This article appears in the July/August 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The aging civic center sits just beyond a string of waterfront mansions, lawns freshly mowed, and across from the bombed-out Capital One Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with dozens of wooden boards instead of windows. On a hot and sunny June morning, Jennifer Cobian, the soft-spoken assistant director of the Division of Planning and Development for the county government, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, uses a big, echoey room on the center’s ground floor to host residents of Greinwich Terrace, a low-income, primarily African American neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.
Built in the 1950s for military families near the Chennault Air Force Base, the Terrace has been hemmed in by larger housing developments, strip malls, and Interstate 210 in the decades since the base closed. As the city built up around it, the Terrace found itself at the bottom of an increasingly full bowl. Low-lying, it’s uniquely vulnerable to the city’s 62 inches of annual rainfall—nearly double the national average—as water tries and fails to snake its way around buildings and roads, no longer able to seep into bayous and fields. The Kayouche Coulee, a concrete-lined ravine abutting the neighborhood, regularly overfills in rainy weather. This came to a head this past year, as the city, which is just 15 feet above sea level and 30 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, faced four federally declared natural disasters.
Even in relatively wealthy downtown, streets fill up with water after a light rain.
During that time, Cobian was struck by the calls she was getting from some Terrace residents, who wanted to know about FEMA buyouts, available in one-off cases to homeowners with sustained and severe damage. Instead, Cobian recommended that the Terrace be considered for a new, $1.2 billion voluntary buyout program, overseen by the state-run Louisiana Watershed Initiative, with federal funds from the Community Development Block Grant Mitigation Program. The idea, Cobian says, is for residents to get payments above the average home value in the area, if they agree to start over somewhere that’s not flood-prone: out of Greinwich Terrace, maybe even out of Lake Charles. She sees the program as the better of two unsavory options: either stay and risk more flooding, or get out.
On the same day, about five miles across town, the Golden Nugget, a 22-story hotel and casino, is in full swing, with cars lining up at the valet by mid-morning. The Nugget sits on the edge of the Bayou Contraband, one of hundreds of waterways that wind through Southwest Louisiana. Across the water, plumes of smoke rise from the plants that dot Calcasieu and Cameron Parishes, major arteries of America’s petrochemical corridor and home to one of the state’s two liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals. (Louisiana exports over half of the country’s LNG.) The structurally unsound I-10 bridge, which recently served as a backdrop for President Biden’s bid for new infrastructure spending, arcs into the horizon.
The Golden Nugget, which remained standing throughout the year’s apocalyptic storms and reopened three weeks after Hurricane Laura touched down last August, was an apt location for what Mayor Nic Hunter was trying to prove. The city was hosting hundreds of housing developers, bankers, and construction executives from around the region for Lake Charles Investors’ Day.
Over pastries and coffee, Hunter, who looks like a cross between Mr. Clean and a high school baseball coach, offered a vision for the future. He told the room that while “the inherent backbone of our economy”—petrochemicals—“is very strong,” the city wants to diversify. He touted plans for Port Wonder, a $20 million complex comprising a children’s museum and nature center with an adjacent microbrewery for the adults; music festivals like “Live @ the Lakefront”; exhibitions at the historic City Hall; and the Creole Nature Trail, a winding driving tour of bayous and swamps that offers alligator lookouts and mom-and-pop spots offering boudin, a local sausage.
His message was clear, if not particularly subtle: Just like the shimmering Golden Nugget, this storm-battered city can also withstand calamity and turn it into opportunity.
Equal parts fearless leader and down-home neighbor, Hunter peppered his speech with Teddy Roosevelt quotes and leaned into his “y’alls.” But his pitch teetered toward desperation, unhinged by too many contradictions. Hunter believes the federal government should support Lake Charles because “we export more LNG through Southwest Louisiana than anywhere else in this country,” with more on the way. While he called for “a very bold and honest conversation” about climate change after a massive spring rainstorm and flood, at the Nugget he wanted to keep politics out of the room, acknowledging that even with “everything that’s happening now with the energy sector, the petrochemical and LNG terminals are gold.”
