“When a disaster happens, before you can crawl out of the rubble, there is a church van in your front yard full of people with chainsaws and casseroles.” Marshall Ramsey, Mississippi cartoonist and writer
August 12th, 2016, was a Friday. Our older son (Evan) was starting his junior year of high school, and that Friday was the second day for students to attend classes. New features of the school year were the driver’s licenses newly possessed by Evan and some of his friends. To mark the occasion, Evan’s friend Colin was picking him up early so they could go to a donut shop before school. No more nerdy bus rides. Friday’s forecast called for heavy rain, but I hadn’t paid attention to the details. Heavy rain is a fact of life along the Gulf Coast, and we had lived in our house for seventeen years without issue.
The forecast was accurate. At 6:30 in the morning, when Colin pulled into our driveway, it was pouring. Heavy rain in a Gulf Coast environment means rainfall rates of one, two, or even three inches per hour. That’s what was happening. Colin’s headlights stabbed through the deluge, crazy refracting through a million tiny bulbs of water. The gutter system on our house has a couple of long runs between downspouts. The downspouts were spewing like fire hoses, and on the long runs the gutters themselves were spilling over.
My wife didn’t want to let them go. “They just started driving,” she argued. “They shouldn’t be going out in this.” I was less worried.
“None of the roads they’ll be on are prone to flooding. They’ll be fine,” I said. “Let them go.” Evan was keen to go to the donut shop and flashes of lightning occasionally lit Colin’s grinning face like a teenage man in the moon. We waited a minute or two for a lull in the downpour, and Evan dashed for the car when it came. The taillights looked unfocused, shimmering, as they drove up the street.
“What do you want to bet that school is canceled before they get there?” my wife asked.
“Do you think?" I responded. I still didn’t have any idea what we were in for.
Evan called from the donut shop. “School’s canceled,” he said. We had just heard similar on local radio. “Y’all be careful coming home,” I told him. It was light out by the time they got home, but the rain had not abated. The cloud ceiling was low, heavy, ominous, and thunder rolled steadily. Koda, our highly athletic but weather averse canine, cowered in a corner of our walk-in shower.
I don’t remember if I went to work that morning or not. I think I did. But I stayed home after lunch, and we settled into a relaxed, dreary day routine. The boys retired to their rooms and Irene and I read books in the den. Outside the house, it rained and rained. At about 4 pm I poured us each a glass of wine and we turned the television on. We were trying to relax with some late afternoon reruns of “Friends” or “Big Bang Theory,” but the afternoon shows were steadily interrupted by emergency news reports. As Lafayette and the surrounding communities have expanded over the decades, many neighborhoods have been built on pancake-flat land once used for growing sugar cane. Without retention ponds or clear paths for drainage, excess water pools in these neighborhoods when it rains heavily. By four p.m. on August 12th, it had been raining heavily for 12 hours. Cumulative rainfall for the event was in or approaching the double-digit range, and many houses already had water in them.
Irene and I listened to the sad stories and vowed to support the recovery efforts with money and time. At some point that evening, as we watched waterlogged families recounting their stories to reporters, I’m pretty sure I uttered the words, “those poor people.”
I am part of a group that meets every Saturday morning for a run. We meet at Red’s Health Club at 5:30 am, drink a cup of coffee, and start running around 6:00. On Friday evenings we check in on a group text to see who is in, and who is out. Heavy rain sometimes keeps us from running outside, but it hardly ever keeps us from meeting at the health club and doing something. If the weather is too nasty we’ll run indoors on a treadmill, or ride an exercise bike, but unless we’re sick or out of town, there’s not much that keeps us from our weekly appointment. The chorus of responses on this particular Friday was unanimous. We were in, rain or shine.
That night, intermittent lightning and thunder caused a few sleep interruptions. A flash of lightning would light the room, and Koda would lift his head and perk his ears. When the thunder rolled he would shiver and shake. He walked to the head of our bed and pawed at our pillows to wake us up. When the fireworks eased, the steady thrum of rain on the shingles soothed us back to sleep. I wasn’t fully rested when my alarm sounded at 4:45 am, but I didn’t plan to miss my workout appointment.
