Progress remains slow in some affected areas

NEW ORLEANS — Much of Plaquemines Parish was still covered with fioodwater, and more than 200,000 people across Louisiana still didn’t have any power Sunday, flve days after Isaac ravaged the state. Thousands of evacuees remained at shelters or bunked with friends or relatives.

“My family is split up,” said Angela Serpas, from severely fiooded Braithwaite. Serpas and her daughter were staying with her in-laws, while her husband and son were staying in Belle Chasse, a suburban area of the parish.

“This is the second time we’ve lost our home; we lost it in Katrina,” she said.

At least seven people were killed in the storm in the U.S. — flve in Louisiana and two in Mississippi.

Progress was evident in many places. Workers continued their return to offshore oil and gas production platforms and drilling rigs, electricity came on for hundreds of thousands of people and the annual Southern Decadence Festival, a gay pride celebration, carried on in the French Quarter.

There were also signs of a slow recovery. Workers continued to deal with toppled trees and downed power lines, driving remained hazardous in areas without working traffic lights, and New Orleans opened two cooling shelters so those with no electricity could escape the heat.

Much of Plaquemines Parish remained under as much as 5 feet of water, Parish President Billy Nungesser said. For many, the damage was worse than Katrina in 2005.

“I’ve never seen water come up this quick this fast,” he said.

Suburban communities farther north also had problems. Near Lake Pontchartrain, St. Tammany Parish officials kept watch over potential trouble spots along Isaac-swollen waterways.

In Mississippi, Gov. Phil Bryant reported 125,000 people were evacuated, although most returned home Sunday. Less than 100 people remained in shelters. Bryant said 924 people had to be rescued during Isaac.

Entergy, which provides power to most of the people who lost it, was under flre from local government officials for what they said was a slow pace of restoration. Jefferson Parish President John Young said widespread outages were hampering businesses’ recovery from the storm and he would ask the state Public Service Commission to investigate.

Entergy spokesman Chanel Lagarde noted that Isaac had lingered over the state and said Friday was the flrst day the corporation could get restoration efforts into high gear.

“We are working hard. We do have a good plan, and we’re going about it in an approach that we think is going to be effective,” Lagarde said.

In Mississippi, about 1,600 Entergy customers awaited power. Roughly 5,000 served by not-forproflt electric associations also had no service.

— All through the scorching summer, as their crops withered under cloudless skies, Corn Belt farmers waited and prayed for this moment. Now, courtesy of Hurricane Isaac, it has flnally arrived: three days of rain to soak their parched flelds and soften the cracked soil.

“It’s a dead-still, straight-down rain,” Greg Schneider, who lost 80 percent of his corn crop to this summer’s drought, said as he watched the storm from his dining room window. “This is exactly the kind of rain we needed.”

But the timing was off. They needed this rain — and more — two months ago, when their shriveled corn was broiling in its husks, their pastures were dying and their soybeans were dropping from the vines. Farmers from Missouri to Indiana to Ohio welcomed the 3 to 5 inches of rain Isaac deposited as it churned east across the Midwest, but they said it came too late to save much of this year’s failed crop.

“Ain’t much we can do at this point,” Schneider said.

This is corn country, and for the most part, the battle to save the corn is already lost. Nationwide, the government has drastically reduced its estimates for the year’s corn yield to the lowest levels since 1995.

Months of searing heat accelerated the growing cycle this summer, and farmers here have already harvested corn that in normal years would still be ripening. As Isaac approached, many raced to flnish hauling in the corn, worried that flerce winds from the storm could fiood their flelds or mow down the brittle cornstalks, destroying even more of the paltry harvest.

Those fears did not materialize. As the rains washed across Missouri, they recharged wells, refllled shrunken irrigation ponds and trickled into parched creek beds. Farmers watched happily as their soybean flelds drank up the moisture, and ground that had been nearly impermeable to plow blades began to squish underfoot.

“Isaac will be a good start,” said Scott Killpack, an agronomist at the University of Missouri’s extension office in St. Charles County. “How well they recover, only time will tell.”

Isaac’s rains may fortify younger soybean plants, whose leaves are not already jaundiced, allowing the beans to plump up on the vine. It should help farmers sow winter wheat, and it should help revive the pastures.

But it will take weeks to measure the rain’s effect on late-summer crops, and even longer to know whether the storms offered anything more than a teasing break from the drought.