Never was it mentioned that those same plants have also contributed to making life in Lake Charles nearly unbearable. His language of rebuilding focuses on physical changes—making buildings stronger, raising them off the ground, having generators immediately available in a storm—but not about moving away from extractive industries that fuel climate change.
A few key but unspoken questions underlined both Investors’ Day and the buyout meeting, one attended mostly by white investors, the other by elderly Black residents. The region is under siege by natural forces spinning beyond human control, with Louisiana losing a football field of land every hour to water. Does it make sense to reconstruct a city that almost inevitably will face more frequent and violent weather events? Who will be able to survive the onslaught of storms, and at what cost? At what point in the cycle of renewal and devastation does anyone utter the forbidden word: enough?
ALEX BRANDON/AP PHOTO
Mayor Nic Hunter has a vision for rebuilding Lake Charles that sits uncomfortably with his support for the petrochemical industry.
FROM AN AIRPLANE, Lake Charles is a mural of blue. The dark, murky waterways flow from bayous like the Nugget’s Contraband into Prien Lake, and then down to the Gulf. With climate change fueling more frequent and ferocious storms, that water has become a weapon.
The city was decimated by category-three Hurricane Rita in 2005, and inundated with water during Harvey in 2017. Last summer, during the most severe Atlantic hurricane season on record, category-four Laura, the strongest storm to hit the state in over a century, brought 150 mph winds to the city; category-two Delta brought torrential rains shortly thereafter. Then an unusual winter deep freeze burst pipes and cut off water supplies. And on May 17, up to 21 inches of rain fell in some parts of the city within just a few hours. It was the third-wettest day in the city’s history, which includes “multiple landfalls of incredibly wet hurricanes,” according to NOAA.
All told, 98 percent of the structures in Lake Charles suffered damage in these disasters. With Southwest Louisiana expected to face “more intense downpours in shorter time periods,” according to the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program, the year felt more like a new reality than an anomaly.
Nearly a year after Laura made landfall, hundreds of bright-blue tarps still sprinkle the landscape, acting as makeshift roofs. Many of Lake Charles’s 80,000 residents left, at least for a little while, fleeing to places like Mississippi, Arkansas, New Orleans, and Houston. An estimated 5,000 people are still displaced, according to the mayor, in large part because they have no homes to go back to. Southerly reported that the city lost about 8 percent of its population last year, the largest out-migration in the country. While there’s no available analysis on the socioeconomic or racial makeup of those who left, many of the lower-income, primarily Black neighborhoods are still hollow.
When the storms hit, some of the city’s poorest residents didn’t have flood or homeowner’s insurance, or were simply unable to meet their deductible, which can reach tens of thousands of dollars. Many residents, regardless of income, have faced FEMA and insurance denials (at the airport, there’s a billboard for a lawyer who fights insurance companies that proclaims, “WHEN THEY WON’T PAY CALL MIKE!”). Rebuilding is always expensive, but even more so in a year full of sporadic supply chain interruptions from COVID. And contractors, sensing desperation, charge a premium for those who want their homes fixed fast.
With roofs ripped off and trees upside down in living rooms, the usable housing stock has significantly diminished, while demand has risen from residents seeking temporary living arrangements and outside contractors coming in to work on repairs. “Right now, housing prices are through the roof,” says Alberto Galan, assistant to the administrator at the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, responsible for overseeing the area’s recovery plan.
The day after Investors’ Day at the Nugget, in a sweaty conference room on the tenth floor of City Hall—the AC still hasn’t been fixed after the storms—Mayor Hunter explained that the city can’t “build back better” without federal dollars. Ten months in, he’s still waiting on funds from the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program (CDBG-DR), more commonly known as supplemental disaster aid. Those monies are regularly given after hurricane disasters—Katrina, Rita, Sandy, Harvey—often within a matter of weeks. The state has asked for $3 billion, much of which would go to Southwest Louisiana.
