Picking up the pieces
After Laura ravaged Lake Charles, residents begin to take in the toll and get to work rebuilding their homes and lives
LAKE CHARLES, La. — By the time Jared Johnson rolled up to the apartment complex, no one had heard from the man in apartment B21 for more than 12 hours.
He navigated his truck around wood and insulation blown into the parking lot, squinting to make out building “B.” A fire alarm trilled.
He knocked on a door. No one answered.
It was the Friday after Hurricane Laura plowed through southwestern Louisiana, arriving as a Category 4 storm and claiming 14 lives. The damage — to cities, homes and livelihoods — is overwhelming. The power is still out and, in towns where downed wires line the streets, will be for weeks. As people picked through the rubble, smoke from chemical plant fires loomed over them.
The damage in dollars and numbers can’t be calculated yet. But for people who live in areas rendered unrecognizable, the toll began as soon as the storm hit. Some people rode it out, listening to 150 mph winds hurtle through. Others evacuated and wondered what they would have to come back to, if anything.
By Friday, people began to come back. They just had to see it for themselves. And get to work rebuilding.
At the apartment complex, Johnson knocked
again. A man opened the door.
“Hey, I’m looking for Edward?” he asked.
The man closed the door. When it opened, Edward — one of Johnson’s high-school football buddies — walked out. The men hugged.
“They hadn’t heard from you, man,” Johnson said. “We were worried.”
6:30 a.m., Lake Charles
A day after Laura devastated his hometown, Johnson woke up with more Facebook friend requests than he’d ever had.
He would get to them. But first, he needed coffee. He didn’t function without coffee
Johnson, 31, rode out the storm outside its main path. He had driven around taking and posting pictures Thursday, and soon messages starting coming in. Can you check my house?
Early Friday, he’d gotten a call. A man named Joe Honshul, 53 years old with Type 2 diabetes, needed help getting out. He needed food.
An hour later, Johnson pulled up in a white Dodge jeep, country music blaring.
“You mind tagging along with me?” Johnson asked. He had a full day ahead of him.
Honshul didn’t. Anything to get him out.
7:30 a.m., Holmwood
Sara Ellis was outside her family camper, hands wrapped around a mug off coffee, when she noticed the sky was getting dark. “OK, God, really?” she thought. The house was already soaked. She didn’t need any more.
Ellis and her husband, Blaine, both 39, had lived in the mossgreen house in the Holmwood neighborhood for 16 years. The trailer home they lived in as newlyweds was destroyed when Hurricane Rita roared through. They started again in the 1910s-era house she picked out herself. Her husband built every cabinet.
Laura ripped it apart, tearing off parts of the roof and the entire wall of her 15-year-old daughter Tyler’s room.
As the rain clouds gathered, Ellis went to clean out the fridge. As she pulled out the potatoes and cucumbers left behind, it started to pour.
She stopped working, and cried.
11 a.m., Lake Charles
Lake Charles is his hometown, but Johnson found himself squinting at the corners where street signs used to stand, trying to figure out where he was.
Landmarks were gone. The street signs were blown into the road or twisted around to label the wrong street. Some of the buildings he couldn’t even identify — like one mostly torn up save its street number, painted in yellow. Honshul knew it. It had been a hardware shop.
Johnson passed the destroyed remains of a green crawfish shack he and his friends used to go to after school. He pulled over by a church he used to live behind, collapsed in on itself. The church had stood through Rita, Ike and Harvey. Laura finally took it down.
“I keep passing by the same buildings,” he said. “It don’t get no easier to look at.”
He didn’t feel like he was doing much, going around and checking out homes. But he hoped it would ease people’s anxieties. At least with his photos, they’ll know what they have to come back to.
He had to leap over tree trunks and between power lines to get to a house that was blocked on all sides. He climbed around the backyard before calling his friend with an update: “Your carport’s f---ed, the car on the side is f---ed, the backyard is f---ed, but your house seems OK.”
His phone chirped. He looked down. It was someone whose house he’d looked at, but with a different query.
“I just got asked out on a date. Huh. Nice.” He laughed. “She said: ‘When this is all over, would you like to go on a date with me?’ I got a date during the hurricane, y’all. That’s a new one for me. I would like that. I would.”
1 p.m., Lake Charles
Alton Lewis’ 24 HR Tire shop had become the hottest spot in town.
