GULFPORT, Miss. Twenty months after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the city of New Orleans continues to serve as the defining symbol of the storm's destructiveness for most of the nation.

That's where the television cameras and news photographers focused most of their attention in the days and weeks after the hurricane came ashore in August 2005, and it is where the news media have returned fitfully over the past year and a half to gauge the region's progress toward recovery.

It's where so many of the third-party relief and recovery efforts have focused their work. Recording artists such as Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. have launched fundraising campaigns to rejuvenate its legendary music scene; filmmaker Spike Lee made a provocative television documentary about the city's post-Katrina tribulations.

There are plenty of good reasons for the almost obsessive attention paid to this single city. It is not just the spectacle of a major American community being destroyed by bad weather that captured the public imagination, but the corollary plot elements: the dramatic incompetence of the federal response as floodwaters engulfed neighborhood after neighborhood, the legendary corruption and cronyism of local agencies charged with developing the city's emergency plans, the overtones of class and race that continue to swirl around the discussion of who should be allowed to return and under what conditions.

But in many ways, New Orleans is an aberration. A sinking city in a levee-ringed bowl below sea level, surrounded by water and protected by a profoundly flawed system of pumps and dikes, it has little in common with any other city in America.

Just to the east along the Gulf Coast, however, lies a string of communities that are much more representative of a nation that has been rapidly and ill-advisedly urbanizing its coastlines.

These towns and cities on the Mississippi coast Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi, Ocean Springs are not as well known to Americans as New Orleans. But they suffered just as much, if not more, from Katrina's destructive power, and they continue to present scenes of equal or greater devastation nearly two years later.

With the start of the next hurricane season less than two months away, they also continue to offer sober warnings about the vulnerability of millions of Americans to the power of wind and water.

In many ways, towns such as Gulfport suffered more from the hurricane than New Orleans did. In New Orleans, the city was wrecked by the secondary effects of the storm, exacerbated by poorly designed and constructed levees and flood walls that failed under pressure from rising water levels in nearby Lake Pontchartrain.

Along the Mississippi coast, however, the damage was more directly related to the force of the storm itself. The surge of water pushed ashore by the hurricane swept inland like an aquatic bulldozer, pulverizing hotels, stores, gas stations, public buildings and private homes, and piling the wreckage in vast heaps.

Today, although some of the damaged buildings have been torn down and progress has been made toward clearing away the debris, the scene remains one of sobering destruction.

For nearly 50 miles, the coastal strip is a wasteland of rubble and bare concrete slabs that used to be the foundations of homes and businesses. Turn off the main coastal road, Highway 90, and you can bump along city streets that once carved tree-shaded residential tracts into neat grids. But the asphalt is buried under sand and branches and fragments of stucco, brick and lumber. Only the street signs poking up incongruously from the mess suggest that these once were neighborhoods.

There are signs everywhere advertising construction and debris-clearing services. There are also lots of signs offering oceanfront residential and commercial lots for sale. Some of the damaged hotels and casinos have been rebuilt as blocky fortresses, and there's an occasional house being reconstructed atop cinder-block pillars intended to elevate it above future floods.

Some homes, however, are being rebuilt just as they were before, on slab foundations only a few feet above the high-tide line. And that may be the most remarkable sight of all along this gently curving stretch of storm-battered coastline.

Not the debris, the shattered structures, or even the ranks of high-rise hotels standing defiantly on low-lying slivers of seaside sand. But this: property owners, provided incontrovertible proof that it's folly to build such homes in such a place, doing so anyway.

John Krist is a senior editor and Opinion page columnist for The Star. To read previous columns, visit http://www.johnkrist.com. His e-mail address is jkrist@VenturaCountyStar.com.