Hello, and welcome back to state of emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein, and today we’re going to talk about a place that one journalist dubbed, “the unhappiest city in the United States.”
It’s been just over four years since Hurricane Laura slammed into southwest Louisiana, just shy of Category 5 status — the fiercest storm the state has seen in a century. Six weeks later, Hurricane Delta, a Category 2, cut a nearly identical tear through the Bayou State. That winter, a deadly freeze gripped the ravaged region. A few months later, spring floods dropped three and a half meters of rain on Lake Charles, the city which at that point had already endured three epochal disasters.
Hurricanes Laura and Delta took the city and shook it like a snow globe, picking up and dropping people off in new parts of town.
I traveled to Louisiana in July to report on the community’s recovery, and examine how the string of storms affected its politics. Before I went, I watched a meeting of the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, the administrative and legislative body that oversees Lake Charles and the rest of Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish (pronounced cal-kuh-shoo). It was clear how eager officials were to move on from talk about the disasters. An assessment presented at the meeting noted that “there is excitement among our leaders to make great progress in areas that do not involve hurricane recovery.” Minutes later, the jurors approved the use of the parish court grounds for a food and music festival which the organizer promised would be the “gateway festival for the month of November for the state and the region”.
But when I visited Lake Charles and spoke with residents there, I saw that while the city is making progress in recovering from the storms’ physical and economic damage, it is still grappling with another legacy left by the storms: Laura and Delta took on the city and shook it up like a snow globe, picking up and dropping people off in new parts of town as they sought shelter from storm-ravaged homes and neighborhoods. Others left the city entirely and ended up in places like Houston and New Orleans. However, Lake Charles, the greater parish, the state, and even the federal government do not have uniform or efficient means of tracking where all these people drifted.
An aerial photo shows damage to a neighborhood from Hurricane Laura outside of Lake Charles, Louisiana.
AFP via Getty Images
This has long-term political implications for both the people who leave and those who stay. When a city or neighborhood loses citizens, it not only loses 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 impact of natural disasters? How can cities be responsible for storms that erode a generation of working-class families?
Lake Charles is one of many places across the country grappling with these questions, whether their representative officials are willing to admit it or not. Until now, the invisible population trend lines etched in Lake Charles have been much easier to ignore than scarred rooftops and abandoned buildings.
Read the full story, and see more photos from my trip to Lake Charles, here.
“I’m not giving up. I have nowhere else to go.”
Lake Charles resident Edward Gallien Jr., 67, lives with his pit bull, Red, on Pear Street in north Lake Charles. His home was destroyed by Hurricane Laura in 2020. Gallien, who inherited his property from his parents, is still hoping that help will come so he can rebuild. Read more here.
Zoya Teirstein / Grist
What we read
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