Onto the path of recovery
Louisiana city begins picking up the pieces after Hurricane Laura battered region
SULPHUR, La. — The mayor of Sulphur couldn’t sleep. It was March, just when the novel coronavirus picked up and businesses shut down. He was home after another long day of getting reports about a crisis he couldn’t stop and couldn’t slow his brain down. His mind wandered over the months ahead as he lay in bed, and he thought: God, please don’t let there be a hurricane.
There was. And it was historic.
Hurricane Laura tore through southwestern Louisiana and parts of Southeast Texas on Aug. 27, killing at least 18 people and wrecking buildings. Most people in its path evacuated. Sulphur is a town of just under 24,000 people formally established in 1914, taking its name from sulphur mines. The mining industry was replaced by refineries; those were replaced by petrochemicals.
Mike Danahay was elected mayor in 2018 and has lived in the area his whole 62 years. During the eye of the storm, Danahay went out of the boarded-up City Hall and brought in a blue street sign that had been banging against the wall of the building. He tried to sleep on
the air mattress he’d set up in his office.
Five days after the storm, the trees and power lines had (mostly) been lifted off the roads. The mayor’s desk was covered in Post-it notes and printed permits. He juggled two cellphones and was thinking about trash. People were flooding in to look at their homes — he wishes they wouldn’t — and were finding the contents of their refrigerators turned rotten. And on top of that, there’s storm debris.
Recovery will take months. None of it will be glamorous. All of it will be expensive, with damages for Texas and Louisiana estimated at $12 billion. Most of it will be mundane. And the majority of the groups that poured in to help at the beginning will be long gone.
“That’s one of the things in these events,” Danahay said into one of his cellphones, talking to the mayor of Slidell, La. The hand that wasn’t holding the phone held his glasses in place; the temple had snapped off one side, and he couldn’t find his spares. “You usually find the initial response is great, it’s overwhelming, it’s like drinking out of a fire hose, but as you get into it, we’re still sitting without power two, three weeks out and we don’t have the resources here anymore.”
Problems pop up
In the days after the storm, the employees who evacuated trickled back into the one-story brick building and set up at what they’ve nicknamed Camp City Hall. They traded chairs for air mattresses and left extra toiletries on a folding table in the hall. One staffer has his wife and two sons in the conference room. The window of the human resources office is smashed: Only HR staffers have the key, and they were evacuated for the hurricane. The people left in City Hall needed to preserve power.
Erica Martin, the communications director, had evacuated to Longview and stayed up all night watching the storm, terrified about what she’d find. Part of her house had fallen off. Karen Herard, an IT employee, leaned against a wall and cried: She felt so guilty, eating hot food and working in generator-powered air conditioning while her husband sat at home with rheumatoid arthritis in the heat.
“Excuse me,” said Cory Murnane, the supervisor at the wastewater plant, hovering at the mayor’s door, a computer clutched in his right hand. “Sorry to interrupt. Do you have a contact for the sheriff’s department? I need to know why the road to our plant is closed. They said something about a gas leak—”
“Ha. That’s beautiful. Just beautiful.”
He made some calls. It was just a traffic issue. The phone buzzed again; Danahay gave it a look of disgust.
“It’s like you solve one problem and three more pop up, I swear,” he said, scrolling through the text. It was a parish official, asking about a dump site location that had already been decided yesterday.
He silenced the buzzing from his family group text — someone had sent a picture of his 93-year-old father, a World War II veteran who insisted on riding out the storm and was now beginning his own home repairs. The sheriff’s department called back. The issue around the wastewater plant wasn’t traffic. It was a gas leak.
Danahay had seen Hurricane Rita in 2005 and had grown up hearing tales of children ripped from their parents’ arms during 1957’s Hurricane Audrey, which killed 416 people. They’re better prepared now: The forecasts are more accurate, they had contracts in place for cleanup, there’s already a contracted firm sorting through their FEMA paperwork. His team, he said, is the best.
“I’m just spending money like a drunken sailor,” he quipped to his finance director. The small “strike team” to guide recovery costs $1 million on its own.
She shrugged. “Well, our sales tax revenues will go up.” He laughed.
A drive through town
The Sulphur mayor is largely a patient man until he gets behind the wheel, where he likes to drive in the left lane and then decide quickly on a right turn without always using his turn signal. That Tuesday, he was not happy: The Salvation Army truck backed up traffic all the way down the main city roads. He had to call the sheriff to get it moved.
He drove through the city in the hours before his afternoon meetings, swinging through a gated community that had lost its gate but been spared the worst (“I don’t know what these people do for a living but I missed the boat somewhere”) and the older part of town where more low-income families live. He paused in front of a house where a man was picking up his yard and rolled down his window. “You doin’ all right?” “Yeah, so far so good.” The home’s carport had fallen down entirely. “We gotta move some of those trees.”
“Be careful with that.”
The mayor pointed to the twisted metal. “And that.”
“The wind folded it — I gotta find a blue tarp somewhere.”
“Look, go to McMurry Park — the National Guard’s giving out tarps. You may have to stand in line for a bit, but you’ll get you a tarp.”
He drove on, slowly. Some of the homes would cost more to fix than to just demolish altogether. His own home was spared: The trees fell on his neighbor’s house.
A number called from Florida. He ignored it. How had so many people gotten his personal cell? Everyone came in wanting to help; when they didn’t know where to go, they called him. Some of the help has been invaluable: food, the local charity that’s distributing donations and letting the National Guard sleep inside. Others come in with chainsaws and no experience, hoping to help clear the streets, not ready to sit through the heat without power.
He fielded more calls, one from the public relations director of an energy firm wanting a press conference (Could they use the pavilion? Would there be enough electrical damage for a good photo opp? They could go to Lake Charles if not, but footage from there was just so one from the National Guard (Could they move the COVID-19 testing site away from the food distribution site? In retrospect, it had been a bad idea to put them together. Everyone had been good about masks up until the storm. Then it stopped being a priority).
He ticked off what he had to do next: three meetings, one in Lake Charles. He wondered how he’d make it back and forth with the traffic. Martin suggested a police escort to clear the way through the building traffic. He strode down the hallway to the kitchen — where plates of barbecue from a man in the Jefferson County Sheriff ’s Office had drawn most of the staff.
He had seven minutes to eat before he had to be back to work.
“It’s like you solve one problem and three more pop up, I swear.”
Mike Danahay, mayor of Sulphur, La.