BILOXI, Miss. — To most folks, the mountains of rubble along U.S. 90 look the same. But Deborah Johnson knows what the splintered boards, ruined furniture and tumbled bricks once were.

"That was a pawnshop. That was a waffle shop," she says, pointing over the steering wheel, then pulling out of the parking lot of the Edgewater Inn. "And this is the only hotel left on the beach."

Johnson, 42, has delivered the mail in Biloxi for 12 years. Since Hurricane Katrina, though, some of her route is barely recognizable. The postal worker lost at least 200 of 1,100 customers.

A month after Katrina, the Postal Service is still struggling to connect customers with their mail, storing as much as they deliver on some routes and hoping for more change-of-address cards. They've received more than 25,000 so far, but manager Jerry Wiecks says he is still running out of places to stash the backlog.

In some southern Mississippi neighborhoods, carriers were back on their beats two days after the storm, says Postal Service spokeswoman Beth Barnett.

In Biloxi, though, workers emptied mud-soaked mail from collection boxes, dried it on the floor over several days and put as much as possible back into circulation. Two-and-a-half weeks later, they started delivering.

The first day, Johnson sat in her truck and cried.

"You know who's just built a new home," she says. "You know who's got a job and who doesn't."

She drives past an apartment complex whose tenants had little money and no transportation. "A lot of them probably stayed," she says. "You just wonder, are they alive?"

Across town, carrier Ronnie Kostmayer walks up Trafalgar Street, past boarded-up homes and piles of debris that get smaller by the day. At one house, 57-year-old Dan Shearin rushes out. After Katrina, Shearin lost all high-tech ways of talking to people, including e-mail and his $150 cellphone.

The first post-Katrina mail Shearin got was a letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency telling him he wouldn't get any money. That, and a telephone bill.

Kostmayer laughs.

"Sometimes we bring bad news, too."