A week after Hurricane Rita delivered a second knock-out punch to the Gulf Coast still staggering from Katrina, this remote corner of Louisiana bore the brunt of the blow.

The area, directly east of where the eye of the storm touched down on the Texas-Louisiana border, was once a tranquil patchwork of coastal wetlands, ranches, farms and small towns.

A helicopter tour Saturday revealed its transformation.

The Holly Beach resort town referred to as the "Cajun Riviera" was completely gone.

Skeletal buildings were waist deep in black water stinking of sulfur and shimmering red or green with slime.

Pieces of buildings were stuck in tops of dead trees poking from the fetid water. Farm fields with raised borders looked like foul pools from above.

White cranes flew slowly above a submerged wildlife refuge bordering the Gulf.

Near the town of Cameron, cows stood stranded on a green knoll turned island. Owners of some stranded bovine resorted to coaxing boaters to deliver hay daily to the animals.

Even houses on stilts weren't spared. Holes gaped in roofs. Walls, windows and doors were gone. Legs supporting the structures vanished into water.

Fragments of buildings were scattered like toothpicks. The air was rank with the smell of sulfur. A flattened delivery truck lay on the side of a road, with "Shrimp" on the side facing up.

Roots of toppled trees reached skyward. Cars and trucks were sunken in sodden fields or underwater marsh. Battered clusters of farm or commercial buildings remained under siege by water.

Water towers occasionally poked from a fetid expanse that, at one point, reached inland to what appeared to be a petrochemical plant.

In some places, water had receded to expose remnants of buildings and swathes of debris. In the storm-hammered town of Cameron, bulldozers and back hoes scooped the remnants of life into mounds. Some people idly sifted through rubble.

"That was all covered with water a couple of weeks ago," native Billy Cormier said, making a broad arc with one arm in a park in the city of Erath. "Cameron was hit hardest."

An estimated 90 percent of the homes in Erath, a town of 2,000, were damaged by the storms, according to city spokesman Warren Perrin.

Army vehicles, police cars and medical vehicles eased along the roads. Only a few civilians could be spied in the annihilated area reachable by a lone access route, a partially submerged coastal road.

Folks in remote parts of that coast had lived in a realm of their own prior to the storms, said Kristie Cornell of the nearby town of Lafayette.

"There are people down there who speak only Cajun French," the geology teacher said. "It's a different world, for sure."

Cornell told of having to explain to a refugee from the area how to use the Internet to look for help. The woman had never been online before, Cornell said.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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