DULAC, Louisiana (AP) – Shortly after Hurricane Francine As a storm surge inundated a cemetery in the Louisiana bayou town of Dulac, Lori-Ann Bergeron came Thursday to check the graves of three generations of families. Their headstones were fine, but coffins lay next door next to broken crosses and soggy bouquets.
“It’s like this almost every time the water rises, but this is the only place for them,” said Bergeron, 51, who remembers her sister’s coffin being dug up when Hurricane Rita devastated the area in 2005.
“It was hard, trying to bury someone twice,” she said.
From cemeteries to homes to businesses and parks, Gulf Coast residents, many of whom are still suffering from the devastation, Hurricane Ida Three years ago we cleaned up the mess that Francinewhich hit Louisiana on Wednesday as a Category 2 hurricane.
The storm left hundreds of thousands of electricity customers without power, sent tidal waves across coastal communities and sparked flood fears in New Orleans and elsewhere.
“The human spirit is defined by its resilience, and resilience is what defines Louisiana,” Gov. Jeff Landry said at a news conference. “Certainly there are times and situations that test us, but those are also the times when we are at our best in this state.”
There were no reports of deaths or injuries, he said.
The storm, the fuel from extremely warm waters of the Gulf of Mexicoflooded large parts of the South, including parts of Arkansas and Florida. Flash floods threatened cities as far away as Atlanta; Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and Memphis, Tennessee.
Francine hit the coast of Louisiana in the coastal area of Terrebonne Parish on Wednesday evening with wind speeds of 155 km/h and damaged a fragile Coastal region that has not yet fully recovered by a series of devastating hurricanes in 2020 and 2021. The system then moved at high speed toward New Orleans, dousing the city with torrential rain. The city woke up to widespread power outages and streets covered in debris.
Rushing water almost hit a pickup truck in a New Orleans underpass, trapping the driver. A 39-year-old emergency room nurse who lived nearby waded into the waist-deep water with a hammer, smashed the window and pulled the driver out. The rescue was broadcast live by WDSU.
“I guess it’s just second nature, as a nurse you just go in and get it done, right?” Miles Crawford told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I just had to get him out of there.”
The water was up to the driver’s head and was continuing to rise, he said.
News footage from coastal communities showed waves from lakes, rivers and the Gulf crashing against levees. Water poured into city streets in torrential downpours. Oak and cypress trees leaned in the strong winds and some power poles swayed.
At the height of the storm, 450,000 people in Louisiana were without power, according to the Public Service Commission. Many of the outages were due to falling debris, not building damage. At one point, about 500 people were in shelters, officials said.
“The amounts invested in resilience have really made a difference, from the number of power outages to the number of homes saved,” said Deanne Criswell, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who attended the governor’s press conference.
In the southern Louisiana coastal community of Cocodrie, where many fishing families own seasonal homes on the bayou, police guarded a street to prevent looting while people vacated their properties.
Brooks Pellegrin, 50, and his family were clearing mud from their campsite, a two-story building with a large dock on a canal about 14 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. They worked well into Thursday afternoon, raking marsh grass and hosing muddy bottoms after a 10-foot storm surge washed away the building’s back wall, porch and much of the boat deck.
“We set everything up so we don’t have to do that. This one brought a lot more water than Ida,” Pellegrin said. “It had a lot more force than I expected.”
For many people in the region bordered by bayous, swamps, lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, the threat of flooding and hurricanes has become part of everyday life, said Craig Webre, sheriff of Lafourche Parish.
About a quarter of the area of the parish, which is home to about 97,000 people south of New Orleans, is water. In 2021, Ida reached the southernmost tip of the parish as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph (241 km/h).
That storm was “catastrophic” and “the most significant hurricane” to ever hit the region. After the 2021 storm, 90% of homes in the region needed new roofs and many homes were damaged beyond repair, Webre said.
Over the years, the area’s storm resilience has improved. Drainage and pumping stations have been upgraded and roofs have been replaced to better withstand hurricane-force winds. Residents also evacuate their homes more quickly when there is a significant storm threat, Webre said.
“This population is very resilient. They are very independent. They are real pioneers,” he said.
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Cline reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Associated Press writers Kevin McGill in New Orleans, Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg, Florida, Jeff Martin in Atlanta and Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this article.
