David J. Phillip/AP Photo
Flooding after Hurricane Laura in Cameron, Louisiana, about 30 miles south of Lake Charles, August 2020
This summer’s furies, Hurricanes Laura in August, Sally in September, and Delta in October, pummeled the same southwest corner of Louisiana. Blue tarps covered the roofs of the places Laura spared. Delta blew them off and flooded anything still standing. After the storm cleared out, area residents flocked to Twitter to complain that the country—especially the national media and FEMA—had forgotten them.
This week, many Lake Charles residents finally got the response they were looking for from the man who came down to the city after Laura. “We love the people of Lake Charles, Louisiana,” President Trump tweeted in pre-election mode. “You’ve been hit hard, and often, but your Federal Government is there to help. It will all work out, and FAST!!! @fema @USArmy.
The early days of the pandemic raised questions about FEMA’s ability to respond to hurricanes and other disasters alongside its COVID-19 demands. For Southwest Louisiana residents, those fears have been validated.
“I don’t think people realize the extent of the suffering and the damage in that town,” says Robert Mann, a Louisiana State University media and public-affairs professor. “Because of that, they are worried that they are not going to get the federal assistance that a larger city closer to suburban New Orleans or Baton Rouge would get.
“It was like a nuclear bomb went off,” he adds.
Whether FEMA will move fast enough for residents, however, is debatable. The early days of the pandemic raised questions about FEMA’s ability to respond to hurricanes and other disasters alongside its COVID-19 demands. For Southwest Louisiana residents, those fears have been validated.
Displaced people see an agency slow to furnish trailers and other temporary housing to replace their homes. FEMA is on the ground now, pulling in resources and providing financial assistance. But the agency is almost out of bandwidth with another six weeks of the hurricane season to go.
The biggest problem is the provision of temporary housing, which presents fiscal and logistical challenges. “It’s expensive,” says Brant Mitchell, director of LSU’s Stephenson Disaster Management Institute, “and takes a lot of resources to properly implement. You have to wait on the funding. In the meantime, people are without housing.”
Two wildlife reserves span the sparsely populated rural region. Lake Charles, where nearly a quarter of residents are poor, is almost evenly split between Blacks and whites. There are few hotels, and the ones in nearby Lafayette filled up quickly. In a decision reminiscent of how New Orleans suburbs kept out Black residents after Katrina, the majority-white city of Lafayette, 75 miles to Lake Charles’s east, decided not to open an emergency shelter, citing fears of “outside entities” in the wake of protests in Lafayette after the death of Trayford Pellerin, a Black man shot by police at a local gas station. So Delta evacuees were compelled to seek out hotels in New Orleans, Shreveport, Houston, and beyond—even in Mississippi and Arkansas.
Getting manufactured housing units, one type of temporary shelter that FEMA provides, to sites from the agency’s Alabama or Maryland storage facilities is a complex task. Once delivered, the units must be parked on level land, connected to sewers and utilities, have sprinklers, and be ADA-compliant. Eligible residents must adhere to rules ranging from the number and types of pets to prohibitions on cannabis. There are other limitations: FEMA can only offer temporary housing for 18 months after a disaster. Inevitably, some people fall through the cracks between the end of their FEMA-provided shelter and securing a permanent residence, which is always a major problem after disasters.
Some of the frustration with FEMA can be attributed to the public’s misplaced expectations. States and localities are the first responders, restoring electricity and water, clearing debris, and the like. Only once state and local officials exhaust their resources do they call on FEMA. John Bel Edwards, Louisiana’s Democratic governor in a fiercely Republican state, gets good bipartisan marks for his hurricane response, in contrast to his coronavirus measures that have prompted Republican state legislators to try to rein in his emergency powers to mandate mask wearing and related restrictions.
FEMA has been pulled in 50 directions by the COVID-19 response, even before it’s had to deal with the California wildfires, the Iowa derechos, and the most active hurricane season since Katrina. The Trump administration has used it as a carrot and stick, doling out “rewards” of pandemic supplies to compliant states and seizing supplies from defiant (usually blue) ones. Like many federal agencies in the age of Trump, FEMA’s leadership ranks have been decimated. The agency’s top response-and-recovery officials are acting administrators; a deputy assistant administrator for logistics management was also acting, on a detail assignment that ended on October 13.
A May GAO report found that FEMA staff deployed to disaster zones often do not possess the skills needed at a particular location, and that overwhelmed employees often refuse assignments. After working on Hurricanes Irma and Harvey About half of its employees assigned to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria declined their assignments. Today, exhausted employees move between the pandemic—and wildfires and flooding—to deal with the hurricane season in a state haunted by the specter of Katrina.
Laura, a Category 4 storm with formidable 150 mph winds and a fierce storm surge, hit Lake Charles 15 years almost to the day after Katrina devastated New Orleans. In Katrina’s wake, Louisiana officials and FEMA Administrator Michael “heck of a job” Brown bore a heaping amount of the blame for the calamities that enveloped New Orleans and its environs after dozens of levees collapsed in 2005. Many fled, but tens of thousands of residents could not or would not evacuate. Fifteen hundred people died.
FEMA has been pulled in 50 directions by the COVID-19 response, even before it’s had to deal with the California wildfires, the Iowa derechos, and the most active hurricane season since Katrina.
Since Katrina, Louisiana officials have stitched stronger hurricane preparedness into the fabric of the Gulf Coast. This year, most residents heeded evacuation orders, and mindful of the pandemic, local officials steered evacuees to hotels. Mitchell notes that the state has constructed its own shelters, rebuilt an entire radio system to maintain emergency communications, and established search and rescue teams (which did not exist in 2005). Some state agencies now do double duty, clearing debris alongside the National Guard. After Delta, FEMA helped coordinate out-of-state search and rescue teams; some FEMA staff remained in the region after Laura. More than 30 people lost their lives in the three hurricanes, some of them after the storms had cleared out.
Despite the post-Katrina improvements, the pleas from residents and local officials suggest that something is still amiss. “People accept that the climate is changing no matter what you want to ascribe it to,” says Jill Trepanier, an LSU climate scientist. “They are willing to listen to politicians and scientists about the threats to life and property, but the response to aftermath is not as robust as it should be for a perennial event.”
The critical question, however, arising out of the 2020 hurricane season is whether people in vulnerable areas should remain there or migrate. The local oil and gas industries shed workers to Texas cities like Midland after the 2014 price crash, but most people in a poor region in a poor state aren’t going anywhere, especially if they are Black, and even though they’ve been consigned to live in polluted lands near the region’s energy facilities. “The same communities that have been hit the hardest with the environment impacts of pollution have also been hit the hardest with these more intense rain bombs and hurricanes that have gotten stronger because of climate change,” says Robert Bullard, the father of the environmental-justice movement and a Texas Southern University professor of urban planning and environmental policy.
The swamplands and coastal forests of southwestern Louisiana sponge up some hurricane effects—Laura would have been much worse if the land had been filled in by homes or industry. Humans have deep attachments to their homelands. But living along coastlines being redrawn in real time by more powerful cyclones and warming and rising seas is a life-threatening proposition that even the most responsive federal agency cannot change.
