The ruins of Sabine Pass, Texas

AP/ NY Times:

Viola Fairchild is 77, limps because of a bad knee and takes seven blood pressure pills a day since Hurricane Rita flattened the house where she lived for 58 years and raised four kids.

She knows a FEMA trailer will likely be her last home in Sabine Pass. Like many in the low-income town of 600, she can't afford to rebuild.

She doesn't care that a new hurricane season began June 1. Few people here do.

''There's nothing left to take,'' said Fairchild, who spends her day taking care of her 81-year-old diabetic husband. ''What else am I going to lose? What's anybody here got to lose?''

Nine months after Rita plowed into Sabine Pass on its way through East Texas, there's not much left for another hurricane to destroy in this community of shrimpers, port hands and refinery workers. The town is still littered with FEMA trailers, piles of debris and gutted houses.

Its only store, which Rita demolished, is still closed. The mound of frayed wires, bricks and broken beams that was the post office remains untouched, and postal service comes from a trailer in front of the rubble.

Rita destroyed 118 of the town's 245 homes and rendered many more uninhabitable.

It also ruined Dianne Jackson's high school yearbook, which included photos of classmates Janis Joplin and Jimmy Johnson, the former Dallas Cowboys coach. Jackson said that had she sold the book before Rita, she might have made some headway in collecting the $20,000 it will cost to put her next home on the 12-foot concrete pylons the city now requires.

Her money problems are a familiar story in Sabine Pass, and help explain why its residents care little about the state's new evacuation plans and sheltering strategies, even as forecasters predict as many as six major hurricanes this season.

FEMA has told displaced families it wants its trailers back in March -- an impossible deadline for many, considering those that can afford to rebuild are just now seeing construction materials delivered to their lawns by overwhelmed contractors.

But in Sabine Pass, where the median income is about $17,000 and an estimated 70 percent had no homeowners' insurance, most aren't that lucky.

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With all the attention on New Orleans and Louisiana and Mississippi, places like Sabine Pass have been largely forgotten. Like Galveston after the hurricaine a hundred years ago, it will never be the same.