State and Regional News

Today, Coleman lives in Alabama. And she is home.

Coleman and her 44-year-old son have a two-bedroom apartment in Birmingham with a bright red door, a TV satellite dish and plants on the porch. There's no thought of moving back to New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina swamped the city.

“I want to go back down there just to see it, but my kids tell me not to, that it would just bring back memories,” Coleman said.

Coleman is among 25,434 evacuees from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas who moved to Alabama after Katrina and Hurricane Rita last year, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some 20,828 evacuees remain, and many have no plans to return to their old homes.

Separately, about 113,000 Alabama residents applied for federal and state assistance after Katrina, and about 3,900 Alabamians remain in temporary housing in the state, many of them from Mobile County, which suffered a glancing blow from the hurricane.

FEMA statistics show the largest number of out-of-state evacuees, 5,063, live in or around Mobile, Alabama's most populous city on the coast. Another 3,263 remain in the Birmingham area, and thousands more are scattered through Montgomery, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa and other areas.

A report by Appleseed, a nonprofit legal organization that works to improve social conditions, said most of the evacuees in Birmingham have found permanent housing and jobs and have enrolled their children in schools.

Yet even those who have fared the best are struggling to overcome the loss of friends and neighbors from their old haunts.

Barry and Fran Ivker used money from their flood insurance and retirement funds to purchase a hillside home in Hoover, but they were better off than many to begin with financially. He was a clinical social worker in New Orleans, and she was an obstetrician. Both are in their mid-60s.

The Ivkers are comfortable, but they miss friends from their synagogue in Louisiana, arts groups and the Sunday afternoon dances at Tipitina's in New Orleans. They still make monthly trips to the city, obstensibly for work but mainly to see friends.

“We've done a lot better than a lot of people in terms of material things,” said Ivker. “But the loss of community, the loss of relationships, the loss of friends is a major hit.”

Others are just getting by in a world somewhere between security and uncertainty. They live in that gray area where life seems more fragile than it used to.

Sherman Brown felt welcome in Alabama at first, and his home in the Birmingham suburb of Center Point is larger than the one he lost when the Industrial Canal breached its levee in New Orleans. Federal assistance will pay the rent through February; he covers the utilities.

But people can tell by his accent that Brown's not from Alabama, and he sometimes gets questions about why he hasn't gone back home. Brown doesn't have a car, and he said he lost his job at a hotel because Birmingham's public buses couldn't consistently get him there on time.

“It's hard to get settled in when it's like you're not invited, you're not welcome,” said Brown. “I feel like the rug could be pulled out from under me at any time.”

Moving to Birmingham has brought some stability to Coleman, an Alabama native who managed a dormitory for Norfolk-Southern Corp. until Katrina hit.

Soaked and tired after days in the flood, Coleman evacuated to Chicago before arriving three days before Christmas in Birmingham, where her oldest son already lived. She didn't have much to move since she lost two cars and everything else to the storm.

FEMA is paying Coleman's apartment rent for six more months, and the son she lives with works at a Publix supermarket. Coleman has numerous health problems, but she still volunteers at a Habitat for Humanity store to keep busy and earn “sweat equity” toward a home of her own.

Coleman doesn't even think about going back to her old job and old life in the hurricane zone.

“It's hard to explain unless you were in my shoes,” she said. “I was thinking of giving the job up anyway and coming back here. I guess the master just gave me a push.”