Not the Riviera: Saint Bernard landscape of lush growth, bare concrete housing foundations and FEMA trailers. American pride: a tattered flag still flies from a pole on a gutted house with a "Do not Enter" sign in the door. Ronald LeBlanc describes the flood of water that rolled over his house. Throughout Saint Bernard Parish, hollowed-out houses stare at empty streets through shattered windows. In the Saint Bernard Housing Project in New Orleans East, homes look as though they await their owners' return. One sign of hope: a volunteer spackling Ronald LeBlanc's home.

NESTLED IN A LAZY CURVE of the Mississippi River as it meanders toward the Gulf of Mexico, downtown New Orleans and its slightly risqué French neighbor have shrugged off the one-two punch delivered by that brassy pair of dames, Katrina and Rita. Harrah’s casino is more subdued, the crowds on Decatur and Bourbon a bit thinner, but the music is as loud as ever. It’s been two years, after all. Time enough for a city to pick itself up. Time to move on.

Then there’s the view of those who venture a bit further afield. “The isle of denial,” they say, referring to the downtown glitz. “The sliver by the river.”

Several hundred yards to the east, where the tourists don’t go, the devastation begins. The broad swath encompasses virtually all of New Orleans East, swings south through the Ninth Ward and then slices southeast through St. Bernard Parish. Two years after a wall of water swept through tens of thousands of homes, this remains a war zone. Vacant structures—homes, stores, office and apartment buildings, gas stations, libraries, schools—stare at rubble-strewn streets, some with plywood nailed over doors and windows, others with gaping holes where the damage was never covered. Blue tarps fly in futile tatters from pock-marked roofs. Mounds of plasterboard, brick, crushed appliances, water-soaked carpeting and broken wood and glass are piled on sidewalks, streets and vacant lots where homes once stood, the ground scraped down to concrete slabs. Rivers of weeds zig-zag through cracked sidewalks, parking lots and driveways.

Two years and counting.

The St. Bernard Housing Project in New Orleans East, where 960 of 1,400 units were occupied three summers ago, was spared the worst of it but looks like the target of a neutron bomb, the kind that kills people but leaves structures unscathed. Intact buildings are surrounded by neatly mowed lawns and chain-link fences topped with three strands of barbed-wire, stern notices threatening trespassers with legal mayhem. The apartments have never been cleaned out, with furniture, clothes and cereal cartons still visible inside, as if the people who live here had just stepped out for a little while, as if they would be back that evening. Only they won’t. These apartments, left relatively unscathed by the storms, are to be razed.

To make way for a golf course.

Further south, the Ninth Ward is a patchwork of shattered houses and vacant lots, in many cases with even the slabs now gone. In their place, a lush tangle of weeds nourished by the semi-tropical climate approaches jungle density, sprawling across property lines to devour fences, garages, sheds and any other structure still standing. Most surviving homes are emblazoned with an X, each quadrant bearing a notation with a different meaning: day searched, the search crew’s identity, number of dead inside. Some, despite all the odds, are still being lived in. Others, though empty, bear defiant signs: “Don’t tear down!” “You look, I shoot!”

Two years.

And then there’s Saint Bernard Parish, butting up against the New Orleans city line. Once home to 67,000 people who fished commercially or worked the oil fields and raised their families in the same neighborhood for generations on end. A middle-class area of modest brick homes, with a 4% unemployment rate and median family income of $36,000. But once Hurricane Katrina had finished her work, all but one of the 27,000 homes in St. Bernard was declared a total loss.

“It felt like a train and an airplane crashed,” says Ronald LeBlanc, recalling the moment when the two large oak trees on his property toppled. Rushing outside, he looked down the street to see a wall of water more than 20 feet high bearing down. The flood came so swiftly that by the time he’d turned to call a warning to his wife and reached his front door, the water was up to his chest. Seconds later it had swept him down the street, beginning a six-day ordeal in which he and his wife slept on roof-tops, dove through six feet of water to scavenge food from a sunken refrigerator and watched a parade of helicopters overhead, none of which stopped to offer help no matter how much they yelled and waved their arms. When help finally did come, it was in the form of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Two years after the storms, LeBlanc and his wife are among the one-third of Saint Bernard’s pre-storm population to return. They live in a FEMA trailer perched on the sidewalk in front of their house, flanked on all sides by the empty husks that once housed their neighbors. Volunteers have been helping him rehab his home, which has been completely gutted, and now that it has been re-insulated, rewired and sheet-rocked, it’s likely LeBlanc will be able to move back in by Thanksgiving. But the prospect, once eagerly anticipated, now moves him literally to tears.

