CHALMETTE, La. — When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on August 29, 2005, Louis Pomes was standing on top of a St. Bernard Parish government building that overlooked a marsh.

"All of a sudden it just looked like somebody picked up the earth and started running with it," Pomes remembers. "It was a surge of water coming, but it was pushing all the debris and the trash in front of it." At the time he worked for the parish as a heavy equipment supervisor.

Katrina flooded nearly every building in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans. Twenty years after the storm, oil and sugar refineries are back, but the local population is just two-thirds of what it was before Katrina. This sprawling, blue-collar coastal community is still rebuilding and it's getting more optimistic a

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