The storm yanked down part of the roof overhang and tore the shop’s inside down to the wires, but Lewis was doing business (cash only) in front of the store he’s owned for eight years. He had driven in a trailer full of tires from Houston to get ready.
Johnson had trashed two of his tires driving around Thursday. He’d been using an air pump he took from a friend’s house to keep his tires functional.
By the time he pulled up, there was already a line of people who had run their cars over debris left by the storm. Marketa LaSalle was waiting with her mother, who had run over a nail after they waited out the storm. Mary Kennerson, who had lived in Lake Charles for all her 60 years, pulled up in a gray car and asked, “Are they open?” in the direction of the line. She’d rebuilt after Rita. She could do it again.
Johnson checked with Lewis. It would take too long. He’d be fine on the pump for another day or so. He punched another friend’s address into his GPS and moved on.
2 p.m., Holmwood
Blaine Ellis clambered over the sheet metal in what was once his shop, searching for nails. One of his wife’s three brothers, Nicholas Leonards, passed him a stray metal pot to fill with them.
The rain, finally, had slowed to a drizzle. They hopped in pickups and headed to Leonards’ house. The entire extended family was working on repairs.
Back at the houses, Leonards spotted a group of kids. “Y’all get over here!” he hollered.
They squatted down and — on the count of three — heaved up a tank that had been pushed on its side. The shed that surrounded it was gone.
What looked like military convoys were on the road. Electric crews were headed their way. They still had cattle to tend to. Wet clothes to sort.
But first, the roof. The family helped each other up on top of the brick home using the bucket of a tractor, and got to work hammering the tarp over the torn of shingles and holes.
Tyler had written Job 37:11-12 on
the plywood they’d used to board up the house before they left:
He loads the clouds with moisture; he scatters his lightning through them
At his direction they swirl around
Over the face of the whole earth to do whatever he commands them.
The glass of the doors behind the plywood was all Ellis really had cared about saving. They had already cracked.
3:45 p.m., Lake Charles
The German shepherd was losing too much blood.
She pressed her snout against the window, pawed at it and barked. Blood poured from a slice under her eye and a rip down her snout. It snaked down her tongue and left splotches on the window and the curtain.
Johnson had gone to his friend’s mobile home to check on Lily, the dog, and two cats. His friend told him to just pull on a window to open it and stick his head in, and give the animals some air. Instead, the glass had shattered, slicing Johnson’s forearm.
He’s not sure how it happened, but it didn’t matter. Somehow Lily got cut on one of the broken windows. He dialed his friend, Justin, a lefty bowler from his bowling league.
“Just bust the door and let her out,” Justin said. “Sh—. I don’t know what else to say, man. I don’t know what to do.”
Justin said he would call a mutual friend to come get her. Johnson kicked in the door, where a cross was tacked and someone had taped on a paper with a handwritten message: “God Bless This House.”
“Here Lily,” he cooed. “Come on, baby.”
Lily didn’t budge. Johnson backed up and tried again.
“I don’t know,” said Honshul. “There’s no way I could’ve left my animals. Not with a hurricane coming.”
Johnson pulled himself back into the truck. “I mean I hear it, but there’s some places you can’t take ’em. And it sounds harsh but it’s like, ‘It’s either me or them.’ ”
He drove his truck away, slowly, hoping that Lily would leave the house. Someone would see the blood, surely. The other friend would come get her. He looked in the mirror one more time before leaving the park. She hadn’t come.
Johnson checked one more house and set out to take Honshul to his grandmother’s house.
He’d kept up a running commentary during the day — passing a car shop with its roof resting on the cars, “Good thing they were there to keep the cement safe.” He needed the levity. But he didn’t feel much like it anymore.
8:30 p.m., Holmwood
Ellis’ sister-in-law pulled up with a delivery of items from Lafayette.
“Woo, we got some toilet paper!” one of the kids yelled, shouldering a package.
They had gathered next door to the Ellis house at another brother’s home — their recovery homebase. A generator hummed. They family had strung lights around the porch.
Ellis’ mom, Vicki Leonards, had made 30 hamburgers to feed everyone. They nestled together on living room furniture pulled outside. Leonards sat with a grandchild on either side. Her husband, Norbert, wore his cowboy hat, drinking scotch and water from a Styrofoam cup.
One of their 12 grandchildren cried, worried about another pitch-black night sleeping on the floor.
They settled on a plan: She would sleep surrounded by her family, safe together on the floor in the kitchen. They had more work to do in the morning.