KATRINA Six months later, New Orleans is far from normal

About a third of the buildings in the city have electricity.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- They're throwing Mardi Gras beads again -- so many strands, they're landing in tree branches and getting snagged on the trellised balconies of the French Quarter.
Tourists are wearing them, but these days so are contractors and the National Guard. It's hard to walk on Bourbon Street without stepping on them.
At the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter, Pat O'Brien's is once again serving its syrupy, yet potent Hurricane cocktail. But walk to the end of Bourbon Street, take a left on Esplanade Avenue, a right on Rampart Street and head east. At first, the debris comes in bits: a small pile of siding. A rusted box spring. One taped-up refrigerator. At first, you find them in neat piles, in the front yard or outside on the curb.
There's still a semblance of order. But keep going. It gets worse. You pass an elegant sofa, the kind you might imagine a grand dame reclining in, sipping her mint julep. It is lodged in the middle of an intersection. A few miles farther, the innards of rotting houses spill out on both sides of the road.
Six months have passed since Katrina ravaged this city. For a half a year, its people have counted the dead (officially, 1,080 in Louisiana and 231 in Mississippi) and struggled mightily to keep their city among the living.
A slimmed-down Mardi Gras is testament to their success; a tour of the devastation that remains is testament to how far they have to go. Hurricane Katrina created an estimated 60.3 million cubic yards of debris in Louisiana, 25 times as much as the ruins of the World Trade Center and enough to fill the Superdome more than 13 times. Of that, only 32 million cubic yards -- a bit more than half -- has been removed.
Victims
Meanwhile, there are just under 2,000 people listed as missing. Some are not missing -- they turned up, but their families never notified authorities. Hundreds of others, though, were likely washed into the Gulf of Mexico or swept into Lake Pontchartrain or alligator-infested swamps, according to Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana's medical examiner. Still more may be buried in the rubble.
At a hurricane morgue near Baton Rouge, 86 bodies remain unidentified. State officials are trying to reach relatives for an additional 74 who've been identified but have no place to go.
Mayor Ray Nagin says a comparison to New York City should be a favorable one. "Let me remind you that after 9/11 in New York, it took them six to eight months to get out of the fog of what happened to them. And to date, there's still a big hole in the ground. So when I look at everything that's going on, I think we're right on schedule," he said.
Indeed, in the French Quarter and on St. Charles Avenue, on Magazine Street and in the plantation-style mansions of Uptown, life has moved on, though protective blue tarps that serve as roofs for many are a constant reminder of the work left to be done.
In the Quarter, uber chef Paul Prudhomme is blackening his signature redfish again, and Antoine's, the 166-year-old dining icon, is dishing up plates of Pompano Pontchartrain with slices of tart lemon.
Yet even here, Katrina has left her mark. Restaurants are short-handed. And look closely at the brass band playing outside Prudhomme's K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen: The golden sheen on the tuba is gone, lost in the deluge at the musician's house.
Flood zone
But in the flood zone, the destruction is not so subtle. Leave the French Quarter and head east, toward the devastated Ninth and Lower Ninth wards and East New Orleans. All around are the carcasses of flooded houses. Katrina laid waste to more than 215,000 homes. Many are abandoned, their doors wide open. Only an estimated 189,000 of the city's roughly 500,000 pre-Katrina residents have returned. For now, the city is overwhelmingly whiter and more affluent than it was before.
Affordable housing is scarce, and FEMA has filled only 48,158 of the 90,000 trailer requests it's received from displaced families in Louisiana, leaving many to wait out their existence in places such as Atlanta, Houston and Little Rock.
With only 20 of 128 public schools open, parents who can't afford to send their children to private schools have no choice but to live elsewhere. Children who have returned must wade through wreckage to get to school.
Even with a diminished population, traffic at rush-hour is heavy. Many people living elsewhere return to the city each day to work at their jobs or on their homes, so the main arteries in and out of town are clogged. Add to the mix the trucks used for the cleanup, and a commute from suburban New Orleans to the central business district that once took 10 minutes can take 45 minutes.
At night, darkness is pervasive. Six months after the storm made landfall Aug. 29, a little more than a third of the structures in the city have electricity. Even fewer have hot water or cooking gas.
Past the Industrial Canal, farther east, is the cement slab upon which Carolyn Berryhill's house sat. In the field of rubble, all that remains of her neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward, the 60-year-old "Miss Carolyn" recognizes the pieces of her house by their signature green color. In what used to be her backyard, the earth is still spongy. In it, a golden doorknob is embedded as if it's about to open a door to the underworld.
"A lot of people, they talk about coming back and rebuild," she said. "Rebuild what? What can you rebuild out of this?"