GRAND CHENIER HIGHWAY, La. — David Ball picked up a dead fish at the intersection of this coastal highway and North Island Road, waiting to see if anything was left of his retirement home.
It had been three days since Hurricane Laura made landfall overnight Wednesday not much farther west on Grand Chenier Highway, with 150-mph winds and what the National Weather Service called an “unsurvivable storm surge.”
The waters, slowly, were receding. But thick muck still covered the road and downed power lines blocked the way. So residents like Ball were stuck, waiting, at three different access points into the worst-hit communities — now turned into disaster zones.
A ferry that normally brought residents from the west was not operating. A road that led down from Lake Charles was the same as this: Residents could only get so far before it became impassable.
Houstonians had been relieved when Laura turned east, sparing the city from devastation. The brunt of the storm instead fell on a row of coastal communities and around Lake Charles, where individual lives still have been vastly changed.
The toll of the damage remains unknown, as search and rescue crews arrived from Florida to Mississippi and residents such as 31-year-old Jill Rutherford, who took the road down from Lake Charles, tried to see if they could glean anything more than what they’d seen in aerial footage.
Rutherford — who struggled to accept the reality of all that happened — saw the slab of what was her childhood home and righted the toppled headstones of relatives in the cemetery. “It’s still not real to be honest,” she said alongside her boyfriend in a GMC truck.
Ball had arrived Saturday morning to the intersection checkpoint to the east. He went past it to see how far he could get, making it within two miles of his property before he could get no farther. Now it was early afternoon. A dead alligator lay in the water next to him; he spotted a dead shrimp.
“This is small potatoes compared to the human aspect,” Ball said, scooping up the shrimp. “It’s just a shame. We haven’t seen the full effect just yet.”
Several guys waiting to work on a pipeline cranked on the giant fan of the airboat they were hauling in to get a bit of breeze.
Here was where Ball, a retired sales representative for Dow AgroSciences, had come to enjoy the good life. Wildlife refuges stretched all around in a vast and stunning marshland. His wife, a teacher, grew up down the road in Grand Chenier.
They knew the damage the weather could do: His wife’s mother was pregnant with her when she rode out Hurricane Audrey on the roof. When they first bought her grandmother’s home, Hurricane Rita pushed it two miles away.
Ball then had salvaged washed-up material on their land and they had started again, turning that lot into a camper spot and buying a property a bit farther down in Oak Grove. He hoped the camper structure remained; in Oak Grove, he didn’t expect much.
Around 2 p.m., he climbed again into his silver Toyota Tundra, packed with a generator, water and gas containers, to try again to reach his home.
The wet, salty smell grew as his tires rolled over the road’s wet muck. He passed a crushed pumping station, a family’s ruined new white fence. He weaved under electric wires, through water, around trees.
A man on an ATV slowed as he passed and told him he would make it to the camper land this time: “You’re good to go,” he said.
Ball saw his tractor shed as he neared — or what used to be his tractor shed. Parking, he walked to inspect the shredded metal building and found the concrete slab broken in pieces. He bent and picked up stray tools strewn about the grass.
His pasture was under water; the fences were gone. A giant pipe had rolled up near the road, but the camper shed remained.
“Looks like I get to pick up,” he said, “all over again,”
He wiped his hands on his shorts and looked back with a grimace.
Residents here had known to leave and take what they could; they hadn’t heard of anyone who stayed and died yet. But Ball, a father of three, was 70. He had just finished moving into the Oak Grove home that he still didn’t think he could reach and expected was gone — there was no worse spot in the storm’s path for it to have been.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to start all over again.
Ball had parked work equipment on a high spot and went to check it. As he turned back, he again went by the camper lot. He had another small structure there, built on stilts 13 feet above a slab, that he hadn’t been able to check because the stairway was gone. Now he spotted the stairs in the distance.
“Hey!” he shouted — a moment of levity. “I see my porch! He-ey!”
Emily Foxhall is the Texas Storyteller for the Houston Chronicle. Read her on our free site, chron.com, and on our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | emily.foxhall@chron.com | Twitter: emfoxhall
emily.foxhall@chron.com
"try" - Google News
August 31, 2020 at 06:44PM
https://ift.tt/31GnQbe
‘I see my porch!’: Louisiana residents try to reach where Hurricane Laura made landfall - Houston Chronicle
"try" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3b52l6K
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "‘I see my porch!’: Louisiana residents try to reach where Hurricane Laura made landfall - Houston Chronicle"
Post a Comment