Roessling's Fastenal store was fortunate to have sustained only minimal damage when Katrina hit last Aug. 29, and business during the recovery has been growing, she said.

At the same time, Roessling is still living in a FEMA trailer on her best friend's lawn—mainly because the rebuilding and renovation efforts have caused rents to more than double as contractors from out of town seek housing.

'Before the hurricane, I was paying $775 per month,' she said. 'Rent has gone to $1,200 to $1,800. So I'll stay put where I am for now...Rental property is in very high demand right now. In Gulfport, we haven't seen a lot of rebuilding. They are more in the restoration stage.'

One apartment complex project alone has brought her store $40,000 to $60,000 in business, 'and that's growing every day,' she said.

'We're selling a little bit of everything,' Roessling added. 'This branch has never sold a lot of nails. In fact, we've never carried them. Now, we're doing framing nails and [nails] for air nailers. We've been selling a lot of those, [as well as] air compressors, air nailers, grinders, shears—and a lot of things we'd never had to deal with before.'

In the past few years, she said her Fastenal branch hasn't reported more than $80,000 to $85,000 in total sales for a month. But since Katrina, they haven't done less than $100,000 a month.

Her branch sold $113,000 in January and could have done as much as $130,000, inventory permitting.

'A lot of things have been on back order,' she said. 'Right now, with the little business we do have, we could even be doing $160,000 to $180,000 per month.'

While the recovery effort has impacted her business favorably, Roessling is concerned about the Gulf Region's economy in the long term. For example, Gulfport's Grand Casino won't re-open, she said, although rumor has it that another casino corporation might buy the license and re-open eventually.

Dole Pineapple Co. has a branch in Gulfport that was severely damaged during Hurricane Katrina. As of early February, the company hadn't announced whether it will re-open the branch, Roessling said.

While there have been sales increases from the clean up, Roessling said she's scrambling to find workers for her store.

In fact, after Katrina, she only had two people: herself and her assistant manager.

'Everyone I've talked to is having a hard time finding people to work,' she said. 'There's so much work to be done, and a lot of people from Mississippi are looking for employees.'

Further east, in Biloxi, Miss., the hurricane damage was worse than it was in Gulfport. The manager of the Fastenal branch there, Jim Self, used to oversee an 8,000-square-foot facility with $300,000 in inventory. Post-Katrina, he now has 2,000 square feet that can house $18,000 in inventory.

His old facility is being rebuilt, he said, with a possible completion date of mid-April. Nonetheless, he said he's coping with the current store's physical limitations.

'Our distribution center used to deliver three days a week,' Self said. 'In light of everything, we've changed that to a five-day-a-week truck route. It softens the blow a little bit when we can say we'll have it in the morning.'

Self said he's seen some progress in the clean-up phase, but admits there's an enormous amount of work still to be done.

'You have some casino barges still sitting on land north of Highway 90,' he said, referring to the major route that runs along the Gulf of Mexico. 'It's definitely still in a clean-up phase rather than a rebuilding phase.'

He said his store has been selling more tools, as people have had to replace items they either lost in the hurricane or need for their repair work. In addition, Self said he's moving a lot of safety equipment and related items, such as dust masks and asbestos protection. Overall, product demand is at an all-time high.

'We're a third of the size, with a tenth of the inventory,' Self explained, 'but our sales are still hitting the goals and numbers that Fastenal requires us to have. We've really been blowing it out.'

Sixty-five miles east from Biloxi, in Mobile, Ala., Bruce Reagan, vice president of operations at Turner Supply, said things are pretty close to normal, all things considered. The Mobile branch of Turner had scheduled a two-day trade show last October as part of its 100th anniversary. That show will now be held in mid-March.

'Literally, as we speak, we have carpenters replacing some panels in the store and doing some outside fixing up,' Reagan said. 'And while for the most part we've recovered here, there will still be signs of it for years to come, high water marks on buildings and things of that nature.'

Six branches of the Oliver Van Horn Co. were not impacted by the hurricane. The seventh—its New Orleans location—was another story. Lee Eagan, chairman and CEO of Van Horn, returned on Sept. 21, three weeks after Katrina hit.

'We lost our roof and back wall,' Eagan explained. 'We got looted and had six feet of water, too...We had sewage water, dead animals and fish that had stayed in here for 14 days.'

From Oct. 1 through Thanksgiving, Eagan and 10 to 12 of his employees operated out of his home, which sits above ground and was relatively unaffected by the storm. The company is now back in its original location.

'We have inventory now and some people back. We took back those employees who could come back, but lost a bunch of people,' he said, referring to employees who left and decided not to return.

Those warehouse employees who are back are putting in 12- to 14-hour days, six and seven days a week.

Eagan says the current New Orleans office location is 'adequate,' while its warehouse is, 'a shade below adequate. But [overall], we're doing OK.'

Like many business leaders, Eagan says he'd readily hire more people if he could. But will people come back to the New Orleans area? That's the key long-term consideration for Eagan. He estimates that the general New Orleans area's population in February was about one-third of what it had been before Katrina. He said he doesn't foresee any immediate improvement in that.

Day-to-day essentials are still not close to normal in many areas, he added. Two area medical schools are not yet operating because the hospitals that they're affiliated with are set to be torn down.

In Orleans Parish, there were 12 hospitals before the storm, but only one that was operational as of Feb. 1, he explained. Three-hour waits in the emergency room are the norm, he said, and area doctors are leaving because they're having trouble making a living due to conditions and a lack of patients.

As for public schools in his area, only three have reopened.

'You tell me how you can do commerce in that kind of environment,' he said.

A colleague of Eagan's is Rob Petter, CEO of Henry A. Petter Supply, a general-line distributor based in Paducah, Ky. He was in New Orleans meeting with Eagan this past December and saw first-hand the conditions.

'It is just incomprehensible,' Petter says. 'Unfortunately, the news clips just don't show the sheer magnitude of what's taken place down there.'

Driving around, Eagan showed Petter some of the area's immediate concerns.

Some residents are deciding whether or not to rebuild at all, Petter said. And others have started to rebuild though their neighbors haven't even returned yet.

'So do you rebuild there, even if you have no idea what your neighbors are going to do?' Petter says. 'Will those structures sit there like that, vacant for years, while you're out there on a block virtually by yourself?'

In the South, Atlanta has the Coca-Cola headquarters as a business focal point. Memphis has Federal Express. There aren't any corporate headquarters comparable to those two in New Orleans.

But Eagan and others in the business community are trying to help. As an example, he explains how his company holds a weekly meeting of vendors. Some vendors recently said they wanted to have the meeting elsewhere.

'I said, 'Positively not,'' Eagan recalled. 'They said, 'Well why not? Everything's torn up there.' I said, 'That's exactly why we're doing it here.'

'People have to see this, report back to their parts of their country, and write their congressmen to have them do something.'

By 'do something,' Eagan is referring to the slow pace of the recovery, especially the repair work (or lack thereof) being done on the levees that proved inadequate when Katrina was at its peak. For life to go on, those levees must be addressed, Eagan insisted—and soon.

'Hey, we're only three-and-a-half months away from the start of the next hurricane season [June 1],' Eagan said.