One glance through the French doors that Evan had dashed out of the previous morning started to give me pause. Just as it had all day Friday, the rain fell not in sheets, but as a shattered, glittering mass of water. Lights beneath the eaves of the house cast bright ovals on the driveway, and as the rain fell through the pools of light it was as if the heavens filled the atmosphere with billions of tiny shards of auto glass. A swift river ran down the outer edge of the driveway, and when I followed it to the street with my eyes, I could see water gushing upward around the outer rim of a manhole cover. The storm drains were full.
“Hmmm,” I thought. “Maybe I’m not going to Red’s.” I walked to the front door and peered through the small panes directly at the street. Overhead lamps lit the covered area right outside the door so my ability to see clearly into the darkness of the street was limited. Still, something in the darkness looked off. The street glistened wetly under the streetlamp at the end of the driveway, but the texture of the road was obscured, as if covered by a sinister miasma that would consume without thought or pity. “Is that water?” I thought. I turned off the porch lights to see better. I still wasn’t sure. I opened the front door and ventured outward as far as I could under the cover of the porch.
Irene and I bought the house in January 1999. It was a private sale brokered through a friend, and we negotiated the sale in late 1998 just as the price of oil hit a historic low point. Lafayette is an oil town. It was a good time to buy. The only odd note I remember from our discussions with the seller was a single comment where he said, “the house has never flooded.” Perhaps I should have thought more deeply about the comment and done some research, but at the time I put it down to the proximity of the house to the Vermilion River and didn’t worry about it. The maps of that time placed the house in the 500 year flood plain, and the mortgage company didn’t require us to obtain flood insurance. And for seventeen years we lived happily in the house and raised two boys blissfully unaware of any danger.
The Vermilion River is part of the Teche/Vermilion Freshwater District. Historically, the Bayous Teche and Vermilion were sourced from the Atchfalaya River by way of Bayou Courtableu. In 1927, the great flood of the lower Mississippi River basin prompted the Corps of Engineers to wall the west side of the Atchafalaya Basin with protection levees. The levees opened portions of the Teche and Vermilion basins for agricultural and other development, but over time the quality and volume of water in the basins degraded, and efforts were started to revitalize the flow and quality of water in the two rivers. In 1982, the Corps of Engineers turned on a pump which moves about 1000 cubic feet of water per second from the Atchafalaya River into a conveyance channel that supplies the Teche and Vermilion basins with fresh water that was constrained by the new levees in 1928.
Our house is built on a point bar on the inside of a modest meander of the Vermilion River in the heart of Lafayette. Our street ends in a cul-de-sac on the river. The yards of the houses that ring the cul-de-sac are built up and form a levee that protects the end of the street from high water levels in the river. The elevation of the cement slab that anchors our house is 17 feet above sea level. As I mentioned, the mortgage company did not require us to purchase flood insurance when we bought the place, but we did anyhow. When my wife asked why, I cited two reasons. “It’s cheap,” I told her. “We’re in the 500 year flood plain so we’re considered low risk. It’s less than 400 dollars a year for the maximum coverage available.” The second reason I gave her was perhaps triggered by the “never flooded” comment made by the seller. It was also prescient. “I know we’re in the 500-year flood plain. But a good golfer could hit a nine iron from the front yard into the river. Who knows what would happen if a hurricane stalls and dumps 30 inches of rain?”
Once in the house we never lost a moment of sleep during rainstorms. We dealt with power outages, and a few downed trees caused by hurricanes in 2002, 2005, and 2008, but in 17 years I never once looked at the Surrey Street river gauge, I never once reviewed the rainfall forecasts from NOAA or any other source, and I never saw water accumulate in the street. Until the morning of August 13th, 2016.
When I peered into the darkness from the shelter of our front porch, the situation became clearer. There was water in the street. At the edge of the road, it was curb deep—just enough to start covering the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road. I frowned and said, “that’s new.” As I stood and watched through the curtains of rain, I thought I detected the water creeping higher, covering more of the grass, but I wasn’t sure. I went back inside, started a pot of coffee brewing, then went back onto the porch to check again. The water was higher. It covered the strip of grass and edged onto the sidewalk. Now I was concerned. I went back inside and woke Irene. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The rain,” I said. “We may have a problem. Come and look.” Fifteen minutes later my oldest son and I were headed to a location in the city where you could fill sandbags for free. When we got there the pile of sand was gone. Others had apparently classified the threat at a more acute level and taken appropriate action. It’s just as well. It would have taken 10,000 sandbags to protect our house, and we would have gone home with twenty.