But as the anniversary of Hurricane Laura approaches, no additional funding except for the usual FEMA, Section 8, and Small Business Administration support has come through. “It is just disheartening, unconscionable, and unfathomable that we are 300-plus days post Hurricane Laura and having been through four federally declared weather disasters over the course of nine months,” says Hunter, “and we have not achieved the same support from the federal government that other communities have achieved in a mere ten days after one natural disaster.”
The mayor wants to use some of those funds for housing, incentivizing new development while also offering reimbursements and grants to help people fix up broken homes. But he’s been forced to wait along with his residents. “It just seems unfair and really crappy,” he says, “that other Americans are apparently viewed as more deserving of federal assistance in the aftermath of disasters than people here in Southwest Louisiana.”
Without help, many Lake Charles neighborhoods remain empty and ghost-like. Meadow Drive, a street in a racially mixed, middle-income neighborhood near McNeese State University, has dozens of seemingly abandoned houses. One house has nothing but a work boot and a glittering vase on the front lawn. A few host tractors and RVs, where contractors or residents, or both, live during the recovery process.
One middle-aged resident, who asked not to be identified because she didn’t want to criticize the recovery effort, says that her family had just moved back into their home before the May 17 flood. After the rooms filled with water, the dining room table, “bless its heart,” collapsed when they tried to move it. “It’s like it had just been working too hard for too long.” All of her sons’ baby books were destroyed, along with nearly all the furniture. “It was like watching everything you have, just gone overnight.” They’re still living in the nearby town of Sulphur, and hoping to move back within the next two months after an NGO, Samaritan’s Purse, helps them fix their floors.
Whenever Mayor Hunter probes for information on the holdup, “the answer that I get is a really pathetic answer. It’s just that Washington, D.C., is more dysfunctional and stagnant and polarized today than it’s been in generations.” Hunter is a Republican who recently won election in a landslide; last November, 70 percent of Calcasieu Parish went for Donald Trump. “When I talk to people about my disappointment, I cast a very wide net,” he says. “President Trump and the 116th Congress had a chance to act and now President Biden and the 117th Congress have a chance to act.”
After the May 17 flood, President Biden called Mayor Hunter, telling him that he “understood the great need.” Hunter even introduced Biden’s May infrastructure pep talk at the I-10 bridge. But when we met at the end of June, the mayor was “a little less optimistic about the substance and the productivity of that phone call” with each passing day.
DAVID J. PHILLIP/AP PHOTO
Buildings and homes damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Laura
JUST BEFORE THE STORMS, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury voted against taking down a statue of a Confederate soldier, called the South’s Defenders Memorial Monument, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. All four of the jury’s Black members voted for it to be removed; 10 out of 11 of its white members voted for it to stay. At the time, Mayor Hunter said the statue should be removed from its place in front of the city’s courthouse, but not “destroyed or erased.” Yet when Hurricane Laura later knocked the soldier clean off his base, the city and parish decided not to put it back up. (The platform still stands; white flags encircled the bottom when I visited in late June.)
While some residents say the decision to let the soldier die with the hurricane indicates a more tolerant, diverse Lake Charles, the incident demonstrates a more rueful reality: that the deep racial tensions and injustices baked into the city are at once overpowered and heightened by nature’s onslaught.
Lake Charles is nearly 50 percent Black, 50 percent white, but that doesn’t mean it’s integrated. The city’s historic preservation district is a leafy neighborhood made up of mansions, yawning porches, and manicured lawns. It is bordered by North Lake Charles, which has some of the poorest census tracts in the country, and is primarily Black. Walking from one to the other takes just a few minutes. On one side of Broad Street, a main thoroughfare, there are towering mansions; on the other, toward the highway and railway tracks, smaller, shotgun-style homes. On the north side of Louisiana Avenue, a Catholic school’s roof has been peeled back, exposing its naked gymnasium. A few blocks further north, a home’s face has been ripped off, intimately displaying the structures of daily life: built-in shelves, a spacious living room, and a desk in a small bedroom.
