NEW ORLEANS – Eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, Stella Chambers’ modest red-brick house had finally been repaired, and she was waiting for one last utility hookup to move back in. But the 85-year-old woman never made it.

A tornado tore through her neighborhood in the city’s Gentilly neighborhood before daybreak Tuesday, flattening her house, ripping apart the front-yard FEMA trailer in which she was living, and killing her.

At least 29 people were injured, including Chambers’ daughter, Gail, as the twister heaped more misery on neighborhoods still trying to recover from Katrina. The storm destroyed at least 50 FEMA trailers and dozens of homes, and damaged many others.

“We were trying to get my mother back in the house. Now there is nothing to repair,” said Mervin Pollard, whose 81-year-old mother’s Katrina-flooded home was reduced to a pile of lumber Tuesday. “How do you start over again when you are already trying to do that?”

Firefighters went door to door, once again searching for victims of a storm. They spray-painted bright orange rectangles on the buildings and trailers and, as with the circles searchers used after Hurricane Katrina, they listed the date of the search and whether bodies were found.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco became teary-eyed as she talked to residents of the suburb of Westwego whose homes were destroyed.

“It’s incredible. It just looks like pick-up sticks,” she said.

Blanco issued a disaster declaration, making the area eligible for aid. She said the state would send in National Guard troops.

The tornado hop-scotched a 10-mile path from the west bank of the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain.

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Kevin McGill, Mike Kunzelman and Cain Burdeau and photographer Alex Brandon.