News Desk

Taking Shelter from Hurricane Katrina

When Monica and John White bought their three-bedroom vacation cottage in 1997 in Seaside, Fla., they imagined spending long summer weekends there, taking walks on the beach and letting their children bike freely around the picture-perfect beach community on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

They never imagined actually living there.

But since Aug. 27, when the Whites, their younger child, Brandi, 16, and their dog, Buddy, fled their primary home in New Orleans in advance of Hurricane Katrina, that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. Brandi has been attending South Walton High School in nearby Santa Rosa Beach for three weeks now and is taking dance lessons at a nearby studio. Last week, Ms. White took a part-time job at a local boutique to stay busy during the day. And Buddy is getting accustomed to walks on the beach.

“Right now, we’re just trying to get some semblance of normalcy,” Ms. White said. “We were so fortunate to have Seaside to come to.”

The Whites are not alone. Since the last weekend in August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina first threatened New Orleans, many people - the number cannot be determined - in the areas affected by Katrina and Hurricane Rita have relocated to their second homes. As a result, across the Gulf Coast picturesque rural towns and seaside resorts, which would normally be in a post-Labor Day slowdown, are bustling with activity as part-time residents suddenly become semipermanent.

Schools and churches in beach towns along the Panhandle of Florida are seeing attendance climb. Supermarket parking lots are filling up with license plates from Louisiana and Mississippi. And resort managers have been fielding calls from owners taking their condos and cottages out of rental pools until further notice.

In Destin, Fla., a popular weekend getaway on what is called the Emerald Coast, David Simms, director of reservations at Dale E. Peterson Realty, said that Katrina evacuees are using about 10 percent of his firm’s 450 rental units. ResortQuest, another management company, with vacation rentals at 17 different properties along the Panhandle, said second-home owners were living at each of them.

Although evacuees with second homes clearly haven’t suffered the same privations as people left stranded in their damaged homes or evacuated to shelters, they are living a tenuous, unsettled existence - not quite home, but not quite away, either. Few know just how long their in-between existence will last. Some plan to head home as soon as they can, and others have settled in for the long haul, enrolling their children in schools, finding new jobs and mailing change-of-address cards.

A. Peyton Bush III, president of a community savings bank in New Orleans, and his wife, Barbara, have taken refuge at their hunting lodge in the woods near Bay Minette, Ala., northeast of Mobile, where Mr. Bush usually spends winter weekends shooting deer with his three sons. On most weekends in the country, Mrs. Bush would spend her time cooking and being with her family. But living there full time, she finds she has few friends in the community and no real daily routine.

“You’re lonely,” she said. “I now go to the same checkout person at the Winn-Dixie because she’s another familiar face.”

Schools in resort areas are perhaps the best barometers of how people have taken refuge at vacation homes. In Okaloosa County, which stretches from Destin to Mary Esther, Fla., along the Panhandle, schools have accepted about 700 children from areas hit by Katrina, among the most in the state, according to the Florida Department of Education. Destin Elementary alone took in nearly 140 students, pushing enrollment to more than 900 and beyond the school’s maximum capacity. With enrollment now capped, the school is sending prospective students to nearby James E. Plew Elementary in Niceville, Fla. “If we went any higher than that, we couldn’t get them through the cafeteria, and then it was becoming tight on the classrooms, too,” said Sue Larrimore, principal at Destin Elementary.

Brandi White and her family had only recently moved to Metairie, La., when the hurricane hit. She was at her new school in Louisiana no more than a week and half before her family evacuated to Seaside, where they now plan to stay at least until January, when her high school in Metairie is scheduled to reopen. “I was just getting into the routine and like making friends, and then you had to leave.”

Brandi, a high school junior, said that the students at her new high school in Florida had been welcoming and that she had already started to make friends. But it has still been a surreal experience. “I do feel kind of like I’m on vacation,” she said. “Sort of like we’re in a daze, and it hasn’t really hit us yet.”

That’s not an uncommon feeling among evacuees who have taken refuge at vacation spots.

“They’re not rooted,” said Carol Tesone, a psychoanalyst and an associate professor of social work at New York University who worked with storm evacuees in Houston recently and with residents of Lower Manhattan whose homes were damaged in the 9/11 attacks. “They’ve been uprooted and can’t think of where they are now as permanent,” Ms. Tesone said.

That’s especially true where extended families have taken refuge together at weekend homes.

“We have quite a few families that are from New Orleans, and they have a lot of family members staying with them, and they’re more or less entertaining them,” said Dock Haney, manager at Carousel Supermarket in Laguna Beach, Fla., where sales of meat, lobster and jambalaya have soared since Katrina hit. “We’ve seen a big jump in our wine business.”

Peggy Mang, 56, a retired high school teacher from Metairie, La., fled to her two-bedroom condo in Destin along with five family members and three dogs before the hurricane. In a nearby one-bedroom condo, which she usually rents out, she had seven people and two dogs. Not knowing when she might go back, Ms. Mang opened a bank account, changed her address to the condominium and tried to make the most of the cramped quarters.

“It’s like an extended vacation with your family - and usually when you vacation with relatives, one week is enough,” she said three weeks ago from Destin. She has since returned to Louisiana and her damaged home; she says she is now living in both places. “We are in for a very long recovery process, but we are fortunate to have a house still standing,” Ms. Mang said this week.

Given the popularity of the Mississippi coast as a getaway for New Orleanians, some people have had both their primary and second homes damaged by the storms. Hard-hit towns like Gulfport, Waveland, Ocean Springs and Pass Christian, where second-home buyers made up about 30 percent of home sales according to local brokers, have been all but wiped out.

“Unfortunately, if you had a waterfront property it was more than likely destroyed because the surge and the flooding took everything,” said Pat Sullivan, fire chief for the City of Gulfport. “What it didn’t take, it didn’t leave enough of it to salvage.”

But the devastation is not keeping some people away. “Our phones have not stopped,” said Kelly Moses, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Alfonso Realty in Biloxi, which sells properties all along the Gulf Coast. Most of the interest has come from investors hoping to buy apartment complexes and build more upscale developments in their stead. “We’re getting phone calls from all over the U.S.,” she said.

-- Michelle Higgins