Mark Tizano, the city’s director of community development, observes that, in the wealthier parts of Lake Charles, “if you go down a street that’s ten blocks long, you may see 8 to 12 contractors at work. When you move into the more vulnerable locations in the city, you may go down a street that’s ten blocks long and not see one contractor … It’s just the typical situation [where] the most vulnerable populations are the ones to suffer the most.”
The city’s downtown, a mark of pride for the mayor, skirts the Charpentier Historic District and notably caters to higher-income clientele. There’s a bespoke shop that sells $130 hats and offers $70 haircuts, a juice joint selling $12 organic smoothies, a few restaurants offering a mix of Louisiana favorites—po’boys, crawfish, beignets—alongside hipper California fare like vegetarian pasta and bean burgers. It’s all Instagram-worthy, with hanging plants and minimalist design.
But there’s almost no one here to buy anything, or for that matter to work at the stores, giving the strip the uncomfortable personality of a middle schooler, all dressed up but unsure what to do. Because losing people means losing a workforce, help wanted signs hang everywhere. In the month after Hurricane Laura, the parish’s unemployment rate jumped from 8.7 to 12.7 percent, according to Daniel Groft, a lanky economist with salt-and-pepper hair who directs the H.C. Drew Center for Business and Economic Analysis at McNeese State University, which saw about 50 buildings damaged during the storms. The rate has now leveled back down to about 7.1 percent, Groft says, not necessarily because the economy is healthier, but because so many people have left.
City and parish officials say the city is at a tipping point as the one-year anniversary of Laura looms. Most insurance will only pay for temporary housing for a year—a time period that doesn’t restart with a new disaster—and much FEMA housing, for those lucky enough to get it, only lasts 18 months. “The longer and longer we wait for this disaster allocation” from the federal government, “the more and more folks are going to lose homes,” says Calcasieu Parish’s Alberto Galan. “We’re gonna lose neighborhoods, because [people] simply can’t wait anymore.”
At Investors’ Day, local officials talked through a variety of mix-and-match options, such as Section 8 vouchers being used on an individual or project level, with gaps filled by supplemental disaster aid. But without knowing if that money will come and when, everything is on pause. The city and parish don’t have a clear vision for what housing would go where, or for whom. Mayor Hunter says all options should be on the table—high-rise, mixed-income housing in the already-developed core, suburban single-family homes in more elevated areas, all smart development, guided by updated, storm-ready codes.
Not everyone was convinced. At the end of a session on long-term rebuilding, one developer leaned over to me to say that even with federal incentives, houses were likely just to be too expensive to build here, given the need for strong roofs and raised foundations. At lunch—tender chicken breast followed by a strawberry-topped cheesecake—another attendee questioned whether investing in Lake Charles housing really made sense, since returns take 15 to 20 years but most stock would be used by workers in short-term petrochemical jobs.
DAVID J. PHILLIP/AP PHOTO
The Capital One Tower, one of Lake Charles’s tallest buildings, remains significantly damaged from the spate of storms in 2020.
After a year of anguish, even those who can afford to stay are wondering whether that’s wise. “I think everyone in this town has thought about moving, honestly,” says Jennifer Cobian, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury staff member responsible for the Greinwich Terrace buyout. She understood the magnitude of what she was dealing with after Laura, when she found a 100-pound terracotta planter she’d left on her porch in her neighbor’s yard. Her patio, ripped off the front of her house, has never been seen again. “I mean, it was huge, like 30 feet by 15 feet. And we have no idea where that patio is.”
She offered an exasperated chuckle as she reflected on the damage. “Me and my husband have had the conversation, like, what are we doing? It’s starting to not make a lot of sense. And we already compete to keep people here. You know, we have Houston two hours away. You see the writing on the wall.”