When my son and I returned the water was halfway across the lawn, and maybe a foot or eighteen inches below the level of the slab. Irene and our younger son were up and dressed. “What should we do?” she asked.
“Elevate anything important.” (The video below was filmed at about 7 a.m. on August 13th. The water has filled the street and is marching across the lawn toward our house.)
We went to work putting photo albums, firearms, computers, important papers, special toys, and special books on top of beds, tables, and counters. For a while, I held out hope that the rising waters would slow and stop, but it kept on raining and after we had worked for an hour the water outside the French doors in our kitchen was a foot deep. The floors were wet; water was coming in through the weep holes and seeping past the weather stripping on the doors. Irene had placed a call to her stepmother, and she was waiting for us a short way up the street. I turned off the main breaker and gave some final instructions. “Okay, when I open the door the water is going to rush in here. Is everyone ready?” Irene was carrying the cat in a kennel, and Evan had Koda in his arms. They all nodded. “All right. Here we go.”
Cool water rushed past our shins as the door opened. Once outside it took a little extra force to close the door against the rushing water, but it wasn’t difficult. The water on the driveway was shin deep. Our neighbor’s driveway sits lower than ours and the water came up to our knees. The ground elevation increases to the northwest, and we waded up the street in that direction. Mary Jane, our savior stepmother/mother-in-law/grandmother, stood outside her SUV just above the waterline. She was no more than 200 feet from our kitchen door. When we arrived at her vehicle, shoes squishing and clothes wet from the rain, she said, “well, looks like you’re going to be staying at my house for a little while.”
It continued to rain. The downpour wasn’t as consistently intense as it had been on Friday, but it continued, and now the reports of flooding were coming in from all across south Louisiana. Irene and I started to worry that the water in the house might rise above the tops of the beds and tables we had piled our valuables on, so we made a return trip to the house on Saturday afternoon. A teenage neighbor (God bless you Chris) had a small inflatable boat and was using it to help people transport items from their flooded houses to higher ground. He waded in with me and we took out our wedding album, baby albums, computers, important papers, and firearms. It’s an odd feeling to wade through your house. The water hit just above my knees. With the lights out, and no background noise, it felt like the scene in the movie Aliens when Newt has fallen down the vent shaft to a lower level of the complex that is flooded. Alone, she wades through a darkened, deserted hallway calling out, “Ripley.” She clutches her doll to her chest and looks left and right for the monsters she knows are lurking.
I slept intermittently on Saturday night. The rain kept coming and I alternated between short intervals of fitful sleep and borderline, eyes-wide panic. During the panic episodes I slid out of bed and walked around my mother-in-law’s darkened house and stared out the windows at sheets of rain that flashed under the streetlamps. “Please stop,” I prayed. I imagined water up to the light switches, even higher, ruining everything.
Whether it was a response to my prayer or not, the rain slackened as daylight approached. By the time the sun rose it had stopped, and blue sky began to appear between breaks in the clouds. We had coffee and breakfast, then drove across the swollen river to our house. To our great relief, much of the water in the street had drained into the river. The water stood just below our threshold, and we rejoiced in the small victory of knowing that the clean-up could soon begin.
In a meterological sense, what happened? A USGS report titled “Characterization of Peak Streamflows and Flood Inundation of Selected Areas in Louisiana from the August 2016 Flood” had this to say about the weather conditions leading up to and during the event:
Heavy rainfall occurred across Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi during August 11–14, 2016, as a result of a slow-moving sheared inland tropical depression, which gained energy and moisture as it moved as a low pressure system across the gulf coast into Louisiana and southern Mississippi. The system tapped into deep tropical moisture resulting in intense rainfall and thunderstorms across a large part of the area causing major flooding across southern Louisiana.
Maximum rainfall was concentrated in two areas of south Louisiana. The region just to the east of Baton Rouge recorded the highest rainfall totals, with the town of Watson, LA recording 31.39 inches of rain during the August 11 to 14 timeframe. Two-day totals exceeding 20 inches were common around both Baton Rouge and Lafayette. My best guess for what happened on Alice Drive, the location of our house, is that about two feet of rain fell in 48 hours. See how the USGS paper describes the aftermath:
The heavy rainfall led to widespread flash flooding and record river flooding. Many of the broken records had been previously set during the flooding of April 1983. In total, 13 people died in southern Louisiana as a result of the flooding. The event was also responsible for an estimated total of $10 billion in damages across southern Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi.
