The story of the Louisiana Flood of 2016 isn’t so much about rising waters as it about the people of Baton Rouge, Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball writes in his latest column.
“It’s been 12 months since a once-in-a-millennium storm delivered a sucker punch to the gut of the Capital Region, resulting in a standing eight count for a city still reeling from the deadly police shooting of Alton Sterling and a gunman’s subsequent killing of three law enforcement officers,” Ball says.
The Louisiana Flood of 2016 killed 13 people, displaced tens of thousands of others, destroyed some 60,000 houses and caused an estimated $8.7 billion in damages across 20 parishes.
“We still gasp at the images of homes and businesses in cities like Central and Denham Springs being underwater.” Ball writes. “The stench of waterlogged drywall and insulation—and the rotting remains of spoiled food in refrigerator caskets—still lingers in our nostrils. The site of street after street after street clogged by mountains of discarded, flood-ruined possessions remains vivid in our mind’s eye.”
This story, however, like all stories, is about people—people like Kyle Page, who hopped into his truck to check on family and joined the Cajun Navy after water closed in out his Livingston Parish home. It’s about people like Justin Untereiner, a young man sweating in the heat while removing drywall and hauling waterlogged mattresses to the street corner to pay it forward after so many helped his family when storm waters from Katrina surged through his Kenner neighborhood, flooding his home.
It’s about Caleb Barber, Holden Farmer and Colin Jolivette, students at Catholic High School, feeling guilty that their homes were spared while hauling saturated furniture from the home of a classmate. And Cindy, a night security guard at downtown’s One American Place, who came to work even though she lost everything just 12 hours earlier and was struggling to find a shelter for her children.
“We know these people—we are those people—and our emotional investment in their tragedies and triumphs is what makes it real—and still painful a year after the floodwaters quickly came and slowly left,” Ball writes.
Read the full column. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
