By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer
Throughout the trials of waiting for assistance, victims of Hurricane Katrina staying in Maine can’t wait to go back.

Wendy wanted to pack up the baby’s clothes. She wanted the family to leave. Right Now.

Bruce wouldn’t budge.

He knew bad weather. He’d been snowed in on his dad’s West Paris farm for two weeks once as a boy: “If I can ride out a blizzard, I can ride out any damn hurricane.”

When the television carried only one emergency signal ordering everyone out of St. Bernard Parish, he gave up the fight. A little. He tossed three days’ worth of clothes in a cardboard box. This storm would be nothing, he insisted.

It was Katrina.

Six months later, the fact that Wendy was right is cold comfort.

For hundreds of families who fled to Maine in the aftermath of the costliest storm in U.S. history, there are still as many details left to sort out as tons of wreckage.

Hurricane Katrina isn’t over.

Wendy Hall, a normally jovial woman with a light accent that belies her native Louisiana roots, struggles with the aftermath every day.

The latest fight: whether boyfriend Bruce Connell’s house was destroyed by wind, by water or by the freak fire that broke out in December – technicalities that matter to insurers but aren’t so easy to take care of 1,400 miles away.

It’s maddening.

So is trying to get back Bruce’s dog: Although neighbors watched over him after the hurricane, Blackie was taken from a pen by presumably well-intentioned “rescuers” and sent to Michigan. Bruce’s blood boils thinking about it.

Back in October, within a month of taking refuge with Bruce’s family in Norway, the couple set up a temporary apartment nearby with their baby girl and two teenagers. Everyone’s still adjusting. Their spat of the last morning in Louisiana has been forgotten (mostly.)

The focus now is on settling claims, keeping warm, biding time and working out details, like how to get back.

“The people in Maine have been absolutely wonderful. We could not have asked for more kindness, more generosity, more anything. It’s still not home,” Wendy said.

Everything closes too early. The streets have too many numbers instead of names: Route 26 and Route 117 versus Claiborne Avenue or a major thoroughfare known simply as Judge Perez.

And the weather: “It’s un-American cold up here,” she says.

They can’t wait to return to Louisiana. With Blackie. But first the storm’s got to pass.

The aftermath: ‘Shock and awe’

St. Bernard’s Parish is 8 miles east of New Orleans, in the boot of Louisiana.

Bruce and Wendy both owned one-story brick ranches there. They were getting ready to consolidate into his house when Katrina struck.

She lived at sea level and had flood insurance in addition to her regular homeowner’s policy. He lived six feet above and didn’t.

Her cathedral ceilings came down. A 12-foot section of tree floated into the front picture window. At his place, heavy black mold has crept past the four-foot water mark. He found live saltwater fish in the pool.

“I was braced, I was ready, I knew what to expect. It was still shock and awe,” Wendy said, referring to her trip back late September. “It’s not that snapshot or where that camera is (focused,) it’s 360 degrees all around you, and that smell” – a mix of oil, mold and damp – “is everywhere. If you haven’t been there, you don’t know.”

Scurrying around the Sunday morning of the evacuation, Aug. 28, they grabbed photos, clothes, paperwork and snapped a slew of “before” pictures, just in case. About everything else was lost.

They left that day for Maine with their baby, Aiyana, Wendy’s 14-year-old daughter, Jackie, the 13-year-old nephew she’s raising, D.J., and Bruce’s 22-year-old son, James.

It was a four-day drive interrupted by long bouts at truck stops glued to CNN.

Donations up here started immediately. A woman Wendy knew only as Melissa dropped off eight bags of clothes. The Second Congregational Church helped with more clothing, a bedroom set and anything it could.

Back home, Wendy, 34, worked at the University of New Orleans as a department secretary and was also a full-time graduate student studying public administration and government. (The irony that she’s wrangled for months with the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the sort of group she wanted to work with, has not escaped her.) She lost her thesis research in the flood.

Bruce, 45, worked at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. as lead technician. When he left, he earned $19 an hour. Every few weeks they offer him more money to come back. It’s up to $24.

Returning to Louisiana isn’t as simple as just signing up for a FEMA trailer. (Not that that’s so simple.)

Aiyana was born 12-weeks premature last year. Wendy and Bruce spent February and March going back and forth to the hospital, hoping she pulled through. She did, but her lungs are extra sensitive.

Some air down there is toxic with mold.

“The baby stays completely out of it until I talk to the EPA myself,” Wendy said.

The tentative plan is to go back this summer, leave the baby with family in Alabama and gut both houses.

That is, if insurance and aid money come through. That’s where the daily battle comes in.

Proving the obvious to insurance companies

Wendy took Aiyana to Boston in December to picket outside of her insurance company. She was upset that adjusters looked at her home and put non-flood-related damage at $5,000. (Flood damage is covered under the separately policy.)

It turned out to be a short protest.

She was ushered into a coffee shop by a company vice president, who made sure she was comfortable. Wendy showed him pictures and reports. She told him: “I am not going to be a number you crunch and throw away.”

Wendy walked away with a check for $12,000.

“I’m a realist. I knew it (would take time to settle claims). I figured it would be six months to a year – I just figured it wouldn’t have to be doggedly fighting for every penny,” she said. Trying to get unemployment benefits has been “the worst. I’ve spent six hours hitting redial.”

Bruce and Wendy both qualified for the initial $2,000 debit cards from FEMA, and have to reapply every three months for $2,300 in rental assistance.

The money comes from a FEMA household maximum of $26,400.

It’s what they’re living on for now. They’re frustrated; there’s no squirreling those funds away to rebuild. “If you don’t use it, they take it back,” Wendy said. “$26,400 is this huge magic number.”

Her flood insurance came through relatively quickly, four months. It’s the details of his home that now present the most problems.

In pictures, the tall pines around his house are all sheared off 30 feet up in the air.

“Water didn’t do that – that’s a funnel cloud or a twister. Water didn’t do it, but you have to prove it (to his insurance company),” Wendy said. She’s taken the lead in the bevy of phone calls.

She just read the fifth adjuster’s report: It said the home had three bedrooms when it’s got four, one ceiling fan when it had three and made no mention of a now-missing fence. “I’m sitting there going, did this guy even go to our house?”

Bruce says he hates the cold. It’s why he moved to Louisiana 25 years ago. “When I came up here (after Katrina), I only had two long-sleeve shirts to my name.”

He’s anxious to go back, but there are questions.

“I want to go back, I want to rebuild, but I don’t want to go through this again,” he said. “What am I going back to? What’s it going to be like?”

Bruce had intentions of driving back in January to check out his now-burned and flooded house. Then his brother’s garage in Harrison, where he stored his truck, tools to rebuild and a computer, also went up in flames.

“When they called to say, ‘The shop’s on fire,’ he thought they were joking, they were just messing with him,” Wendy said. “You just laugh, what else can you do?”

Wendy misses the food back home. She can’t get a taste for lobster – it’s no crawfish.

“It’s never going to be the same, you know it’s not,” she said. “I’m hoping a lot of the tradition and culture stay” as Louisiana is rebuilt.

Fat Tuesday this week- Aiyana’s first birthday – is a sad reminder of what they’re missing.

“The kids are dying to go home. I want to go home. It’s not just Mardi Gras, it’s everything that happens around it,” she said. Parades, barbecues, a day of family fun.

“If New Orleans has any hope of coming back, they have to be on the ball for this. Mardi Gras is going to be a test. I am so worried that Aiyana will never know it.”