This storm event has been regarded as the worst natural disaster in the United States since Hurricane Sandy on the east coast in 2012.
Please forgive the scientists who wrote the USGS paper for misgendering Sandy. Everyone knows Sandy identifies as a superstorm, not a hurricane. ;-)
The estimate for the number of homes damaged by the rain and flooding exceeded 140,000. On Sunday, the same day we ventured back to the house to find the water receding, President Obama made a federal disaster declaration for south Louisiana. Tens of thousands of affected homeowners did not have federal flood insurance because so many of the damaged structures were in areas that were not considered high risk. In St. Helena Parish, one of the hardest hit areas near Baton Rouge, fewer than one percent of homeowners had flood insurance. People without that coverage were eligible for up to $33,000. in assistance through FEMA to help rebuild their homes and their lives. Helpful, but only a fraction of federal flood insurance that can provide coverage up to $250K for the dwelling, and $100K for contents. If I’m to be completely honest, as our tenure in the house approached two, problem-free decades, I considered letting our flood insurance lapse. My wife talked me out of it with the same rationale I had used in the beginning. “We’re close to the river, and it’s cheap,” she said. “Why drop it?” I love her.
Although many rivers and streams in south Louisiana set records for high water and streamflow in August 2016, the Vermilion River by my house was not one of them. The August 2016 flood is number two in the record books. The flood of record occurred in August 1940, when a slow-moving hurricane moved from east to west along the Louisiana coast before coming ashore at the Louisiana/Texas border. That storm dropped 38 inches of rain at locations just west of Lafayette and the Surrey Street gauge recorded a water level at 24.87 feet, as compared to the 17.62 recorded in August 2016. Storm surge from that 1940 hurricane likely pushed water levels in the Vermilion higher than they would have been from the rain alone.
I learned two things from the 2016 flood. Number one is that in widespread emergencies, the first responders are probably not the police, or the fire department, or federal officials from FEMA. Those people often do dangerous, heroic work, but they are the responders who will get to you eventually. There’s only so many of them, and there’s only so much they can do. No, the first responders are you, your family, your neighbors, your friends, and if you’re lucky like we were, your friends’ friends. We didn’t start work on Sunday. There was still water in the cul-de-sac and people gathered themselves and went to church to be in fellowship with their family, friends, and God. They prayed for the resilience and renewal of all. In the afternoon, as the wet streets began to steam in the hot sun, individuals and groups began to venture into the affected neighborhoods, and in a freeform, organic triage, assess who needed help the most.
On Monday morning, the cavalry. Friends, family, and co-workers descended upon us and we began the nasty work of emptying a house, pulling up carpets and flooring, and cutting sheetrock. By mid-day there was a 30 foot roll-off dumpster sitting at the back of the driveway and a steady stream of people filled it with broken sheetrock, sodden carpets, and ruined mattresses. These people—our friends—saved us thousands of dollars. In a flood insurance settlement money is allocated for sheetrock removal, carpet removal, flooring removal, and the rental cost of fans and dehumidifiers to dry the inside of the dwelling. We didn’t have to pay for any of that because people did it for us, for free. I recall this one woman. She was a friend of a friend. We had never met her, and she was a tiny slip of a thing—not much over five feet and maybe 100 pounds. And she worked like a mule all day Monday cutting and hauling sheetrock in that hot house. We are eternally grateful to everyone that helped us.
The other thing I learned is that Marshall Ramsey is right about the church vans. For more than a week, as we worked on the house, at first with a crowd of people, and after a few days, mostly by ourselves, church vans would show up on the street at lunchtime and late in the day handing out hearty meals to anyone who needed them. Our own church, Asbury Methodist, put us on a list of affected families and organized the members of a Sunday school class to bring us evening meals for about two weeks. We finally had to tell them to stop, as there were so many people in situations far worse than ours.
