Southwest Louisiana still picking up the pieces after the back-to-back hurricanes Laura and Delta dealt a double blow to Louisiana just six weeks apart
The following written content from Daniella Silva NBC
Clair Hebert Marceaux, her husband and their dog, Sugar, drove up a water-filled road in the days after powerful Category 4 Hurricane Laura pummeled southwestern Louisiana to their home of nine years.
Sugar, a Labrador retriever and boxer mix, was making a singing sound after finally coming home to Cameron Parish following a mandatory evacuation because of the life-threatening storm, but when they pulled up, she suddenly stopped and no longer wanted to get out of the car. Hebert Marceaux screamed and cried.
Her 1,800-square-foot house, once the color of sandstone with brick-red shutters, was gone except for a slab. Not even the frame remained. Three alligators swam in the water that completely filled her yard.
“I was sad and I was heartbroken and angry that so many people are in the same circumstance and I can’t do anything to help them,” Hebert Marceaux, 43, the port director of Cameron Parish, said from atop the slab of her home in late October, where storm surge water behind the property could still be seen, two months after the hurricane leveled her home.
“I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me, but it’s really rough being on your hands and knees in boots trying to find something that looks like your life,” she said.
Scattered around the road are pieces of the life Hebert Marceaux once had: a washer and a dryer, a red sweatshirt belonging to her son, a refrigerator door.
“I mean that’s my Crock-Pot right there, that’s so messed up,” she said, her voice breaking as she gestured around the debris surrounding the remains of her home. “A lot of people don’t know what to do next. I just want to come home.”
The deadly and destructive hurricanes Laura and Delta dealt a double blow to Louisiana just six weeks apart, both making landfall in coastal Cameron Parish near the Texas border. Laura made landfall in late August, leaving a path of destruction along its route from the coast to Lake Charles, a working-class city in Calcasieu Parish of around 80,000 people. Delta followed in October, striking just 15 miles from where Laura first hit.
Laura, which struck land as a colossal Category 4 storm, is now the most powerful storm on record to make landfall in Louisiana.
Parts of southwestern Louisiana, devastated by the two hurricanes could take a year or much longer to return to normal in the face of a critical housing shortage, economic crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, local officials and community advocates said.
People are struggling to find contractors because of the massive extent of the need and the damage on top of what had already been a slowdown in economic activity because of the pandemic. Meanwhile, insurance checks have been slow to materialize and thousands of houses and apartment units have been taken off the market.
“Almost every dwelling, every business, every building has some damage, either moderate to severe,” Dick Gremillion, the director of nearby Calcasieu Parish’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said. “In some cases complete structural failure.”
The storms have left thousands displaced, businesses shuttered and a community traumatized.
“The destruction is so utterly complete”
Gremillion said most apartment complexes in the parish have canceled leases to get the residents out, so repairs can be done.
“We literally have probably a couple of thousand people who were living in apartments that no longer have a place to live,” he said.
“If you were to fly over the parish right now, you’d see probably 80 percent of private homes have blue roofs on them,” he added. Read more from NBC
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