some residents began trickling back to see the d evastation for themselves.

Staring at the wreckage of a friend's house in the eastern part of the parish, shrimper and oysterman Wade Nunez wonders how a place so devastated can ever come back.

"It will never recover," the 42-year-old says, shaking his head. "All our culture and our way of life, it's gone."

Looking around the parish of 66,000 residents, it is easy to fall into despair.

The entrance to St. Bernard is a makeshift barricade of truck trailers manned by National Guardsmen in blue surgical masks. Just inside, a welcome sign carries the hopeful message, "St. Bernard Parish: Building a better future."

What lies ahead is an uninhabitable moonscape.

The waters have largely receded, leaving streets caked in thick muck. Where it is still wet, it envelopes the shoes and tries to suck them off; where dry, it cracks underfoot like broken dishes, flaking into a fine gray dust that coats the throat and stings the nostrils.

State-designated scenic byways are littered with the rotting corpses of animals, the canals are choked with tangled and twisted boats. Many of the trees are lush and green on top, blackened and dead-looking where the water raked their trunks.

In Violet, just east of the parish seat of Chalmette, many of the homes, like Manuel's, appear to be intact. But one step inside reveals the bitter truth.

Colonies of black and white mold have sprouted on the walls and ceilings. Expensive parquet flooring in the kitchen has buckled like cheap plywood. The entire house is awash in a foul-smelling sludge.

A dark smudge nearly six feet off the floor shows the water line. Manuel, a carpenter, knows the wall studs have already begun warping. The house is a total loss.

"I have no more tears left," she says, though it is clear she is wiping more than sweat from her face.

"The best thing they can do is start bulldozing," says her husband, Floyd Manuel.

Farther east, Katrina's wrath is more apparent. Here, houses were obliterated. Cars and trucks parked along the highway in hopes of saving them are encased in cocoons of sea grass and fishing nets.

In the tiny fishing community of Yscloskey, not a single house remains standing. The Baptist Church and community center -- gone.

"This was a thriving community," says George Jackson, who lived with his girlfriend in a raised, two-story concrete block house on Bayou La Loutre. He returned Saturday to a pile of rubble.

"Nothing, nothing, nothing," the 48-year-old shrimper says as he pulls his rusted guns from the debris. He got his skiff out, but left behind $50,000 worth of radio and radar equipment.

Jackson looked into insurance a couple of months before the storm. But the companies wanted $6,400 a year in premiums.

"We couldn't afford it," he says, sucking on a cigar and choking back tears. "We don't make much money, but we make a living. And we enjoy our life."

If his way of life wasn't killed by the toxic soup pumped out of New Orleans after the storm, he fears the government will finish him. He has been hearing rumors that he and others won't be allowed to resettle in this part of the parish, that it will be turned into a wildlife preserve.

But officials say talk of abandoning any part of the parish is premature.

"We haven't given up on anything," says Parish President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez.

Rodriguez's roots in St. Bernard date back to the 1770s, when the Spanish brought in settlers from the Canary Islands to grow food and guard a swampy outpost against British invaders. In the state of emergency left by Katrina, the law has sidestepped the parish council and transformed him into a kind of dictator in cowboy boots.

"I sure didn't want to be in this position at all," says the soon-to-be-70 Rodriguez, a bear of a man with snow-white hair and a brass-topped walking stick. After floodwaters came rushing into the government center on Aug. 29, Rodriguez and others ended up spending two days on the roof. He now holds court in an office at the Chalmette Oil Refinery.

Cords dangling from the ceiling connect to four white phones. A large squirt bottle of hand sanitizer dominates the conference table. On the door is a computer-generated sign that reads: "St. Bernard Parish's Rebirth: Return, Rebuild & Remain."

Establishing a functioning government has been no easy task.

Much of the staff is operating out of a cruise ship docked nearby. Their main function right now is controlling the flow of people in and out of the parish.

Ashley Allen, the 19-year-old daughter of the parish's assistant homeland security director, produces temporary IDs with a computer and digital camera salvaged from an office.

In another room, Rodriguez's wife, Evelyn, stamps piles of hastily drafted roadblock passes for business owners and residents.

"It's not a state of anarchy," says District Judge Robert Buckley, who has been sleeping on a prison bed in a colleague's courtroom. "There is government in place."

But for now, it is a government with no tax base, no citizens, really.

Over the next two weeks, residents are being allowed back in, neighborhood by neighborhood, for 10 hours each, to salvage what they can. Some neighborhoods, including one affected by a spill at the Murphy Oil refinery, are still too "hot."

The water plant is up and running, but Rodriguez can't allow residents to return for good until the sewage system works, and he's been told that could take seven or eight months.

"It's going to be tough, but I look forward to the battle," he says. "We're going to rebuild, and it's going to be bigger and better."

The Rev. Ernest Dison is counting on it.

Dison, 61, returned to Violet over the weekend to find that his home and 12 rental units had been flooded to their second stories. A pair of stray dogs that had taken over his house had to be ejected before he could begin salvaging paperwork.

As he slogs through the foot-deep muck surrounding his ruined home, Dison says he sees a divine purpose to this destruction. He sees Katrina as a lesson, a test.

"I see humility," he says. "I see a people who are starting to educate themselves and make changes. ... I see a place that was good made bad, but I see it will exceed the good that was."

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh, N.C.

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)