Laura tests resilience in battered southwest Louisiana
HACKBERRY, La. – As Judy Atwell approached the flattened remnants of her double wide mobile home in rural Cameron Parish on the southwest Louisiana coast, the surge of dread hit fast. It happened. Again.
Mangled strips of the trailer walls were wrapped around trees. She sifted through the debris Wednesday, picking out Easter baskets and a glimmering gold sailboat figurine.
Two roads over, in the same sparsely populated parish, her mother’s trailer was in similar shape. Broken pieces of the matriarch’s home slid into the road when Hurricane Laura’s winds blew life apart on Aug. 27. Family members picked a Dallas Cowboys mug out of the debris, but not much else.
Atwell, her family and many others in southwest Louisiana have become familiar with the grim cycle of wreckage and renewal. Storms have become a way of life in the area, which revolves around commercial fishing along the Gulf Coast and oil and gas, with a robust array of industrial plants further inland toward Lake Charles.
Three major hurricanes have battered the region in the past 15 years: Rita in 2005, Ike in 2008 and now Laura. Each wave tested residents’ weary resilience, sending some of them further inland.
Rita made landfall in 2005 around the same spot as Laura, bringing a 17.8 foot storm surge that swept away much of Cameron Parish and devastated the region, leaving marooned boats miles inland as markers of the water’s power.
While Laura’s storm surge fell short of some forecasts, residents, experts and officials said this hurricane’s especially vicious winds brought a bigger wave of destruction in some parts of Cameron and Calcasieu parishes, including Louisiana’s fifth biggest city Lake Charles.
“It is catastrophic. We have tens of thousands of our fellow Louisianans whose homes and or businesses have been damaged or destroyed,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said of the latest storm’s impact. “It’s every bit as bad, and probably worse, than Hurricane Rita in the area that was struck.”
This time, Atwell said, she had seen enough.
“When you come back to devastation like this, it hurts your heart too much. I can’t take no more,” said Atwell, 54. “I just don’t think I can come back. The storms are getting harder.”
Her husband Mark Atwell, a fisherman, disagreed.
“He says, ‘I gotta stay where my living is.’ We’ve been fighting about it,” Atwell said. “We’re all on each other’s nerves.”
Laura brought ‘a hurricane-sized tornado’ to southwest Louisiana
That push and pull were on vivid display in the early days of recovery. Residents radiated pride in their tight-knit communities, but bone-deep exhaustion poked through as they went about the early phases of a familiar rebuilding process.
And, as Rita showed, the repairs could take years to complete.
Houses were torn apart, shredded so completely that the only thing recognizable at one Cameron Parish home was a white bathroom sink wedged between broken beams.
Family businesses, many of them already struggling to stay afloat during a global pandemic, were ripped into bits of brick and siding.
Schools preparing to open their doors for their first classes in the COVID-19 era were walloped, losing roofs, water and electricity. Teaching classes online won’t be an option until infrastructure is repaired and electricity is restored.
“All of southwest Louisiana got hit by a hurricane-sized tornado,” said Jessica Minton, 35.
Hurricane Laura’s devastation means ‘Lake Charles won’t be the same’
Minton and her family had been building a new home in Lake Charles that was months away from completion. Laura pushed that timeline back, shattering windows and ripping a wall away from the new construction, ruining the furniture inside.
Lake Charles, a city of 78,000 people, is known for its ebullient celebrations including the Louisiana Pirate Festival, which draws hundreds of thousands each year for a boat parade and live music. As the city lurched into its recovery mode, residents mopped sweat from their brows and tears from their eyes as they ripped out carpets and lugged tree limbs out of front yards.
“We’re in trouble here,” Minton said. “I think Louisiana just needs a hug.”
Minton and her family spent the week cleaning up their property and helping neighbors tarp their roofs. While they are grateful they made it out of the storm, they have tough decisions ahead.
Without electricity or internet, they don’t know how long they can work or teach their kids.
“So many people won’t be able to come back,” Minton said. “Lake Charles won’t look the same, because our trees and nature and so much is gone. But Lake Charles won’t be the same because some businesses won’t reopen.”
As Katrina transformed New Orleans, Laura will transform Lake Charles
Nineteen people were killed across Louisiana as Laura battered the Texas and Louisiana coasts and crawled north. Significant damage was reported in at least 16 parishes, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By Wednesday, 80,541 people had already registered for federal aid, FEMA said. More than $8 million had been set aside for temporary housing, home repairs and other costs for individuals and businesses. More registrations and allocations are expected as recovery efforts continue.
FEMA registered a total of 317,332 victims of Hurricane Rita in 2005. Climatologist Barry Keim at Louisiana State University predicted Laura’s impact would “rank right in there with the worst.”
Keim surveyed the damage in Lake Charles last weekend. What he saw left him reeling. The fast-moving storm gained windspeed as it moved inland, leaving an uncharacteristic path of destruction in its wake after making landfall near Cameron at 150 mph.
“I haven’t seen wind damage at this scale from a hurricane before,” Keim said. “The city of Lake Charles was annihilated,” he added. “This is going to be a transformational event for Lake Charles much like Katrina was a transformational event for New Orleans.”
For Cameron Parish, recovery will be daunting for those who decide to stay
The dominant question now, experts said, is how many people will leave as the grueling recovery stretches on. The wait for electricity and other reliable utilities could take months.
“The longer it runs, the more inclination there is for people to not return,” said Craig Colten, an LSU professor who studies environmental trends in coastal Louisiana and water hazards across the South.
Colten said the region’s embrace of the oil and gas industry, with the openings of new industrial plants, could be the economic nucleus that holds the community together.
Liz Skilton, a history professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, researches the effect of natural disasters in Louisiana. She said residents in the southwest part of the state in particular had emotional ties to their homes despite the recurring threat of disaster.
“Those traumas continue to haunt those communities, but along with that there is … an understanding that this is part of life,” Skilton said. “Yes, they will recover. Will it look the same? No. Will it be the same? No.”
In between recovery tasks, Cameron Parish Sheriff Ron Johnson said his community had already withered under the strain of the storms.
Now, after Laura, the parish, which has dropped to a population of about 7,000, was wiped out again. Johnson said his house was destroyed.
He’s confident some in the community will battle back, like they did after Rita washed so much away. Experience tells him it will be a daunting task.
“We keep thinking, ‘Hey, we got our share maybe it’ll stop,’” Johnson said. “I can’t blame anybody if they go. I can’t blame anybody if they stay.”
It’s not an easy decision to leave. Even those who lost nearly everything they had described the gravitational pull of generations of family and friends who built their lives by the water.
‘I had enough”: After two decades, Laura takes toll on Hackberry fire chief
But there’s no doubt the cumulative effect of Rita, Ike and Laura — with their alternating punches of water and wind — had tested the community’s resolve.
Tammy Welch and her husband Mike, the chief of the Hackberry Fire Department for nearly two decades, said Laura’s impact seemed to be more widespread than Rita or any of the others in recent memory.
“Rita was bad,” Tammy Welch said, recalling the horrible smell of the stagnant flood waters. “But I think this was worse. I think more houses are damaged. This storm really got everyone.”
After Rita, Mike Welch said, his family took precautions to guard against the effects of high waters. They built their house — which they bought after Rita destroyed their old one — on piers that were more than 9 feet tall.
Laura’s winds sent their home crashing to the ground.
Mike Welch isn’t sure he has it in him to rebuild again.
“I had enough,” the fire chief said. “Ain’t happening.”
Reach Adam Tamburin at 615-7265986 and atamburin@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter @tamburintweets.