WHILE THE MAYOR is busy advocating for relief aid and courting developers, city staff are contacting the owners of vacant properties, telling them to either fix their home, or “we’re gonna come in here and condemn it and tear it down,” says city administrator John Cardone. “It’s been almost a year and it’s time to get those areas cleaned up.” Residents locked in insurance battles can ask for more time, but ultimately, Cardone says, the properties pose a public-health and safety threat and make the city, in the midst of its rebirth, unattractive.
In poorer neighborhoods like North Lake Charles, people are being offered “pennies for their property” by private developers, according to Roishetta Ozane, a local community activist. (Across the city, “we buy houses cheap” signs are common.) She and Dominique Darbonne co-run the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a multiracial mutual aid organization formed during February’s freak winter storm. They helped unhoused and underhoused residents who had been turned away by the city and other organizations find hotel rooms for the night.
Two days after the Golden Nugget event, Ozane and Darbonne chop cabbage, onions, and sausage to the smell of freshly baking cornbread in the kitchen of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church. Ozane is tall, broad, with a warm, calm energy and a clean, efficient ponytail. Darbonne is short, muscular, and wiry, her long curly hair pulled back into a baseball cap. Together with a few volunteers, they make 150 hot meals for low-income residents on the weekends, since other meal programs only run Monday to Friday. Gap-filling is at the heart of what they do.
During the winter freeze, Ozane realized that people had “so many more needs that were not being met by the larger organizations because of bureaucracy and red tape.” The team recently paid for a baby’s funeral when the mother, homeless after the storms, couldn’t make the bill. They helped to get Felicia Collins, a volunteer with the Vessel Project, into a FEMA mobile home, after she paid $5,000 out of pocket to stay in a hotel after her insurance denied her claims. Darbonne says that a FEMA staff member praised them for helping Collins navigate the process. “And I was like, that’s fine, but isn’t that your job?” She says the Vessel Project “deals with the aftermath of what happens in the rooms” of politicians and policymakers.
With roofs ripped off and trees upside down in living rooms, the usable housing stock in Lake Charles has significantly diminished.
Both Ozane and Darbonne have their own housing struggles. After nearly a year living in a damaged house with her five kids, Ozane recently received temporary FEMA housing. With her husband and two kids, Darbonne bounces between her parents and her brother’s homes as her own house is fixed.
Over a pile of vegetables, Darbonne expresses incredulity at events like Investors’ Day. “So, were there just a lot of slumlords there?” she asks, eyebrows raised. The two activists are particularly skeptical of the $1.2 billion Greinwich Terrace buyout. They don’t think the money, even if it is above market rate, will really help residents start over, with housing prices rising in Lake Charles and even higher across the country.
The history and legacy of an African American community is at stake. Ozane looks to nearby Mossville as a warning. The community, just a few miles down the road, was bought out by Sasol, a petrochemical company, nearly a decade ago. A few people have remained, but for the most part, “there’s nothing there,” she says. “People have forgotten about that community.”
Debra Ramirez is a former Mossville resident who now lives in Lake Charles. She also sees the Greinwich Terrace buyout as part of an effort to move poor people of color out of the way when they become inconvenient. She and her friends Paul Geary and Lois Booker Malvo, a triad of older residents who meet regularly to discuss race, public services, politics, and environmental contamination, say they’ve seen this pattern before. Lois grew up in the Fisherville neighborhood of North Lake Charles. She remembers chemicals spilling from the cars passing on the nearby train tracks, degrading the value of the 80-acre farm her grandfather had acquired after the Emancipation Proclamation. She’s worried that eventually, industry, which for decades has been encroaching on neighborhoods like Fisherville, will completely take over.
Darbonne wants the language of “build back better” to extend to Greinwich Terrace. She asks why the city and parish don’t take the $30 million slotted for the neighborhood to replace the current pump stations and “fix the problem.” Ozane shares the skepticism of many of the Terrace’s residents about the city’s claims. “When those people moved into those homes 30, 40 years ago, they moved in there on a promise that it would never flood,” she says. “So why is it now that it’s flooding at every drop of rain? Something happened.”
