Martha Rial, Post-Gazette photos
	Marlon Jordan plays his trumpet outside the Superdome in New Orleans yesterday during a Hands Around The Dome event organized by the African American Leadership Project in observance of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
	Family won't abandon search for father Outpouring of donations after Katrina largest ever A Photojournal: One Year After A statistical look at Katrina's aftermath, one year later From 2005: Following Katrina's Wake
	Brazella Briscoe cleans out the home that he built in 1976 in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. He is undecided if he will return there.

NEW ORLEANS -- The home that Shari Seymour used to know, before all of the madness, before the thousand-mile exodus to Pittsburgh, is a sturdy one-story rental along Law Street in what remains of the traumatized Lower Ninth Ward.

That it still stands says much for its brick construction, which withstood Hurricane Katrina's historic onslaught a year ago, but it says little about the tattered remains of a home -- of a life -- that lie inside.

Patches of ceiling have collapsed, with strips of dirty pink insulation dangling from the exposed rafters. A window-unit air conditioner is in a muddy heap on the floor, next to a television, next to overturned tables, next to rubble and scrap of every domestic variety, deposited arbitrarily by 12 feet of floodwater.

Wallpaper is peeling, the framed art that still hangs on the walls is moisture-stained, a wedding album has been destroyed, and in every way this home, just a mile and change from the Industrial Canal levee breach, reflects the ruin of the neighborhood and city that surrounds it.

New Orleans circa 2006, one year after the deadliest American weather disaster in a century claimed 1,580 lives along the Gulf Coast, has at least regained a pulse, weakened though it is.

The suburban highways and byways thrum with traffic, major industries operate at or above pre-Katrina capacity, more and more of the city's famed restaurants reopen each week, and in many parts of town, such as on the spotless Tulane University campus, one would never know a hurricane came through.

But is New Orleans even close to fully recovered? No. Does reconstruction seem to be moving at an urgent pace? No. Has the hoped-for post-disaster economic boom materialized? No. And even if the one-year anniversary represents an artificial barometer, it is how the city's progress, or lack of it, will be measured by politicians, the news media and others in coming days.

"Is it as far along as we initially had [hoped]? Probably not," said Oliver Thomas Jr., president of the New Orleans city council.

The volatile leader of this city, Mayor Ray Nagin, said in interviews last week that the rebuilding is moving slowly because of an absence of federal funding. Meanwhile, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and President Bush, who will be traveling to Louisiana and Mississippi tomorrow, were urging patience, noting that the federal government has committed $108 billion to Katrina relief across five states.

Still more money will be needed for a new levee-and-pump system to protect the city, and people will be reluctant to return until it's in place. Even further away -- if it ever arrives -- is a rebuilt coastal wetland, the delta's natural barrier against inland floods.

That's the big picture, long term. Among the more immediate issues:

Crime rates are up. Tourism is down. Government workers are in short supply. The city's workforce has shrunk by 200,000, and the missing workers won't all come back until there's housing to accommodate them.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette photos
	Paulette Jones talks about her experiences living in Pittsburgh after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her Lower Ninth Ward home. Her grandson Timothy Seymour (age 2) is in the foreground. She tells the story of the death of her fiance in Katrina floodwaters that nearly claimed his sister as well.
	Shari Seymour's beloved marble-top table sits under debris in her former home in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. She's now living in a two-bedroom apartment in Pittsburgh's Lower Hill District.
	Cherlynn Seymour reflects on the chaos following Hurricane Katrina -- "I still can't believe the water came in and just washed entire lives away.
	Ebony Jones, 14, shows off the trophy she won in a jazz dance competition while she lived in Pittsburgh. Ebony and her mother, Paulette Jones, returned to the New Orleans area in June after finishing the school year at Mt. Lebanon High School.
	Andre Miqule Seymour, 8, left, is learning how to skateboard with new friends since moving into a new neighborhood in Waggaman, a small town across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, in recent months. Andre Miqule and his parents lived in Pittsburgh for nearly two months after Hurricane Katrina damaged their family home last year.

Thousands of abandoned cars remain in the streets. Utility service is still spotty. For those reasons and more, fewer than half of the city's July 2005 residents have returned to New Orleans now that the city has wrung itself out. One-hundred-forty thousand or so remain in Texas, and the rest have washed into Mississippi, California, Georgia and elsewhere, including Pennsylvania.

