When Hurricane Rita hits Mouton Cove, residents and friends of the small Cajun community search for signs of life.
by Jeremy Alford

September 28, 2005 - When Rita makes landfall as a Category 3 hurricane at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning around Sabine Pass on the extreme southwestern corner of Louisiana, 100-mile-per-hour wind squalls are wreaking havoc on the trees in Carencro’s Lexington Heights neighborhood. The tops of majestic water oaks bend at 90-degree angles, and the sound of cracking pecan trees fills the night.

A few hours of restless sleep doesn’t stop the howling cacophony. Around 9 a.m., a huge boom resounds through the air; a 100-foot-tall water oak goes down and crashes through the roof of a home; luckily the residents are safe in another part of the house.

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September 27, 2005 - Cameron, La. -- Cameron Parish is the largest county in all of Louisiana, a big, flat marshy place that absorbed Hurricane Rita's storm surge like a sponge. There wasn't a whole lot here before the hurricane, and there's a whole lot less now that it's passed.
What the water didn't inundate, the wind carried away, and authorities said they simply cannot say when most of the 9,800 people who live on this stretch of the Gulf Coast can return.

Not that they'll find much worth returning to.

The storm destroyed up to 80 percent of the houses south of the Intracoastal Waterway, a shipping channel that divides the county in two, officials said. About 6,000 people live on the south side, and it could be weeks before the roads are cleared and a month or more before the power is back.

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