Louisiana high schools meet mighty opponent: Climate change
Repeated hurricanes have devastated the state’s schools, teams and athletic fields
GRAND ISLE, La. — Ida was not yet a hurricane when high school coaches across southern Louisiana began preparing for what had become all too familiar, even inevitable.
Coach Denny Wright of tiny Grand Isle School texted his cross-country runners and basketball players about the mandatory evacuation on Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island: “No school. No practice. I’ll let you know when.”
Lyle Fitte, the football coach at South Plaquemines High School in Buras, La., evacuated on what became an eight-hour trip to Houston. Buras is 50 miles southeast of New Orleans on a thin, vulnerable peninsula where the Mississippi runs to the Gulf. Fitte’s high school coach rode out Hurricane Katrina in a gym in 2005 when the storm poured 20 feet of water into lower Plaquemines Parish. Fitte, 30, would not make the same reckless decision.
“I’ve got kids,” he said. Along the Texas border in Cameron Parish, which was devastated last year by the onetwo punch of hurricanes Laura and Delta, coach Travis Merritt moved batting cages and football tackling dummies into elevated storage at South Cameron High School. He knew better than to wait.
Laura’s 150 mph wind and 17-foot storm surge gutted the school’s two gyms, which were built at ground level. The storm pushed a rack loaded with 400 pounds of weight 60 yards onto the football field. The basketball scorer’s table was found 10 miles away. The players practiced all
of last season in the school cafeteria, using goals usually used in driveways, and is likely to do the same this season.
And then, last weekend, came the thrashing of Ida. It became the second hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph to pummel Louisiana’s coastal region in a span of 12 months. A flyover of Grand Isle showed that almost every structure seemed to sustain damage. Utility poles listed, as if inebriated. Some homes revealed their insides like dollhouses. A 13-foot levee, topped recently with $500,000 worth of sand, succumbed to the storm’s surge and washed onto state Highway 1, the only road in and out of town.
Jefferson Parish officials called the island uninhabitable at the moment. The school principal said predictions were that it might take two months to restore power.
From cities like Lake Charles along Interstate 10 and southward into the bayous and marshes and onto a barrier island below New Orleans, high schools and their sports teams provide a stark glimpse of the state’s challenges in dealing with issues that scientists have linked to climate change: more muscular hurricanes, rapid intensification, heavier rainfall and rising sea levels contributing to higher storm surges.
The resilient girls’ basketball team at St. Louis Catholic High School in Lake Charles won a state championship in March with a 30-1 record, despite playing every game on the road after the sides of its gym were peeled like fruit by Hurricane Laura. The Saints will make another epic road trip this season. The school’s main court remains buckled and gouged. Strips of wood from the warped and unusable practice court were fashioned into religious crosses and sold for $50 each as a fundraiser, coach Tony Johnson said.
At Washington-Marion Magnet High School in Lake Charles, football was canceled last season after Laura’s battering. A new season is beginning, but one of the stadium goal posts is still missing its left upright. The frame is all that remains of the scoreboard, and the press box was condemned after being struck by a falling light pole during the storm. Yellow caution tape marks sections where seating is considered unsafe for spectators.
Some preseason practices at Washington-Marion were moved indoors when the heat index rose to 104 degrees or higher. And many players are still living in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or have familiar blue tarps covering the roofs of their homes.
“We are trying to put our program back together, but we’re also still trying to put our lives back together,” said Ronnie Harvey Jr., the principal at Washington-Marion.
At Grand Isle School, South Plaquemines High School and Phoenix High School in southeast Louisiana, basketball is played in gyms built 12-20 feet off the ground after Katrina. The elevated gym in Grand Isle is made of 8-inch precast concrete walls meant to withstand winds of 150 mph. Still, it sustained roof damage during Ida.
More of the same is surely coming. A United Nations climate report issued in August painted what the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate called a “grim picture for south Louisiana,” predicting that the Gulf of Mexico could rise by more than 1½ feet by midcentury.
Already, sinking land and coastal erosion cost Louisiana an average of a football field’s worth of wetlands every 100 minutes, scientists say. Since 1932, the rough equivalent of Delaware has washed away, which, among other things, has depleted the buffer against hurricane storm surges.
Scientists have been persistently urging people to consider moving inland from the fragile coast.
“A big issue is when do you accept defeat” and not rebuild and let the water have its way? said Jill C. Trepanier, a hurricane climatologist at Louisiana State University. “That is very difficult for humans to do.”
She said she visited Grand Isle recently and thought, “I don’t understand how people live here.”
The narrow barrier island, 7 miles long, serves a vital purpose, blocking storm surges and helping keep New Orleans, 50 miles to the north, from becoming beachfront property. Grand Isle is a renowned birding habitat; a popular getaway for fishing, crabbing and shrimping; and a respite from a faster paced life for its 1,400 permanent residents, who live in homes and camps, some of them opulent, built high on pilings.
“It’s like growing up and still living with your family without living in the same house as your family,” said Frazia Terrebonne, 57, the secretary at Grand Isle School, who has lived on the island most of her life.
But Grand Isle is also an isolated and exposed place. A 30-mile drive through marshland is required to reach it. The lone road in, Highway 1, routinely floods during storms. Government officials said Ida swamped the road beneath 6 feet of water as it lashed the coast.
It can be challenging to recruit teachers for the 120 or so students in pre-K through 12th grade. Over the summer, Principal Christine Templet said, a prospective elementary schoolteacher from suburban New Orleans called to cancel her interview while driving to Grand Isle, saying: “There’s too much water around me. I have to turn around.”
Last school year, Grand Isle was evacuated seven times because of storms, Templet said. Hurricane Zeta knocked out power on the island for two weeks. Cross-country meets had to be rearranged or canceled. Between the storms and the coronavirus pandemic, a portion of the basketball season was lost.
“It was mentally, emotionally, a wreck,” said Wright, 70, the coach.
He coached Grand Isle School to a state cross-country title in 2016 and says his passion for basketball is sustained by the dedication of his players. But a new school year is already facing calamitous disruption. Ida damaged the roof of Wright’s home. And it is impossible to know how many students will return when school reopens. Even before Ida, there were too few girls to field a varsity basketball team. The girls’ middle school team needs a coach. And peak hurricane season will run through October.
“It takes the wind out of you, it really does,” Wright said from Alabama, where he evacuated with his wife.