“Initially, there was no question we were coming back,” he says, ticking off the numerous friends and relatives who lived nearby. “But since we’ve been back, I don’t know if we made the right choice. After two years, look” --a sweep of the arm encompasses his hollowed-out neighborhood-- “look at how we’re living. There’s no one here.”

Not only are there no neighbors, but there are few stores in the parish: the Wal-Mart has never reopened, nor have Kmart or Winn Dixie, and the local Wendy’s reopened just two weeks ago—bringing to four the number of available fast-food outlets. The hospitals are still shuttered, so the only medical care available is in a group of trailers. The civic center likewise has been shuttered, its parking lots and landscaped grounds serving as a trailer court for scores of white aluminum boxes parked nose-to-tail like circus elephants on parade. The sewage treatment plant is not operating, so the sewage must be pumped out of the ground by a fleet of tanker trucks that haul their fragrant cargo to . . . somewhere. The libraries are all closed, their sodden contents trucked away but not replaced.

All that after two years.

MORE THAN TWO YEARS after a pair of hurricanes hammered Louisiana, tens of thousands of working class Americans are living in a Third World environment of sewage pump-trucks and doctors working in trailers. When disaster struck, help was provided by a friendly foreign government. And as the disaster continues, day after day and week after week for months on end, the only ongoing assistance is coming from volunteers, non-profit organizations and charitable groups. Government assistance is little seen by residents, apparently uncoordinated and smothered in bureaucracy.

The St. Bernard Project is one private effort, an apparently quixotic enterprise started by a couple of Washington, D.C. residents who volunteered in New Orleans six months after Katrina and had their lives turned inside out. Lawyer Zack Rosenburg and teacher Liz McCartney ended up with some seed money from United Way and started what to this day is the only organization in Saint Bernard Parish devoted to helping local residents rebuild their homes.

“A home is the basic building block of community—you can’t have a community until people have a place to live,” explains Andrea Bean, the project’s volunteer coordinator. And rehabbing an existing home, even one that has been gutted down to the studs, is still vastly cheaper than building a new home from scratch: $10,000, says Bean, which includes the cost of insulation, drywall, flooring, wiring and electrical service panel, windows, doors, kitchen cabinets and appliances, bathroom fixtures and a water heater. Even an inexperienced crew of volunteers can finish a house in eight weeks with a bit of help from expert hands.

Yet for all that, the Saint Bernard Project has just undertaken its 100th renovation—in a parish where thousands of homes sit vacant and gutted, many with forlorn “for sale” signs tacked to their siding. “We’re pretty much the only thing going on,” says Bean, adding that Habitat for Humanity is building new homes in the parish.

For homeowners, who in Saint Bernard Parish outnumbered renters two-to-one, there are few options. Most paid flood insurance premiums until a few years ago, when insurance companies redrew their flood plain maps to exclude the area, leaving 75% under- or un-insured for flood damage. Stories abound of residents who received a few thousand dollars in payments for roofs damaged by hurricane winds—roofs that were exposed because they were the only part of a house sticking out of the water.

Whatever insurance payments are made typically go directly to a mortgage holder; even if a mortgage is completely paid off, the homeowner is left with an uninhabitable pile and, usually, no financial means to rebuild. A federal bridge program, “The Road Home,” provides grants for homeowners to rebuild or relocate, but is so bound in red tape that in its first six months, says Bean, it had provided grants to only 14 families. Others have been waiting more than a year, she adds—and only recently learned that the money they’re getting is taxable.

But perhaps the greatest vacuum is the lack of any agency, either governmental or from the private sector, that can match the area’s gaping needs with volunteers and donations. There is no one a would-be volunteer can call or e-mail to say, “I’m willing to spend three weeks of my vacation in the New Orleans area on such-and-such dates, and I have such-and-such skills, is there a productive way you can use me?” Those who want to help have to find a specific group, like the Saint Bernard Project, and link up directly, usually via the internet.

Yet despite the magnitude of the problem, or perhaps because of it, Bean says the number of homes the project is rehabbing is less significant than the example it sets for others. Every family that moves back into a neighborhood makes it that much easier for a second to follow, and then a third and fourth, in a cascading ripple effect. Eventually, hopefully, all of Saint Bernard Parish will be revitalized.

Or that’s the hope, two years and two months after Katrina and Rita paid a visit.