Election Day in Lake Charles, Louisiana, began with heavy rain and tornado warnings. Bands of precipitation moving up from the Gulf of Mexico hammered the city in the early hours of the morning, stopping by the early afternoon. At polling stations across the city, voters walked over deep puddles and soggy ground to cast their ballots. The storm was nothing new in this corner of southwest Louisiana, a mostly conservative region in a Republican-controlled state, where residents have borne the brunt of the hurricanes that have swept through the past four years. Polls in the state will close at 8 p.m. local time, and voters should know the unofficial results by 11 a.m. tomorrow morning — whether the state’s eight Electoral College votes will go to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
“I’m still displaced,” said Stephanie Edwards, a mother of two whose home was destroyed during Hurricane Laura, which swept through the state in late August 2020 and caused $17.5 billion in damage. In the aftermath, “I didn’t see anyone, but regulars come down to help.” Speaking from behind the counter of the ExxonMobil gas station where she works as a cashier, Edwards told Grist that the Biden administration has done little to improve the lives of people like her, who lost everything in recent hurricanes . The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, she said, offered her just $2,400 in disaster relief funds — barely enough for a month’s rent. (President Biden was sworn into office about five months after Laura.) Edwards eventually moved back in with her mother. Her disappointment with the government’s response was one of the reasons she decided Donald Trump deserved her vote.
“I just feel that Trump is a better option for us for the simple fact that he cares about the American people,” she said to the nods of her colleague, Sherri. “He cares about our environment. He cares about what’s going on in the United States.”
Edwards said she disagreed with Biden’s decision to shut down the oil fields, but that she was not opposed to his incentives for more green energy production. (Despite promises to limit oil and gas drilling on public land, Biden has overseen a record boom in fossil fuel production).
The oil and gas industry is central to the economy of southwest Louisiana. Over the past decade, new pipelines have been built to transport natural gas from Texas through Lake Charles and down to Cameron Parish, where fossil fuel companies scrambleafter a judge in Louisiana blocked Biden’s break on new natural gas export permits to build liquefied gas terminals to export American fuel abroad. Petrochemical companies such as Sasol and Westlake Chemical are expanding their industrial operations across the Calcasieu River in the town of Westlake, already a maze of flare stacks and chemical storage tanks pushed against the majority-Black community of Mossville.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Speaking from the parking lot of Ray D. Molo Middle School after casting her vote, Erica Dantley told Grist that she is concerned about the possibility of future chemical plant explosions in the area. The rubber manufacturing facility near her home has sometimes caused unpleasant odors, but it’s the new gas pipelines and the large petrochemical plants across the water in Westlake that she’s really worried about. “If they explode or leak or whatever, that pollution will come this way,” she said, referring to the explosion at Biolab’s facility in 2020 and another at Westlake Chemical’s south plant in 2022. Both Dantley and her daughter, Kailynn, 18 and excited to vote for the first time, told Grist that they believe a Harris administration will address the pollution risks faced by communities like theirs. ‘s and work is carried, will take more seriously. to enforce the environmental regulations established over the past four years.
“We have to keep the progress going,” Dantley said.
Like everyone Grist interviewed, Carol Taylor’s life was shaped by successive hurricane seasons. She recalled putting as much as she could into her Ford Ranger when Hurricane Rita closed in on the fall of 2005. Her house in Cameron Parish was badly damaged in the storm, then bulldozed by the Army Corps of Engineers without her permission. Fifteen years later, after moving to Lake Charles, she fared better through Hurricanes Laura and Delta and just needed a new roof for her house. Despite the huge impact natural disasters have had on her life, Taylor said climate policy didn’t factor heavily into her voting decision, though “it probably should.” She was more concerned about women’s access to abortion, an issue on which she and her grown children disagreed.
Asked if she supports a transition to renewable energy, which would wean the economy from the things that fuel the growth of Lake Charles’ economy, Taylor replied, “I just know that something has to change.”
She went on to say: ‘Even if everything goes green, it’s going to take years for everything to finally switch over, isn’t it? There has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.” Then she shrugged.
