Kathryn Morgan, 18, stood on the shore of the neighborhood, waiting for a boat and taking stock.
Home, truck, school, workplace, her friends’ homes: all gone, flooded out. There was less certainty about the fate of her dog, left days ago with some food in a portable kennel; or the bassinet and piles of baby clothes left behind when she and her five-week-old daughter, Charlie, were picked up in a boat and taken to the safe and dry second story of her godmother’s home.
“It’s Louisiana; we always expect the ditches to fill when it rains,” said Morgan, who was returning from the first supply run in three days.
Photo: AFP
This was not just the ditches.
“It’s like a hurricane, but without any warning,” she said.
As receding floodwaters continued to expose the magnitude of the disaster the state has been enduring, Louisiana officials on Tuesday said that at least 11 people had died, and that about 30,000 people had been rescued.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards acknowledged that the state did not know how many people were missing, but said that nearly 8,100 people had on Monday night slept in shelters and that about 40,000 homes had been “impacted to varying degrees.”
“We are still very much in an emergency, search-and-rescue response mode for much of the Florida parishes,” Edwards said, referring to an eight-parish area east of the Mississippi River. “Saving life is the most important priority that we have. We’re going to dedicate every available response to that effort until it’s no longer required.”
In Louisiana, severe weather can often seem a trauma visited and revisited. However, the disaster unfolding this week fits into a recent and staggering pattern in more than half a dozen states, where floods have rolled out at such a scale that scientists say they might be a once every 500 or 1,000-year occurrence.
The cumulative, increasingly grim toll, from Maryland to South Carolina to Louisiana to Texas, includes scores of lives and billions of US dollars in economic losses.
Everywhere the same refrain — that it has never happened like this — has given rise to the same question: How should communities and families plan for deluges that are theoretically uncommon, but now seem to play out with appalling regularity?
“We’ve clearly had a rash of these things in the last year; in the last 12 months; it’s just been incredible,” Louisiana state climatologist Barry Keim said. “We’re learning a lot, but, unfortunately, it’s flooding a lot of people and causing a lot of problems.”
In Livingston Parish, which recorded more than 63cm of rain in three days, unearthed coffins floated down main streets and elementary schools became islands of shelter.
The house of parish president Layton Ricks was flooded out, even though the house was not located in a federally designated flood zone when he moved into it — two weeks ago.
“Grab what you can and get out,” is what Ricks recalled a man telling him, as he stood in the deepening lake of his driveway on Friday night last week. “This is going under.”
In an interview at the parish government building, Ricks played down his troubles, talking instead, between catches in his voice, of the staggering challenges faced by the poor and newly homeless of his parish.
“What do they do?” he said, asking for them as much as for himself as the parish’s chief executive. “It’s ungodly what happened.”
After the interview, Ricks walked down the hallway to a small gathering of senior state and parish law enforcement officials. They hugged, and some wept.
Just to the west in Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital, federal and state officials also grappled with how to manage the fallout from the unnamed storm system that experts said carried enough precipitation to rival a hurricane.
US Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate described the situation in Louisiana as “a very large disaster,” while East Baton Rouge Parish authorities imposed a curfew from 10pm to 6am. Residents of 20 parishes are already eligible for federal disaster assistance.
As Louisiana on Tuesday faced its second catastrophic flood in about five months, climate scientists elsewhere cautioned that the state was unlikely to be the last to confront a disaster like this one.
“There’s definitely an increase in heavy rainfall due to climate change,” Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said. “The actual increase from place to place is going to be variable because of the randomness of the weather. Some places will see a dramatic change.”
In Louisiana, the miseries varied by geography. In Ascension Parish, officials were still handing out sandbags and urging evacuations.
In Baton Rouge, the chore for emergency workers was going door to door to find the unreported missing, injured or dead.
In Livingston Parish, the task had changed from a frantic flight to safety to attempts at return that were expected to end in heartbreak.
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