September 15, 2005 Thursday
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Column 1; National Desk; STORM AND CRISIS: REBUILDING; Pg. 21

LENGTH: 1042 words

HEADLINE: Areas Isolated After Storm Make Do

BYLINE: By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

DATELINE: BROOKLYN, Miss., Sept. 14

BODY:


Hours after the wind stopped howling but days before outsiders showed up, Amanda Williams had cooked up the 300 pounds of venison that was stored in her deep freezer, scavenged some paper plates from the store across the street and set up a table in her front yard to begin feeding this town just north of Gulfport.

Before long, a Red Cross worker sheepishly joined in on the feast of venison sausage, venison chili and venison sandwiches at the new town ''restaurant.''

''I said, 'You're supposed to be feeding us,''' Ms. Williams said with a chuckle.

In McComb, a 70-year-old man wobbled up a ladder to the roof of his house and tried to remove a 4,000-pound tree, to the alarm of Edward Hager, a contractor from Kentucky who finished removing the tree's stump, so heavy it snapped a cable on his crane.

Not far from the Mississippi border, the residents of Franklinton, La., used chain saws and sheer brawn to chop through the twisting, perilous pile of trees that had turned their streets into impenetrable mazes and trapped residents in their homes.

In the most far-flung hamlets throughout the devastated regions of Mississippi and Louisiana, thousands of residents neither waited for government nor lamented its absence after the hurricane. They put on their boots, pulled out their tarps and chain saws and got busy.

Isolated, experienced in working outdoors and fully equipped with the accoutrements of rural life, these people are quite accustomed to being their own sanitation, social service and utility bureaus.

''People here are used to doing for themselves,'' said Faye Boyd, Franklinton's town clerk. ''They didn't wait for FEMA or the parish to do it for them.''

Hurricane Katrina left some of these towns so cut off from the rest of the nation that they still do not even know what is happening 20 miles away. While it accentuated the area's remoteness, it also showcased its coping abilities.

''You're dealing with a different kind of person in the country,'' said Mr. Hager, who has been traveling throughout the two states over the last few weeks removing debris. ''They're used to hard physical labor, they've used chain saws all their lives and they're not going to sit around and say, 'Oh I can't do this.'''

Franklinton, like Brooklyn and all the small towns in the southern corner where Louisiana and Mississippi meet, suffered extensive damage and loss of electricity and phone service. Because of the remoteness of these areas, officials are still trying to determine the extent of the loss of life.

In the areas north of the coastline, fallen trees wreaked the most immediate and dangerous havoc. Houses, city buildings and hospitals were enclosed by fallen branches and upturned stumps, making escape by foot, let alone car, impossible.

''So all the neighborhood husbands just got the chain saws out,'' said Regina Runfalo, a hospital administrator in Bogalusa, La.

In many areas, the chain saw is to the trunks of cars as the MetroCard is to the wallets of Brooklynites. (The other Brooklynites.)

Robert McNabb, a sheriff's deputy in Magnolia, Miss., was driving in his patrol car when trees began to fall around him. After the wind stopped, he took his chain saw out and cut himself free.

''I changed my uniform and started clearing the road,'' he explained. ''I used my tractor.'' I've got cows. For the most part, we like do things ourselves around here. I do hope to get reimbursed on the gas I have been using for the generators.''

Franklinton's jumble of gnarled trees required a platoon of saws. ''Some people were cutting one way, and some were cutting the other, and you'd meet them at the corner,'' said Roland Carter, whose subdivision was devastated by the gusting winds.

The chain saw brigade got some reinforcement to speed the recovery.

''My son's house had 68 trees across his drive,'' said Richard Knight, who owns the Ace Hardware store in Franklinton. ''So the dairy farmer Rickie brought his tractor with the front-end loader over, and my son would cut the tree and then he would load them in.''

Ace Hardware has made a brisk sale of generators, used to cool homes, heat showers and cook, as well as tarps for damaged roofs and electric wires to rewire appliances.

''You've heard of the FEMA blue-roof program?'' asked Ms. Runfalo, referring to the federal government program of placing blue tarps on the roofs of homes that are badly damaged. ''We've got our own blue-roof program right here.''

In places that are extremely rural and that have many elderly residents, the do-it-yourself model is more limited, and limiting.

Anne Lambert, who lives in a shotgun house along a remote highway in the unincorporated town of Wilmer, La., has no chain saw, no backhoe or tractor. She has gone at the formidable pile of branches in her yard with rakes and pitchforks.

''Me and him picked up thems we could,'' said Ms. Lambert, 75, referring to her 88-year-old neighbor, Percy Gill.

The work outside can be daunting. Temperatures throughout the region have hovered well above 90 degrees most days since the storm, and the cleanup coincides with the two-week infestation of so-called love bugs -- black winged things that seem to exist only to procreate and commit suicide against car windows -- which are swarming all the more thanks to the storm, which blew them inland.

Things do not always go perfectly.

Buster Bickham, 53, who works for the telephone company in Franklinton, heard a neighbor calling to him from his roof.

''He was trying to put a tarp up there and he was afraid to move, because it was too steep for him, so I got the bucket truck and I went up there and got him,'' Mr. Bickham said.

Some other do-it-yourself approaches bumped up against the role of the authorities.

For example, E.G. Warren, a State Farm insurance agent, arrived in Gulfport with his family the Tuesday after the storm and took shelter in a trailer with his family. Late one night, he said, a person covered in blood started banging on the door.

So he asked his son's three firefighter friends who were coming to help from Georgia to bring 9-millimeter guns to Gulfport.

How many guns?

''Let me put it this way,'' said his son, Eric Warren, ''there are enough to go around.''