In that first week after the storm, we had one really difficult day. For decades, my wife has collected meaningful things from her life—old report cards, letters, photographs from girlhood, high school, and college, memorabilia from her cheerleading days, and more. All this irreplaceable material was stored in a wooden chest, and we passed over it when we were lifting valuables on the morning of August 13th. We discovered the chest and its sodden treasures on Wednesday, August 17th. It was the only time she cried.
Is there any way to prevent disasters like this from happening again? Regarding the weather, not really. It rains quite a lot on the Gulf Coast. The average yearly rainfall in Lafayette, LA is about 65 inches. The atmospheric circumstances necessary for extreme rain events have occurred in the past and will likely occur again in the future. How soon is anyone’s guess.
Once the water is on the ground there are things that can be done to prevent, or mitigate the severity of flooding. Solutions proposed for Lafayette include dredging the Vermilion River to increase its capacity and help it drain more quickly to the Gulf of Mexico, the removal of spoil banks to allow water from the river to run out into neighboring swamps when the water is high, and detention ponds and plans that restrict the rate at which run-off makes its way to the main drainage artery, which is the Vermilion River. During heavy rains, it is the rapid, synchronized run-off from all the coulees, drains, and tributaries that feed into the Vermilion that swells the river and overwhelms its ability to drain south into Vermilion Bay, or overland into adjacent swamps. Accordingly, the use of detention ponds and other mechanisms to slow the rate of drainage into the river may hold the most promise for flood mitigation. But the fact remains that if the atmosphere is heavily charged with precipitable water, and a hurricane or other tropical system stalls or slows over south Louisiana, rainfall can quickly move into the double digits. And the waters will rise.
The author Richard Campanella has written extensively about the physical and human geography of New Orleans. In his book “Bienville’s Mistake: A Historical Geography of New Orleans,” in a chapter titled “Urbanizing The Landscape,” he writes this sentence about housing construction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:
Regardless of stylistic variations, most postdiluvian houses share a certain architectural trait that dates back to the Colonial Period, only to have been foolishly abandoned during the Modern Period: raised construction on piers.
In Lafayette, as in every other Gulf Coast locale, houses built after 1940 are largely built on concrete slabs at grade. It is entirely possible to live safely on a point bar of the Vermilion River if you elevate your house. Our house should never have been constructed on a slab. It should be on piers, in the old tradition, three or six or eight feet above grade. There are a number of companies that specialize in lifting existing homes, either by separating the house from the slab and constructing a new, raised floor, or by raising the slab and the house together. The second method is the most attractive because the process doesn’t disturb the interior of the house. You can leave the expensive crystal in the cabinets, and it will be fine. It is expensive though—more than the average home price in the state of Louisiana. For true, long-term peace of mind, it’s the only answer.
My wife and I have PTSD (Postdiluvian Traumatic Stress Disorder). Last summer it was very hot, and very dry. Our yard was parched and brown. We needed rain. When it finally came, in the form of a heavy downpour, we watched the rainwater spill over the gutters as it had in August, 2016. The storm was moving quickly and I knew the deluge would not last very long. Still, after about ten minutes I looked over at my wife. “Okay,” I said. “That’s enough.”
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I remember that day! I made it to coffee that morning. I am sure there was a dreadmill or something involved. I remember driving home from coffee past the Cajun Dome. There was so much water in the system that several of the manhole covers were "floating" over the holes. I spent time in a cousin's house in the Broussard area cleaning up after. I made a trip the year before to Lake Jackson to clean up. Oyster Bayou flooded my brother-in-laws house.
I love the comment about the church vans. After Katrina, we ventured to assess damage in my mother-in-laws house in Picayune, MS. Pine trees lay criss-crossed about her long lake lot. A van full of Missouri church men with brand new chain saws and a lowboy with a loader pulled up. They we given the loan of the equipment by one of their fellow christian brothers. They made quick work of the trees in the yard. I a few hours, there was a large pile of trees and a clear path to the house. It is great illustration of how great people can be (at least here in the South).
You have a gift for writing, thank you for sharing it.
We had the whole family in town for a scheduled engagement party for Jack and Stephanie at Mazen Grill. Needless to say, the party was canceled. It worked out well that all my boys were here to help with neighbors who flooded. National guard was launching boats from in front of our house. Hope we don’t have another “500 year flood” for a while. It always renews my faith in humanity to see how neighbors and communities pull together during these times.