GREINWICH TERRACE resident Anita La-Fleur, 64, grew up with most of her neighbors, who are older and low-income like her. She works three jobs to pay off her mortgage and car payments: manning a gift shop in the Golden Nugget, cleaning a local doctor’s office, and doing hair in a salon tucked into the back of her home.
When I tell her that I’m checking in with residents to see how Lake Charles is doing, she waves around her gutted house and replies, “Terrible.”
MARA KARDAS-NELSON
Anita LaFleur of Greinwich Terrace has seen her house flood multiple times, but still doesn’t want to leave her home.
Yet the thought of leaving is more abhorrent. “I put 12 years into this home,” LaFleur says, and she likes the quiet, friendly neighborhood. Her two sisters live down the road, one in the house that LaFleur grew up in. Even if she got the maximum buyout—$250,000, which the parish’s Alberto Galan calls “generous,” equal to the average price of a new home in Lake Charles as of 2019—she would consider the offer unworkable.
“I have a mortgage, so the broker would have to be paid off,” she explains. “So, after the fees and paying him what’s going to be for me?” Besides, she doesn’t know where she’d move. “Do you all have an area where we can move or subdivision for all of us who are bought out? Y’all don’t have anything, no answers for us, but y’all want us to buy out?”
It’s not that LaFleur wants to deal with more flooding. After fighting with her insurance company and receiving some money from FEMA, she started paying out of pocket to get her house fixed up after the hurricanes. By the spring, the cabinets were back in, the mold removed. Then the May 17 flood hit, and water spilled over the sides of the Kayouche Coulee and into her backyard. By the time she left the house, water was up to her ankles. It ruined the mattresses, ruined the couches, ruined the AC, ruined storage bags, everything that was waiting to be unpacked.
Luckily, she had bought flood insurance in January, making her an exception in the neighborhood, since FEMA considers the area “low-risk” for flooding. Still, LaFleur is shell-shocked. Her few remaining possessions are piled in her living room, accompanied by some clothes in the closets and a few family photos framed on the wall. “Every time it rains hard, like yesterday, I’m like, oh gosh, I’m starting to pick stuff up.”
Like Darbonne, LaFleur doesn’t understand why the city and parish don’t just fix the flooding problem—build walls, put in a pump, find a way to divert the water. After Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, the parish promised residents they’d look into another pump, but nothing happened. LaFleur heard rumors that the city didn’t turn on the pumps fast enough during this year’s storms. She thinks “they didn’t want it to flow into other areas of the town, to the bigger houses.”
Complaints about flooding cut across racial and class lines in Lake Charles, whose drainage system dates back decades. Even in relatively wealthy downtown, streets fill up with water after a light rain. Part of the problem stems from a political and environmental collision. From above, Southwest Louisiana resembles a marbled countertop, one streak of water running into the other. But administratively, the landscape is cut into sharply defined jurisdictions that don’t take into account an interdependent ecosystem.
Which leads to finger-pointing. While the city is responsible for maintaining open ditches and making sure culverts and gutter lines are clean, the lakes and bayous that the water flows to are overseen by the parish and the drainage district, not to mention the water beneath roadways, which is the responsibility of the state. Even if the city cleans everything constantly, “if our water can’t get into the laterals (culverts) and the laterals can’t get into the bayous and the lake, you’re going to have backage. It’s just the way it works,” says John Cardone, the city administrator.
Because losing people means losing a workforce, help wanted signs hang everywhere.
Jennifer Cobian understands residents’ concerns, but says that to save any parts of the Terrace, the oldest, lowest houses abutting Kayouche Coulee probably have to go, relinquishing the land to green space to absorb the extra rain. To protect future development, a new drainage ordinance requires larger subdivisions to have “zero runoff,” which limits how much new water can be pumped into local waterways. The city council also recently approved borrowing $20 million just for drainage projects. By matching that with state and federal funding, Lake Charles hopes to spend $100 million on drainage in the coming years.
