Collins family averts disaster
The first day, it was just a little rain. Two days later, it was a fullfledged flood.
But for Landon Collins, it was never a worry. The Giants safety talks to his father, Thomas Collins, at least three days a week, so he knew that the water was piling up in Baton Rouge, that 11 years after Katrina, his home state was enduring yet another disastrous flood.
He also knew that his family was OK, that somehow, 11 years after Katrina uprooted them from New Orleans, they had avoided the heart of the disaster.
“They closed down the interstates, closed down the streets,” Collins says of this month’s flooding. “I called my dad, I was like ‘Dang, it’s that bad?’ How are you doing?’ He said ‘We haven’t been hit at all.’ The house is fine. Everything is fine.”
Collins smiles, a sense of relief in his voice, because he knows his family was lucky. Just two weeks ago, Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards called this year’s flooding “historic” and “unprecedented,” and more than 100,000 families have reportedly registered for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It was the latest tragedy for an area that’s been in a state of tumult for much of the summer. It was Baton Rouge that touched off the new discussion of police violence in early July, when cops shot and killed Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man. And it was just weeks later that a shootout led to three Baton Rouge cops dying.
Such incidents rocked the entire region. But Collins believes his home state is ready to recover from the floods, at the very least, if only because it’s mentally strong a decade after Katrina.
“We went through Katrina,so they was ready for this,” he says of his home state. “At least somewhat. Before (Katrina), with a hurricane, it was always like, ‘It’s going to die down.’ After Katrina, that’s always in the back of our mind, so we’re not going to be caught off guard.”
The Collins clan certainly wasn’t, and neither were many of the New Orleans natives who joined them in moving to Baton Rouge. Plenty of neighbors joined the Collinses in settling in Ascension Parish, Collins says.
The Collins house is about five miles from the Mississippi River, Thomas says, but it seems to have narrowly averted the worst of the flooding. Life is largely normal in the Collins household, Thomas says, and Landon’s little brother, Gerald Willis, is expecting to start school in a few days.
For a few moments, when the flooding began, there was cause for worry, Thomas says. But things subsided quickly.
“We started to really worry when they were saying that the water from the Baton Rouge area had nowhere else to go, and that it was going to start collecting in our area,” Thomas says. “But that never really became an issue.
“We’re doing good,” he adds. “But two blocks, turn left from our house, and people have four feet of water inside their house. One block from us is a disaster. It was by the luck of God we made it through.”
Now Thomas hopes good can come of the disaster and believes that’s what he’s seen over the last two weeks. For all the tumult of the early summer, he says, he’s watched the community band together in the wake of the flooding. The divide between police and the African-American community has narrowed, he says, as everyone has battled nature.
“We just went through a lot of things with the shootings,” he says. “But it’s an act of God to bring everybody together. That’s how I look at it: Everybody pull together, show togetherness.
“Everybody is their brother’s keeper now,” he adds. “That’s what you’re seeing. If a family is in trouble, doesn’t matter who you are, everybody is helping them get out of the water.”