Baton Rouge

Peter Schmidt, a property manager in New Orleans, is one of the lucky ones. His condo, in an 1870 building in the French Quarter, was undamaged when Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29. So when he decided to list the 600-square-foot unit for sale in late October - after taking a job in California - he set the price at $299,000, nearly double what he would have asked before the hurricane. After all, Schmidt said, thousands of people in New Orleans are looking for places to live and he had been hearing that homes in good condition were commanding a premium.

Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger will miss one game and possibly two after arthroscopic knee surgery yesterday. A piece of torn cartilage was removed from his right knee. Coach Bill Cowher said Roethlisberger will definitely miss Sunday's game against Green Bay. Roethlisberger, who missed a loss Oct. 16 to Jacksonville with a hyperextended left knee, initially hurt his right knee Sept. 11 against Tennessee. The right knee bothered him again after his shoe stuck in the turf as he was being hit by Ravens linebacker Jarret Johnson during the first quarter of the Steelers' 20-19 victory Monday night.

NEW ORLEANS -- On a weekday morning not long ago, two state engineers left Baton Rouge to go hunting for places to deposit the remains of half a city. Before the ruined portions of New Orleans can be reconstructed, they must first be deconstructed and hauled away - an estimated 22 million tons of debris, an amount 15 times greater than what was generated by the World Trade Center collapse. About 40 miles from New Orleans, the pair - 48-year-old Bijan Sharafkhani, who rode shotgun, and the driver, 31-year-old Jason Meyers - began to pass billboards erected after Hurricane Katrina.

BATON ROUGE, LA. -- It was a last-minute decision that Laila Brown now regrets. The 34-year-old woman had planned to take her youngest daughter, Dion Rochelle Ridley, with her to the New Orleans Convention Center to ride out Hurricane Katrina. But when she called the girl's nanny the night of Aug. 28, Dion, 6, was already tucked in bed asleep. Believing that the approaching storm was not really a big threat, Brown agreed to let her daughter stay one more night. "If I would have known it would have been this bad, I wouldn't have ever left my baby," Brown said.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Two weeks after an enormous relief effort to welcome survivors of Hurricane Katrina, the strain can be seen everywhere in this state capital and laid-back college town, and many are having second thoughts. The waits at gas pumps are daunting. Grocery stores have trouble keeping food on their shelves, and classrooms are overcrowded. Meanwhile, nearly everyone - from Red Cross volunteers to job hunters to store clerks to TV news vans - is perpetually stuck in traffic. The ripples of Katrina seem to have left no one untouched.

NEW ORLEANS - The pumps need another month to drain the city, maybe longer. Then the bulldozers and dump trucks will go in for the debris, assuming the remaining survivors and bodies are removed. Electricity and drinking water will be the next priority, along with repairs to the bridges and boulevards that are still salvageable. Only then will reconstruction begin in earnest - maybe by November, state and federal officials estimate - with engineers and surveyors picking through the wood-framed houses to determine which will survive.

There are places like it all over the country, where college football is more religion than mere sport, where a small city or a college town swells in population and revels in celebration six or seven weekends every fall. In that way, the city of Baton Rouge, La., and the LSU Tigers are no different than Ann Arbor is to the Michigan Wolverines. It has been that way for generations. That has now changed, as the state of Louisiana has forever been altered with the destruction and devastation caused by the most catastrophic hurricane in U.S. history.

John Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston, flew their private jet into Baton Rouge with food and tetanus shots for Hurricane Katrina victims, then toured New Orleans evacuee shelters. Sean Penn took a leaky boat out into New Orleans' mucky waters to carry out people stranded in their flooded homes. He dropped into chest-deep water to help people into his boat. NBC's Katie Couric broadcast from Baton Rouge. Oprah Winfrey took her show to the Gulf Coast, and Geraldo Rivera reported from the New Orleans convention center.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Their translucent eyelids are rarely open, but these babies have already seen much of the world. They've flown in military choppers and forded rivers of sewage. Tiny New Orleans natives, they survived Katrina's wrath in their first days of life, or, like Skylar Burke, in the process of being born. His mother's contractions were less than two minutes apart Aug. 29 when the National Guard moved her, barefoot and wearing only a T-shirt, from her flooding New Orleans apartment to the Superdome.

BATON ROUGE, La. - On the first day of classes since Hurricane Katrina, you couldn't tell the local students from the out-of-towners at Our Lady of Mercy School. They wore the same uniforms, took the same quizzes and ate the same lunches as everyone else. The teachers even knew their names. The school of 821 children added 200, mostly from the New Orleans area, virtually overnight. Uniforms, backpacks, notebooks - even socks and tennis shoes - were all donated and piled up on the stage in the gym. Class sizes bulged from 28 to 35, but no one was complaining.