A year later, New Orleans, despite its brave face, remains a shell of its old self, surviving on the instincts and boosterism of home-grown residents, politicians and business officials who refuse to let the city die, even if they're not at all sure how to save it.

A family scattered
The pace of New Orleans' reconstruction mirrors that of Shari Seymour's. She came to Pittsburgh last September, part of a weary 18-member family convoy that converged briefly in the Mt. Lebanon home of Javon and Tara Ronel, then scattered like milkweed on a breeze.

One cousin, Chianti Jones, moved to the South Side and enrolled in nursing school. Paulette Jones, Javon's mother and the matriarch who tends to this complicated family tree, lived in a North Side row house for a few months, then moved back to the Gulf Coast. Andre Seymour, his wife, Cherlynn, and their kids quickly returned to Louisiana, despite initial hopes for a new life in Pittsburgh.

As for Shari? Like other New Orleans expatriates, she was faced with a decision -- go home or stay away? -- and she decided to stay in Pittsburgh. A year later, there are no regrets. "It's working out fine," she says. "Most of the people that did decide to go back to New Orleans, it's very difficult."

The home Shari Seymour now knows is a two-bedroom apartment in Pittsburgh's Lower Hill, spartanly furnished. It is the product, she says, of her unwillingness to accept free furniture from strangers.

In the middle of the living room is a folding table, surrounded by chairs. On the floor, near the window, is a safe -- one of two items her husband, Roy Bindon, was able to salvage when he returned to their Law Street house late last year. (The other item was a lamp.)

The walls, bright white, are bare. There's a small television, resting on a smaller TV stand. No sofas or recliners can be found, but in the kitchen, colorful ceramic knickknacks are beginning to accumulate.

A year has passed since Shari fled New Orleans, and her life is moving forward in small steps. She finally got a car, an old Ford Contour, in May, nine months after she arrived in Pennsylvania. She's still jobless, hoping that sessions with career counselors will help her update her resume. She wants to begin job training, too, but she hasn't been able to do that yet.

Most of Shari's time is spent caring for her brother Arnold, who is deaf, blind and mute. Her husband, Roy Bindon, can't help much because he's still working for a drilling company in Alabama, He hopes to find a job in Pittsburgh soon.

Since the spring, Arnold has been spending six hours a day in a hospital-based adult day care program in Beechview, where, over time, he may learn sign language. Arnold's placement may have freed Shari to reassemble her life, but then came another curveball -- a child.

A cousin from New Orleans came to Pittsburgh in January. Months later she was back on heroin, which has haunted her, off and on, for years. The state intervened, the mother checked into a drug rehab center, and her 21-month-old boy is now Shari's responsibility.

Shari nevertheless remains hopeful, her robust optimism difficult to fathom. She says it is rooted in faith and confidence in God. God will guide her as she begins her second Pittsburgh year. God will someday provide her husband a job in southwestern Pennsylvania.

"I think everything is on schedule," she says, as if she'd drawn it up this way.

Two jobs, three bedrooms, luckier than most
Andre, Shari's younger brother, didn't wait around for God. He moved back to New Orleans last October, after two months in Pittsburgh.

A job at the refrigeration company that had employed Andre prior to the hurricane was still there. What wasn't there was a home.

The apartment that he and his wife, Cherlynn, had shared, in the west bank town of Westwego, had flooded. And so the next eight months were spent looking for a new place.

They finally found one just outside of Waggaman, a small town across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. The three-bedroom apartment was available because its owner had moved to California, tired of dealing with hurricanes.

Andre and Cherlynn are paying more than they'd hoped -- $1,800 a month -- but, like a lot of people who fled and then returned, the Seymours are finding that the cost of living has risen considerably in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Rent is up nearly 40 percent around the New Orleans metropolitan area, according to the federal government. Property owners are being double-teamed by high renovation and insurance costs, which are being passed on to tenants, fairly or not.

"They're price-gouging a lot," said Cherlynn, an assessment shared by her husband. "They see we have our FEMA checks, and they want to get a piece of it," he said. "A lot of people want to come home, they can't afford it."

