Carol Smith, a Summit County resident for two-and-a-half years, recently revisited her old home in New Orleans to check on the rebuilding efforts. What she found was a culture still struggling with the impact of the hurricanes.

While most of our country believes the Gulf is in recovery from the Katrina disaster, the reality is very different. The people of the Gulf Coast are still suffering and pulling dead from the rubble. In Louisiana, refrigerators still sit on roofs of houses. An enormous river barge has destroyed a neighborhood and still sits where Katrina placed it. A shrimp boat still rest in a neighborhoods five miles inland.

Debris of carpet, furnishings and toys still litter the streets everywhere. People still speak in hushed tones about Katrina. Our friends, family and former neighbors do not refer to the horrific hurricane that changed so many lives on Aug. 28, 2005, by name.

They refer to Katrina as "the storm," as if naming her gives her even more devastating power. Lives were changed forever there. Every day during my two-week visit home, we heard story after story from friends, family and former neighbors. Tonya Ory, a former neighbor, has her elderly parents living with her now. Katrina washed away their home, her dad's job and their complete way of life.

For 40 years they shared their lives with a large group of friends in St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans. It's the type of neighborhood where most of the people go to work in a uniform with their name in a small box on the shirt. They shared their meals, played cards and attended christenings of each other's children. Now they cannot even find some of their friends - most of who have moved in with their children. Everything they know and everything they owned is gone.

St. Bernard will probably not be rebuilt. Another family I know from there has been changed forever as well. I have known the Cortello family for 20 years. They had to bury two family members in the same funeral parlor with the same service two weeks apart.

My friend was 101 years old. Although very petite, she was the maternal great-great grandmother of a very large Italian family, the type of Italian family held together by visits to grandma, marching in the Italian American Parade and the culture of New Orleans. Having lived through the great Hurricane Betsy in 1965, Mrs. Cortello was very wise about the power of a great storm. She had lived a full life but, after two evacuations from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, her body just seemed to give up.

I had the good fortune of visiting with her only last year. Her mind was still sharp, and often through our friendship I was embarrassed as she could always recall things I could not! During our last visit, she said, "You live in Colorado now with those two boys so you can't come to visit as much now?" More than 100 years of living could not destroy her lucid mind, but Katrina was able to do it in just a couple of short weeks.

Two weeks after the burial of Mrs. Cortello, her great niece Karen Cortello skirted the mandatory five-day waiting period for gun ownership, bought a gun and killed herself. With a history of depression, she had tried to seek help but the hospitals were overcrowded and she was discharged. There are only two hospitals operating in the New Orleans area now, and the medical learning facilities are destroyed. Charity Hospital, LSU Medical and Tulane Medical are damaged beyond repair. The impact of the loss of these great training facilities is a loss to the entire American Medical Establishment.



Read part 2 tomorrow: More details on the impact of Hurricane Katrina from Summit County local Carol Smith, with photos from her husband, Timothy.