The road to recovery along the Gulf Coast: after Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi and Alabama residents are rebuilding their lives and communities

It's a year later. While the world's attention focuses on the recovery in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, also ravaged the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coasts. As is the case in New Orleans, thousands of hurricane survivors along the Gulf Coast are still picking up the pieces of their shattered lives.

To better understand the effects of this disaster, take a quick look at the situation of the nine-member Collier family of Gulfport, Miss. "It takes cash for everything, and the money is running out," says mother Simone Collier, speaking of the $10,000 that's left of $80,000 in home insurance and American Red Cross emergency assistance funds the family used to help pay living expenses, move from rented motel rooms and an apartment, and cover more than $100,000 in extensive repairs to their three-bedroom, ranch-style brick home.

After Hurricane Katrina, the Colliers lost everything but their strength and hope to survive as a family. They lost jobs, security, children's medical records, family photos, clothes and furniture--all gone.

While rebuilding their home, the family is living side-by-side in two white, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers on property owned by Simone's mother, Emma Chambers. Simone, 46, and daughters, Tayla, 10, Madisyn, 8, and Raelin, 7, live in one air-conditioned trailer. Father Roy Sr., 49, and sons Roy Jr., 19, Mark, 18, Michael, 14, and Mason, 12, live in the other trailer. Chambers resides in a third tiny trailer behind her wrecked house.

The plain, 70-foot-long trailer homes with enough space for a bed, kitchenette and a toilet, provide a sense of stability for the Colliers, who had been temporarily separated in the past eight months. The children were spread out among different aunts and uncles in Nashville, Tenn., and Gulfport.

The Colliers are among approximately 107,239 Hurricane Katrina survivors in both Mississippi and Alabama who are still living in temporary housing--trailers, shelters or with relatives.

Hundreds of Gulf Coast families are situated in nearly 40,000 FEMA travel trailers that are parked on vacant lots where homes were destroyed, in ballparks, near community centers, on U.S. military bases and on other available land. The trailers have come to symbolize the long-term recovery efforts. FEMA set an 18-month usage limit for occupants.

Since Katrina, thousands of survivors have left the Gulf Coast altogether to start over in other cities, including Chicago, Houston and Seattle. But for those residents who remain in hometowns along the Gulf Coast, many are on a long road to recovery. "Hardest hit is the African-American community," says Walter Dickerson, the first Black director of Alabama's Mobile County Emergency Management Agency, who is overseeing the area's long-term recovery.

About 45 percent of Mobile County is comprised of Blacks with low to moderate incomes. "Affordable housing was, and still is, the biggest challenge," says Dickerson, who expects it will be easier now to get Alabama residents in coastal areas to evacuate during the hurricane season. New plans include doubling the number of shelters for evacuees, bus pick-up sites for the elderly and putting hurricane safety tips in the hands of every resident.

"We learned from the lessons of Katrina," Dickerson adds. The message is simple: Be informed, make a plan and get out before a bad storm hits.

While surveying the devastation created by Katrina, most observers say recovery along the Gulf Coast is much slower than expected. It will take decades to rebuild some battered cities, including Alabama's Bayou La Batre, Grand Bay and Dauphin Island, and Mississippi's Moss Point, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian and Waveland.

"The impact of it all is taking its toll," says Xavier Bishop, the first African-American mayor of Moss Point, Miss., a town of 15,581 residents [pre-Hurricane Katrina], which is about 70 percent Black.

"We lost beaches, parks, institutions, the 24-hour super Wal-Mart and much of our workforce. It will be a long time before we return to the quality of life we once knew."

It's difficult to grasp the magnitude of the devastation in this once Southern heaven. In Gulfport, for example, the second-floor balcony of the interracial First Baptist Church Gulfport, one of the city's largest, hung from its hinges like a loose tooth. To document for themselves and others how unbelievably high the flood waters rose--in some spots as high as 25 feet--many residents boldly wrote the words "water line" on external house walls.

A 15-minute drive away in neighboring Biloxi, sections of the U.S. 90 bridge, which is a vital 1.6-mile link to Gulf Coast cities and casinos, fell like dominos into ruins after Hurricane Katrina blew it down. Plans are underway for a new $338.6 million high-rise bridge, which is to be completed by April of 2008.

Along the Biloxi-Gulfport shoreline, historic homes and treasures were lost forever, including the Pleasant Reed House, one of the region's links to its African-American heritage.