Hello and welcome to State of Emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein, and today I’m here to talk to you about what one journalist called “the unhappiest city in America.”
It had been exactly four years since Hurricane Laura struck southwest Louisiana just shy of a Category 5, the most violent storm the state had seen in 100 years. Six weeks later, Category 2 Hurricane Delta left a nearly identical scar on the Bayou State. That winter, a devastating cold wave battered the affected areas. A few months later, spring floods dumped a foot and a half of rain on Lake Charles. At that point, the city had already experienced three landmark disasters.
Hurricanes Laura and Delta slammed into the city, shaking it like a snow globe and rolling people up and dropping them into new parts of the city.
I visited Louisiana in July to report on community recovery and explore how the series of storms has affected politics. Before I left, I visited Lake Charles and Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. Cal-Ku-ShooIt was clear how eager the authorities were to move on from the disaster story. Evaluations presented at the meeting “Our leaders are excited to make great strides in areas unrelated to hurricane recovery,” he noted. Minutes later, the jury approved the use of the parish courthouse grounds for a food and music festival that organizers promised will be “November’s highlight festival for the state and region.”
But when I visited Lake Charles and spoke with residents, I learned that while the city is recovering from the physical and economic damage of the storms, it’s still wrestling with another legacy they left behind. Laura and Delta shook the city like a snow globe, picking up people who had fled their homes and neighborhoods destroyed by the storms and dropping them off in new parts of the city. Some people left the city entirely, ending up in places like Houston and New Orleans. But Lake Charles, the larger parish, the state, and even the federal government have no uniform or effective way to track where all these people ended up.
An aerial image shows damage caused by Hurricane Laura in a neighborhood outside Lake Charles, Louisiana.
AFP via Getty Images
This has long-lasting political implications, for both those who leave and those who stay. When a city or neighborhood loses residents, it doesn’t just lose part of the social fabric that imbues the place with emotion: Where people end up determines district boundaries, congressional representation, and the allocation of state and federal resources. So what happens when states can’t grasp the population-level impacts of natural disasters? How can cities account for storms that hollow out generations of working-class families?
Lake Charles is one of many places across the country wrestling with these questions, whether local representatives would admit it or not. Until now, the invisible population trend lines etched in Lake Charles have been easier to ignore than scarred roofs and abandoned buildings.
Read the full article and see more photos from our trip to Lake Charles. here.
“I’m not giving up. I have nowhere else to go.”
Edward Galyan Jr., 67, of Lake Charles, lives with his pit bull, Red, on Pair Street in north Lake Charles. Galyan’s home was destroyed by Hurricane Laura in 2020. Galyan inherited some money from his parents and remains hopeful that help will come so he can rebuild. Learn more.
Zoya Tierstein / Grist
What we’re reading
Heatwave causes Harris, Trump rally attendees to fall ill At least 78 Trump rally-goers have been hospitalized with heatstroke in the past few months, according to a Washington Post analysis, and a Harris rally in Wisconsin in August was halted after a participant “appeared to have heatstroke,” The Post reported. The two candidates have vastly different views on climate change, which is causing dangerously high temperatures in the U.S. and around the world. 
read more
The Atlantic Awakens: The National Hurricane Center is tracking two hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, one that may be heading toward the Caribbean and another that is developing near Africa. September is the busiest month of the Atlantic hurricane season. The next hurricane to be named is named Francine.read more
Tropical Storm Horn floods Big Island: A powerful tropical storm dumped 10 to 15 inches of rain on Hawaii Island last week, causing widespread flooding and temporarily cutting power to 24,000 customers. Another storm, Hurricane Girma, is heading toward the state this week.read more
Michigan schools closed due to extreme heat and power outages. Several school districts across the state, including Detroit Public Schools Community, closed schools or held half-day classes during the first week of classes because of the heat and weather-related power outages, and some schools’ antiquated cooling systems couldn’t withstand temperatures that reached nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit.read more
