![]() “We’ve been in places that had damage, and we’ve never seen this many blue tarps a year after a storm.”Ĭhastity Bishop is one of those people. The group has visited Lake Charles multiple times over the past year. It’s everywhere you look,” said Gary LeBlanc, cofounder of the nonprofit Mercy Chefs, which has provided food in disaster response situations for more than a decade. “It’s startling, gut-wrenching to see how many people are living under blue tarps. More than nine months after Hurricane Laura’s devastating blow to Lake Charles, many of the city’s streets are still lined with homes covered by blue tarps. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many Black communities already clustered near the chemical plants and refineries spewing toxic emissions along the state’s Gulf Coast, the compounding disasters in Lake Charles epitomize how climate change disproportionately impacts those already most at risk. It’s one of the most segregated residential communities in the US, and its Black residents have among the highest rates of poverty and unemployment in the country. Of the more than 56,000 homes statewide that were damaged by Laura, most were in Calcasieu Parish, home to Lake Charles. And it’s often low-income families and communities of color that are most impacted and get the least amount of support to build back. In 2020, the US experienced the most billion-dollar disasters on record. ![]() You don’t have to be a scientist or a genius to see that.”Īs the planet warms and people continue to build homes and businesses in high-risk areas, disasters have become more destructive, more frequent, and more costly. “In the past 25 years, Lake Charles had been through 11 federally declared disasters five of those occurred just in the past year. “There is a lot of PTSD in this community from what we have gone through,” Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter told BuzzFeed News. And lingering heaps of debris render the city vulnerable to more flooding from future rains and storms. The crushing housing crisis has left families like Boudreaux's living in unsafe conditions in their broken, mold-infested homes or in tents. People are exhausted, stressed, and hurting, and many cannot afford to change their circumstances. “You are constantly getting hit with these natural disasters, and sometimes it feels like you’re living in Revelations.”Īnd the city is close to its breaking point. “Right when you think you’re catching your breath, boom,” Boudreaux told BuzzFeed News. Now, as the 2021 hurricane season gets underway, Boudreaux’s three-bedroom home - still askew on its foundation, with holes in its roof - is one of thousands in Lake Charles still waiting for a recovery that never happened. In May, historic rains flooded the area with upwards of 19 inches of water in a single day. These were followed by a brutal ice storm that froze pipes and wrecked houses in February of this year. Then, in October, Hurricane Delta rammed into Lake Charles as a Category 2 storm. With its 150-mile-per-hour sustained winds, Laura was the worst storm to hit the state in a century. ![]() But Boudreaux’s grief didn’t end there: It took her family another seven months to finally bury her father, as one disaster after another pummeled the riverbank city where she grew up. ![]() ![]() The 72-year-old died alone after medics rushed him from a hospital to nursing homes, trying to find a facility that still had power after Hurricane Laura hit. Bridget Boudreaux didn’t know she was saying goodbye to her father last August when an ambulance took him away from her sweltering, hurricane-battered home near Lake Charles, Louisiana. ![]()
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