Dazed survivors left jobless by hurricane ponder their future

Vicki Smith

Monday, Sept. 12, 2005 | 10:44 a.m.

BILOXI, Miss. -- For the first few days, they wandered dazed and disbelieving through their flattened or flooded homes, wondering where they would get their next meal or a drink of clean water. Then the victims of Hurricane Katrina realized something else was gone: Their jobs.

"My company is broke," says Tiec Nguyen, a 35-year-old blackjack dealer at Casino Magic who is 8 months pregnant with her second child. "I don't know what to do."

A government report says Katrina will ultimately erase about 400,000 jobs in the coming months, though others offer a dimmer outlook. Some private estimates say job losses could reach 1 million.

Officials in Mississippi and Louisiana haven't yet issued any formal estimates of job loss in their states, and say they're too focused on search and recovery to address Katrina's long-range economic fallout.

Nguyen's husband, Ba Van Dang, 38, worked in another key industry along the Gulf Coast. His shrimp boat now sits wrecked in a cove with many others, the season shot for the year.

"I try to think about moving away from here, but I don't know where I find a job," he says. If he finds one, it may be far from Mississippi and the four hurricanes he's survived here.

"I think that's enough in my life," he says.

Katrina walloped the port at Gulfport, gutting the east pier facilities and wiping out cargo plants that handle forest products, aluminum, paper and more. It destroyed bakeries, bars and every kind of business in between, leaving coastline landmarks like the Beau Rivage too unsafe to enter.

Chuck Polite, supervisor for an Anheuser-Busch distributor that employs 150 people in and around Biloxi, says only 200 of the company's 1,500 customers remain. That means half his employees will lose their jobs.

The company hopes to place them with other distributors, he says, but they may have to relocate.

Pawn shop owner Hayes Bolton will have to let his 10 workers go and worries about what will happen to them.

"I can't start rebuilding next week," he says. "It just can't be done."

But in time, it will be.

"It's either that or commit suicide," he says.

Some businesses will recover faster than others.

Mississippi's largest private-sector employer, Northrop Grumman Corp., builds ships at the Navy yard in Pascagoula. It planned to pay its 12,000 people through the end of last week and hopes to phase in production within weeks.

Philip Teel, president of ship systems, says a quarter of the workers have already returned.

Beverly Martin, executive director of the Mississippi Casino Operators Association, says the industry's top priority is to get 17,000 people back to work soon. But no one knows when that might be.

Harrah's, for example, says it can't estimate reopening dates for Grand Casino Biloxi or Grand Casino Gulfport, but it will continue paying its 6,000 workers a regular salary for up to 90 days.

Cathy Kessler still has a job at the damaged Isle of Capri casino and hotel and expects to keep it -- but only because she's in charge of a hotel maintenance crew that has plenty of work ahead.

"The worry is really whether they can fill up the hotel with no casino there," she says.

Employees there have been told it could be 18 months before the casino is rebuilt. Until then, Kessler's hoping the hotel might be filled with construction and relief workers.

Mississippi Insurance Commissioner George Dale, who has surveyed the damage by helicopter, predicts that within months, the coast will be the center of the nation's biggest building boom.

"You're going to have millions of dollars of insurance money coming to the Gulf Coast. You're going to have millions of dollars of federal money pouring into the Gulf Coast. Somebody's going to have to do the work," Dale said recently. "An old-timer once told me, he said, 'Sometimes, about every 10 years, the coast needs a haircut. It adds to the economy.' "

Bernard Garcia, the 16-year-old son of immigrants from Michoacan, Mexico, says his family will not only remain in Biloxi and rebuild the El Toro Bar, but also summon relatives from California to come for construction jobs.

"There's going to be more work here than any other place," he says.

And auto mechanic Khoi Le, 34, will put his own reopening on hold for three or four weeks to help in the rebuilding.

But welder and mechanic Melvin Young of Bay St. Louis may be forced to move on.

"I got $25 to my name," he says. "We're looking for work."