Life in Louisiana’s boot challenging, adventuresome post-Ida – KIRO 7 News Seattle

BELLE CHASSE, La. – (AP) – Life in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish has been a mix of frustration and a little adventure since Hurricane Ida long lines for gas and food.

On the plus side, no one died during the Category 4 storm on this narrow strip of wet land southeast of New Orleans. On the other hand, thousands of homes have been damaged, many lack electricity and water, and no one is sure when things will return to normal.

“It’s getting worse and worse,” said Gail Rudolph on Wednesday as she sat in a pickup truck near where dozens were lined up outside a closed grocery store waiting for it to open.

Chris Vanhoosier stood in line for an hour to fill a couple of 5-gallon canisters with gasoline.

“We are waiting for the water to come back. We lost a generator so we’ll do a little better if that works again, ”he said.

Just a few miles down the road, toward the boot-shaped Louisiana coast, it was like an Old West scene of horsemen using ropes to catch a black cow that had run off in a storm. After about 15 minutes of work, they finally shooed it into a pen that was set up on a highway.

“There are a few hundred out there,” said one of the cowboys.

Farther south, past oil refineries that line the banks of the Mississippi, Ben Tucker rode his nephew Robert Singlemen and Michael Restock in a boat for the first time to see his fish camp house in the Myrtle Grove Marina.

As they slowly navigated through flooded fields, past alligators, snakes, and hundreds of dead nutria, they found a neighborhood of about 70 flooded homes, many of which were missing siding and the contents of garages and carports on the first floor caused by the storm surge from Ida. were flooded.

There was mud everywhere, and only a small part of it was washed away by an afternoon thunderstorm. Tucker’s fishing gear was strewn all over the place, and the benches near his dock were gone. But the first floor of the house, which stands on stilts, was remarkably dry and the roof seemed fine.

All in all, Tucker said, things could get a lot worse.

“It’s here. It survived. It’s not the nicest thing, but we’ll be back,” he said.

Neighbor Gayle Lawrence, who was riding with her husband Ida in the canal-built neighborhood, resented the loss of two cars, refrigerators, and almost everything else in her garage filled with marsh grass and stinking, dead fish.

“The house is solid, it hasn’t even moved. But when the water came up it destroyed everything, ”she said.

The entire lower part of the parish is under the mandatory eviction order and the town of Belle Chasse is subject to a voluntary eviction order. In one area, workers cut a dam to allow the water to flow back towards the Gulf, officials said. The water supply is patchy due to power outages and the local authorities are closed until next week.

Mayor Kirk Lepine urged residents who had fled Ida to stay away for a while until the streets were cleared, electricity was restored, dead cattle removed, and more.

“We want to see your smiling face. We want you to come home. But not now, ”he said at a press conference.

Louisiana calls itself an “athlete’s paradise” and Plaquemines has earned a lot of credit for its nickname. Skilled taxidermists can do good business in this 23,000-resident community by prepping all of the mounted fish and deer heads that hang on the walls of residents’ homes. They’re sometimes next to paintings of crabs, prawns, and other coastal delicacies.

The houses that some residents call “fish camps” resemble the large, beautiful houses that line so much of the Gulf Coast. Refinery and oil industry workers in the area make enough money to lead a good life, with a little extra for boats, hunting gear, quality fishing rods, and more. It’s a place where it’s easy to forget about the world’s problems.

“It’s just great. The water is just calm. It’s like being on an island except when a hurricane comes, ”said Lawrence, 79, who retired to Plaquemines Township with her husband Warren. “We were talking about selling when this came through, but we can’t.”

Tucker, who works for a road construction company and lives in the New Orleans suburb of Gretna, may one day leave the ward, but it’s hard to imagine when. The fishing is good, the beer is terribly tasty when it’s cold on a hot day and hurricanes come and go like alligators.

“As long as it is more fun than work, I’m fully involved,” he said.

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