Couple Rebuilds in Gulfport, Mississippi
LEMON: More than 15 months after Hurricane Katrina, you can drive for miles and miles along the Gulf Coast and see nothing but wiped out beach front. Now, we can see how some are rebuilding, and it comes with great personal sacrifice, including loneliness. CNN's Sean Callebs is live in Gulfport, Mississippi. And Sean, I've been there. Nothing -- there's nothing, really, along the beach front there. And so now we have some people that are trying to rebuild?</s>SEAN CALLEBS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it's interesting. No matter how many times you hear about it or even come here, when you drive down Highway 90 and just see slab after slab, when you see a home like this one, which belongs to Lee and Chichi Bryant, the first house built from the ground up since Hurricane Katrina rolled through this area. They've only been in it a couple of weeks. It's been a great couple of weeks for them. But Lee Bryant says, only half jokingly, he has to travel pretty far if he wants to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor.</s>CALLEBS (voice-over): Lee and Chichi Bryant just couldn't walk away.</s>CHICHI BRYANT, HOMEOWNER: Sand looks nice, doesn't it? Nice and smooth.</s>CALLEBS: They are the first people on Highway 90, Mississippi's Gulf Coast, to rebuild, after months trading in their 400 square foot FEMA trailer for a 3,300-square-foot home.</s>LEE BRYANT, HOMEOWNER: When the hurricane hit, it made me appreciate what I had had before the hurricane and what I had lost, and I vowed to rebuild.</s>CALLEBS: The Bryant say people cringe when they explain they're building on exactly the same slab where their old home stood and was washed away and didn't built it any higher off the ground. But Lee says his new home is safer, with steel rods running from the foundation to the rafters every two feet throughout the home. (voice-over) Was there ever any thought to not rebuilding?</s>L. BRYANT: Not at all. I mean, I didn't hesitate one time. I knew it was going to be difficult to do.</s>CALLEBS: Like a lot of Gulf Coast homeowners, the Bryants believe they've been shorted by their insurance company. They rebuilt after getting nothing on a $100,000 policy for contents. Money for wind damage is in litigation, so, they scrimped and saved.</s>L. BRYANT: It took about 35,000 bricks to rebuild our home, and 10,000 of those bricks are from our old house.</s>CALLEBS: That saved $7,000.</s>C. BRYANT: This can be cleaned up, and it will look nice and pretty.</s>CALLEBS: And Chichi is still finding her old knickknacks Katrina washed away. But what the Bryants really miss are neighbors. Now just slabs and weeds to the left, rubble and more overgrown fields to the right.</s>L. BRYANT: They're rebuilding the back of us on Second Street, but I wish more people would take the initiative like we had and rebuild.</s>CALLEBS: Till then, they will be virtually alone on their patch of Highway 90 along with a view and the hope that others will follow.</s>CALLEBS: Back live at Gulfport, this, of course, the balcony where Lee and Chichi have their morning view from. The sun rises just to the left of where I am. They enjoy that part every day. But what they also enjoy, up and down this way a number of houses are under construction. Many of them just not very close to people moving in. We want to show you what that really looks like. We have a couple of cameras set up here. If you look over here you can just see slab after slab. There's a FEMA trailer in the left-hand corner of the picture. And to give you an idea if you look down there, you can see what the hurricane storm surge did to this hardwood floor. Just completely warped it, destroyed it. That's pretty much the image that you see as you go down through here. Once again, as we look out, there's low tide, and this is the view they have every day. This is the reason Lee and Chichi said that they wanted to move back to this area. Don, if you look in the lower right-hand corner, there you see our producer and the real photographer doing their job, but this is the view. This is what they're going to stay here for, even if there is another hurricane -- Don.</s>LEMON: Yes. It's amazing how close it is. It's really just a few -- maybe a few hundred yards from the ocean there. And some might wonder. When it was all happening you saw cars that were, like, on different streets had moved miles away. Some would wonder with all this why people would want to move back. Let's talk about, though, the insurance company, Sean. Because there was some -- they've been fighting with their old insurance company.</s>CALLEBS: Right.</s>LEMON: And now are they going to be able to get insurance for this new home? Do they have it?</s>CALLEBS: They do have insurance. They have flood insurance. They have the maximum federal flood insurance, which is $250,000, which is nowhere near enough to replace a home this close to the beach. You know how expensive those homes are. They have fire insurance, and they have wind coverage. The biggest change, wind coverage. Get this, Don. Their wind coverage insurance went up by 400 percent since Hurricane Katrina. So if anybody else is going to move down to this area, be prepared to pay, because it is going to be very expensive.</s>LEMON: Yes. Sean Callebs, thank you very much for that.</s>NGUYEN: And there's a parting shot from the Pentagon. Just before he resigned, Donald Rumsfeld sent a secret memo to the White House. The details on his call for a major adjustment. That's ahead in the NEWSROOM.