The new Gulf: Safe enough?

Crews with trucks and bulldozers are laying pipe and asphalt along Main Street of this Gulf Coast town, as customers at the Mockingbird Cafe, seemingly oblivious to the din, sip cappuccinos. Traffic now clogs inland Route 90 on most mornings, and the local building inspector has recently complained of being "swamped" with work.

Well into the third year since hurricane Katrina leveled nearly all the shoreline mansions and tore beachfront shops to pieces, Bay St. Louis is, for all intents and purposes, a boom town, along with much of surrounding Hancock County.

"The country is [about] in recession, but we're not seeing anything like that here – quite the opposite," says Jeffrey Reed, city council president.

Stoking this boom – and similar ones in Mississippi's two other Katrina-walloped counties – is $38 billion in federal aid and private insurance money that has been spread across this coast like a salve. It's a lot of money – as much as $100,000 for every resident in the three counties – intended to help this long, thin sliver of warm sand and live oaks recover from one of the worst natural disasters in American history.

As much as Americans are willing to invest taxpayer dollars to make Katrina country whole, many also want assurances that what rises from the cataclysm is sensible – communities rebuilt to take another direct hit from a Category 3 storm without devastating loss of life or property. Most observers agree that what's going up now is much improved over what was on the ground the August morning the hurricane rushed ashore with its 120-mile-per-hour winds and 27-foot-high storm surge. Many Gulf communities have adopted better building codes, including strapping all new houses to the ground by their studs. Some have pledged to funnel new construction to higher ground, resisting the temptation to let businesses and homes sprawl in low-lying areas where the surge caused the most destruction.

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