But Alberto Galan says that won’t protect the Terrace. “We’re seeing record-level rainfalls that we’ve never seen before,” he says. “We need to not see that as an isolated event, but expect that it may continue. The drainage system is not designed to withstand that.” Raising homes is an option, but it’s not seen as financially feasible. “There is not enough drainage that our entire budget could cover what would be needed to keep them from flooding,” says Galan.
Local officials say they’re willing to negotiate with homeowners, and stress that the buyout is voluntary. LaFleur takes issue with that word. “I mean, if they’re not going to fix the drainage, it’s almost like they’re forcing you out,” she says. For now, she’s discussing with her sisters what to do. Even if she were to go forward with the buyout, it would take at least a year, and while she’s deciding, she’s not sure if she should fix the house because it could be flooded again anytime. “Either way you go,” she says, “you’re not winning.”
In between delivering meals and helping with housing, Roishetta Ozane, the community activist, reminds people that petrochemicals are as great a threat to the people of Lake Charles as the hurricanes. Some of her family members work at local plants, so she’s sensitive to concerns about jobs. Still, she peppers people with questions. “Do you know what fracking is? Do you like to fish? Do you like to crab? Do you understand how important our wetlands are? Do you know that if these facilities continue to come you won’t be able to do that?”
Joe Biden’s focus on a just transition away from fossil fuels gives Ozane some hope. “The conversations need to happen now when you have a president who has promised to exchange those jobs with environmentally safe jobs,” she says. “We don’t want these natural disasters to get bigger and bigger with climate change and wipe us out.”
Ozane is determined to stay in Lake Charles, despite the hurricanes and the floods, the blue roofs and the empty downtown. “I live here, my children are here, my children will grow up here and I don’t want my grandchildren not being able to live in the same community that their parents lived in,” she says.
But Paul Geary, one of the triad of elders who talk politics and environmentalism every week, has been in the city too long to be that optimistic. Over the decades, he’s seen chemical plants and highways encroach, his friends and family affected by respiratory illness and cancer. For him, the future is clear. One day, in the not-too-distant future, the water will take over, and Lake Charles will be left to the alligators and the herons and irises and the few people who can make it there.
ON MY LAST DAY in Lake Charles, I drove over the I-10 bridge from Lake Charles to neighboring Westlake, past the huge ConocoPhillips sign that welcomes visitors, past po’boy shops and BBQ trucks and drive-throughs selling daiquiris, with music from nearby Lafayette playing on the radio. I decided to kayak through the bayous, paddling past huge, orchid-like white flowers with their heads dipping down, turtles sunning themselves on spindly logs, finding shade under moss that nearly kissed the water. It felt timeless, unbending.
Louisiana is beloved for so many human things—zydeco, deep-fried alligator, syrupy cocktails, unmatched flair—that it’s easy to forget that the state is what it is because of the water. The bayous underpin the license plate slogan “Sportsman’s Paradise,” while also acting as floating highways on which chemicals and plastic, oil and gas, are shipped across the state and to the world. For decades, Southwest Louisiana has been turned into one of America’s chief sacrifice zones, to the detriment of everything that lives there. As a country, we’ve decided that this is acceptable, on top of and compounding a longer history of sacrificing some bodies for the benefit of others.
Maybe Paul is right. Maybe now we’re at a strange sort of tipping point, where that sacrifice will no longer be possible because we won’t have the land on which to make our plastics and ship our natural gas. But that’s a different sort of sacrifice, one that’s not so far from the argument being made about Greinwich Terrace: We screwed up, but we’ve got to find a place to put that rising water so that the rest of us can stay afloat. But across the city, when I asked what made Lake Charles tick, I got the same answer: the people, with their unbending kindness and fortitude, the embedded resilience birthed from the formerly enslaved people who found in Lake Charles a place to elude their captors and from the Cajuns who fled Canada to make Southwest Louisiana home. If the water comes, we risk losing that history, as Mossville was lost, as people fear Greinwich Terrace will be. The water will persist, but at what a huge, immeasurable cost.
