Questions rise after Ida: Stay? Move?
Damage in La. from multiple storms has residents rethinking
DULAC, La. — Coy Verdin grew up 100 feet or so from the slow-moving waters of Bayou Grand Caillou, and a few miles north of Louisiana’s marshy coast.
His parents still live in the firmly anchored, elevated mobile home that overlooks the sprawling oaks framing their view of the bayou. The 52-year-old’s own home on Fisherman’s Lane in the Dulac community is a short drive away, a little farther from the water.
A third-generation fisherman who also coaches volleyball at Grand Caillou Middle School in Houma, Verdin speaks glowingly, almost reverently about bayou life.
But he doesn’t want to live “down the bayou” anymore.
Not after Ida severely damaged his home — less than a year after it took minor damage from Hurricane Zeta.
“I’m moving,” he said, touring the ruins of his home, days after Ida badly damaged his roof and caved in his ceiling with torrential rains. “A little bit further up.”
Whether to evacuate or stay is often a question before a hurricane hits. If it hits hard, the question then becomes whether to stay or relocate. Ida, one of the strongest storms ever to hit Louisiana, made landfall Aug. 29. That was 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina led to massive population shifts in southeast Louisiana.
The latest storm has people talking about leaving again.
And not just in Verdin’s bayou country.
The city of LaPlace is nearly 70 miles inland from Dulac and about 30 miles west of New Orleans. It’s a working-class suburb tucked between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. People cleaning up after the
second major flood there in nine years — Isaac in 2012 pushed waters from the lake into their homes — are considering moving away.
“This is our second time around, and I just don’t want to experience it anymore,” Dawn Anthony said, standing outside the house where she’s lived for 27 years as her husband, Derek, worked inside, knocking down ruined drywall with a sledgehammer.
Down Cambridge Street — which was lined, yard after yard, block after block, with headhigh piles of sodden furniture, carpeting, clothing, insulation and other debris — Michael and Shontrece Lathers watched as workers wrestled a blue tarp into place over their home.
“We didn’t need flood insurance when we bought this house,” Michael Lathers said as
he toured the soggy mess that Hurricane Ida made of the structure.
A mechanic, he’d been planning a move even before Ida hit, flooding the house for the second time since Isaac. Now, he’s expecting to sell the house at a loss. A recent highly touted groundbreaking on a flood control project that would protect his neighborhood is “10 years too late,” he said.
He won’t be leaving Louisiana, however.
He plans to move to St. Helena Parish, where he has family, about 60 miles north of LaPlace, farther from the lake and the river. Likewise, Verdin, said he didn’t plan to move far from where he grew up.
He’ll remain close to family and hopes to keep fishing.
“Environmental migrants, people who move because of repeated hazard events, typically
move very short distances so that they can preserve all of that — their employment, their cultural capital, their friendship networks,” said Elizabeth Fussell, a professor at Brown University. “They don’t want to change everything in their lives. They just want to move away from risk, and that means moving a relatively short distance.”
Katrina caused catastrophic flooding when levees failed, swamping 80% of New Orleans. The city’s population plummeted.
Even now, with a population estimated at 394,000, New Orleans has only 79% of its pre-Katrina population.
What effect Ida will have on the region, whether it drives people to other areas or prompts moves inland, remains to be seen.
And factors other than storms — housing costs, job opportunities — are often factors in population
shifts, noted Lamar Gardere, executive director of The Data Center of New Orleans.
While recently released 2020 census figures show that Louisiana’s population growth of 2.7% over 10 years lags the national rate of 7.4%, the growth has been largely in the southern part of the state, including the region around New Orleans and in suburbs near Baton Rouge.
That raises questions about whether people are leaving the state or the southern region because of storms, Gardere said via email.
“Interestingly, even among people that left New Orleans and never came back, many did eventually return to a neighboring parish, pointing more to the idea that economic issues drove relocation more than climate risk,” Gardere said.
In LaPlace, District Attorney
Bridget Dinvaut, who helped her sister empty a storm-ravaged apartment, said she understands the impulse to leave after a disaster.
“It’s overwhelming. It’s horrific. The damage is so devastating. So, the visceral response is, ‘Just let me walk away from it,’ ” Dinvaut said.
But she believes people will decide to build back, especially in light of planned flood control.
And, on Bayou Grand Caillou, Coy Verdin’s mother Kathy Verdin said she isn’t ready to give up on bayou life.
“I don’t plan on leaving,” she said, leaning on a pickup truck parked beneath her elevated — and newly tarp-covered — mobile home.
She gestured toward the water: “There’s no other place like this.”
Meanwhile, residents grappling with severe home damage and unable to shelter nearby may be eligible for a new program offering travel trailers and other temporary housing, the state announced this week.
“We’re starting to purchase the travel trailers now and move them into the state,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said.
State Rep. Tanner Magee, a Houma Republican who represents portions of heavily damaged Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, said estimates are that 10,000 homes in Terrebonne Parish were made uninhabitable by Ida.
Magee described people living in tents or vehicles, struggling to find places to take a shower or do laundry.
But he said many people don’t want to stay in hotels or lease homes elsewhere because that would send them too far away from their jobs, schools and rebuilding work.
“The closest hotel room we can find somebody right now is in Mississippi,” a two- to threehour drive from the area, Magee said. “That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever” for people trying to repair and reconstruct their houses, he said.