Even though some job sectors -- particularly food service -- are offering signing bonuses and higher wages, such incentives are not enough to offset the elevated cost of living. It's a conundrum that could permanently retard the city's economic growth, fears The Times-Picayune, the local newspaper.

To pay his bills, Andre must work two full-time jobs at two different refrigeration companies. The early shift runs from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and after spending a few hours at home, he works from 6 p.m. to 1 or 2 a.m. "Your body gets used to it," he said, offering an exasperated smile. "You'd be surprised."

Still, he and his wife are pleased with their spacious new home -- especially considering that several of Andre's coworkers are still waiting for FEMA-issued trailers.

They're just as pleased with their new, diverse neighborhood. Their youngest son, 8-year-old Andre Miqule, is making friends quickly, and in the afternoons can be found skateboarding and playing basketball with neighbor boys.

Life, relatively speaking, is good. As their lost Katrina year draws to a close, Andre and Cherlynn realize they're luckier than many New Orleans couples.

"I still can't believe the water came in and just washed entire lives away," Cherlynn said.

There's no place like home
For displaced residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, having successfully escaped the flood is an emotional tradeoff: Most who survived know someone who didn't.

Neighbors. Friends. Relatives. A fiance.

Paulette Jones was engaged to marry Charles Andrew Johnson, who didn't evacuate, and didn't make it.

On Monday, Aug. 29, last year, as politicians and weather officials expressed relief that Katrina had spared New Orleans its full fury, the Industrial Canal was quickly emptying into the Lower Ninth. As the water level rose, Charles and his sister kept moving higher in their house.

"It was hot in the attic," said Paulette, relaying the account that was given to her by her fiance's sister, who survived the ordeal.

"He started ripping out boards," to cool the place. And then, "he panicked." He took a board, hoping it would serve as a crude boat that could carry both of them away from the Charbonnet Street home, and perhaps to drier ground. They both slipped, tumbling into the water.

Charlene grabbed part of the house that was still above the flood line. Charles, 46 years old, with a backpack of supplies slung over his shoulders, disappeared.

By November, Charles was still missing, and his family posted his name in a database of Katrina victims. In March came word that a body had been found, and a DNA test confirmed what Paulette had known for some time.

Still living in Pittsburgh at the time, having evacuated there to be near her son and with her extended family, Paulette flew back to New Orleans for the funeral service. Somewhere, she still has the newspaper obituary, which reads:

"Charles Andrew Johnson, entered into Eternal Rest on Monday, August 29, 2005. A Victim of Hurricane Katrina. He was born on January 31, 1959 and a native of New Orleans, LA. He was 46 years old and was educated in The New Orleans Public School System. He was a prep cook at the Doubletree Hotel and worked offshore for Universal Offshore Company. He is the son of Mercedes Jones Johnson and the late Charles Albert Johnson."

Living in Pittsburgh, in a row house on the North Side's Galveston Avenue, provided a long-distance buffer between Paulette and the hurt that had been heaped upon her by Hurricane Katrina.

Although a year has passed, she plans never to go back again to the Lower Ninth Ward -- "too much memories," she said. It wasn't until June that she convinced herself to return to the region, along with her daughter Ebony.

They both had grown to appreciate Pittsburgh -- especially the network of social workers, clergy and friends that helped them through the first difficult months -- but the time had come to migrate south.

"There's no place like home," Paulette said, even if that home is flood-prone and not at all the way she'd left it. Her house, along the Lower Ninth's Andry Street, is still standing but has been reduced to bare studs.

For now, Paulette and Ebony, who is going to be a sophomore in high school after spending her freshman year in Mt. Lebanon, are staying with Paulette's son, daughter-in-law and their two children. It's a big crowd for a small two-bedroom apartment in Westwego.

Soon, although it's hard to say when, Paulette hopes to move to Metairie, on the outskirts of New Orleans, and maybe get a job at a hotel. Ebony wants to move into the heart of the city -- to "the real New Orleans," she said, someplace livelier than the suburb in which see currently resides.

Either way, both are looking forward to the day when they finally have their own place.

But looking forward is one thing, and moving forward is another. Resilience, which can be found in great abundance in New Orleans one year after Katrina, is not a substitute for remediation, for recovery, for rebirth.

For the Big Easy, those all seem years away.