It has been just over four years since Hurricane Laura slammed into southwest Louisiana just shy of Category 5 status — the fiercest storm the state had seen in a century. Six weeks later, Hurricane Delta, a Category 2, carved a near-identical gash through the Bayou State. That winter, a deadly freeze gripped the ravaged region. A few months later, spring floods dropped a foot-and-a-half of rain on Lake Charles, the city that had already endured, at that point, three epochal disasters. One journalist called it the “most unfortunate city in the United States.”
I traveled to Louisiana in July to report on the community’s recovery and examine how the string of storms impacted its politics. Before I went, I watched a meeting of the Calcasieu (cal-kuh-shoo) Parish Police Jury, the administrative and legislative body that oversees Lake Charles and the rest of Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish. It was apparent how eager officials were to move on from talk of the disasters. An assessment presented at the gathering noted that “there is excitement among our leaders to make great strides in areas that do not involve hurricane recovery.” Minutes later, the jurors approved the use of the parish courthouse grounds for a food and music festival that its organizer promised would be the “go-to festival for the month of November for the state and the region.”
Hurricanes Laura and Delta took the city of Lake Charles and shook it like a snowglobe, picking people up and putting them down in new parts of town as they sought refuge from storm-battered homes and neighborhoods.
But when I visited Lake Charles and talked to residents there, I saw that while the city is making progress recovering from the storms’ physical and economic damages, it’s still grappling with another legacy the storms left behind: Laura and Delta took the city and shook it like a snowglobe, picking people up and putting them down in new parts of town as they sought refuge from storm-battered homes and neighborhoods. Others left the city, ending up in places like Houston and New Orleans. Lake Charles, the parish, the state or even the federal government, however, don’t have uniform or effective ways of tracking where all these people have drifted.
That has long-lasting political implications for both the people who leave and those who stay. When a city or neighborhood loses citizens, it doesn’t just lose some of the social fabric that imbues a place with feeling. Where people end up dictates district lines, congressional representation, and how state and federal resources are distributed. So what happens when a state fails to capture the population-level impacts of natural disasters? How can cities account for storms that hollow out a generation of working-class families?
Lake Charles is one of many places across the country contending with these questions, whether their represented officials are willing to acknowledge it or not. Up until now, the invisible population trend lines being etched into Lake Charles have been a lot easier to ignore than scarred rooftops and abandoned buildings.
Read the full story, and see more pictures from my trip to Lake Charles, here.
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