What It’s Really Like To Survive A Historic Hurricane, For People Who Think They Know But Don’t

This one is dedicated to everyone who made it through Hurricane Laura, but it’s meant for everyone who didn’t have to. If you live in the affected area, send it to your friends and relatives who don’t live here and might mean well, but whose earnest advice and make-believe empathy are anything but helpful.

I wish people who don’t live in a hurricane zone could remotely understand what it’s like to go through a historic storm. Every hurricane is terrible in its own way, but the really bad ones – the historic ones – are on a whole other level.

Everyone affected by this storm – which is everyone who lives anywhere in Southwest Louisiana (and parts of Southeast Texas) – has gone so far past exhaustion at this point, there’s really no word severe enough to convey just how over it all of us are. We can’t do it anymore. We’re past the breaking point. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter.

Hurricane survivors don’t get to burn out and take a break because there are no breaks. There is no rest, no brief respite from the million things that have to be done, no distraction from the devastation all around us. If you’re lucky and your home is livable with power and probably/maybe clean water, you have to worry about when you can get to the store during their limited hours, and what might be available so you can scrape together some kind of dinner every night. You might have power but your neighbors don’t, so the generators are still running 24/7. Sleep comes hard, if it comes at all.

If you were less lucky, you’re still trying to dig out whatever bits of your life you can still excavate from the rubble of what was once your home before you have to say enough’s and enough and write off anything left as unsalvageable, even when all that’s left are mementos and memories that can never be replaced.

Most people are somewhere between the extremes, with severely damaged but not entirely destroyed homes, which means trying to work while meeting with insurance adjusters, sitting on the phone while calling contractors and listening to hours upon hours of terrible hold music, only to hit one dead end after another, with this claim being denied, or that appraisal being too low, or wait, you still need to find a place to live for the next year or so while you wait your turn in line for a roofer or plumber or electrician.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has moved on and expects you to behave as if nothing at all has changed. As if you still have a complete home, with walls and a roof and electricity and clean water and internet access so you can finally file your TPS reports with corporate and get Karen in Accounting off your back.

Bill collectors start calling. They’ve sent you several notices they insist you should’ve received despite your house being off its slab and you not having a mailbox. All the promises different companies made of discounts and grace periods during the storm go flying out the window as just so much PR hot air when you can only get as far as some dude named Peter in India who has no idea what you’re talking about and can only help you with setting up a payment plan for a modest penalty fee.

The other day, I paid for a full month of electricity I did not use, a full month of internet I still can’t use, and a month’s insurance to a company that has yet to give me a penny. A post in a local Facebook group for hurricane recovery popped up last night with a guy renting out campers – yes, campers – for $200/day or $5,000/month, and I’ve already seen rental properties renting at twice their pre-Laura rates. These are the kinds of things we’re dealing with and will continue to deal with for months and years to come, all while trying to piece our lives and homes back together as we continue playing along with the rest of our obligations as if everything’s fine.

Then we get to listen to all the people who’ve gone through anything stronger than a thunderstorm tell us they’ve been there and know how we feel. That they know, somewhere where the climate is moderate and they don’t even need air conditioning to survive, what we’re going through. That they actually understand what working and sleeping in 100+ degree heat and 97% humidity every day, never able to escape it, is like. That they have even the slightest concept of mosquito swarms so thick and so bad, they’re literally killing off herds of livestock.

Life goes on everywhere but here, where we just experienced the strongest hurricane to hit the Louisiana coast in 150 years, but everyone around us wants to act like it’s not really that big of a deal while comparing it to this storm or that storm they went through without ever having set foot in a city like post-Laura Lake Charles and seen the unprecedented level of devastation across not only our entire city but the entire region. It’s the same everywhere: barely any structures came through the storm unscathed, with nearly everything taking some level of damage from the moderate to severe and straight on through to catastrophic.

I’ve lived through every named stormed to hit the Gulf Coast since 1975, so I can speak on this with at least some level of authority, and I’ve never seen windstorm damage of this magnitude at this scale. Sure, I’ve seen the same level of localized damage, and I’ve seen widespread lesser damage, but never this much complete destruction over this large an area. That’s the difference. That’s what we’re dealing with that people who’ve been through other storms haven’t. When I say “we” I’m not talking about me, my family, our friends, or our neighbors. I’m talking about an enormous swath of land and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people all hit the same, all at once, with everything being affected across hundreds of miles. No, Karen. You don’t know what it’s like.

The only people who think they’ve gone through a hurricane remotely similar to Laura are people who didn’t go through Laura.

We barely have power back, with much of what’s been done being piecemeal temporary fixes just to keep us going until more permanent repairs can be made. Clean water is still hard to come by, and internet? What’s the internet now in Southwest Louisiana but tin cans tied together on a string we make squeaky-squawky noises through and pretend like we’re doing something. Seriously, there is no internet access here. All most of us have right now are our cell phones or mobile hotspots (if we’re lucky enough to score one before the latest shipments sell out), with the bandwidth of functional cell towers maxed out as everyone tries to get work done or stream movies at resolutions so pixelated and blurry, we’d be better off just reenacting our favorite scenes on the front lawn where our living rooms used to be.

On top of everything else, we’re still in the days of COVID-19. And, despite how you might feel about our country’s (and state’s) response to it – and a lot of people sure do feel all types of ways about it – the fact is, like it or not, we’ve all been under Phase Something-Or-Other since March. The economy is in shambles, we haven’t been able to go out and socialize or do anything normal for months, and here comes the most devastating hurricane I’ve ever personally witnessed. Even if you’ve been through an awful storm, did you do it during a pandemic? No. No, you did not.

Well, unless you’re reading this after Sally and probably Wilfred or Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta hit after we run out of names because this year is a legit Greek Tragedy and just can’t seem to stop getting worse.

UPDATE: Well, I guess Tropical Depression 22 is Beta now because two other storms organized faster and stole the names for Wilfred and Alpha and OMG SOMEBODY PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.)

SECOND UPDATE: Now that we’re nine months into a historic global pandemic and SWLA is about to experience an unprecedented second major hurricane just a little over a month after being devastated by the strongest hurricane in Louisiana history (tied with one in 1856), people will finally stop playing my storm was worse than your storm.

Anyway, the point is it’s rough. It’s been rough for weeks and it’s going to stay rough for more weeks. And months. Maybe years for some. A lot of businesses won’t rebuild. A lot of locals will move somewhere else or just plant roots in whatever city they evacuated to. Renters are going to have to figure out if staying here is worth it after landlords send rent skyrocketing to profit off insurance companies willing to pay outrageous rates for their policyholders to have places to live while their actual homes are being repaired or rebuilt. Everything is going to get more expensive, wages aren’t going to go up to compensate, and large swaths of the city will be entirely remade by the powers that be, their populations removed and relocated through the power of economic policy.

All that said, the future is not as bleak as it seems right now. Communities are coming together to help each other. Volunteers are jumping in to lend helping hands where they can. There are lots of resources and plenty of information available. Yes, there will be a lot of greedy people exploiting the situation, but good people will always be there, helping each other. Will it be enough to rebuild everything just like it was? Probably not. Can we build something better? Hopefully.

This is what “fixed” looks like right now.

I wish I had more pictures to share with people who haven’t seen the devastation firsthand, but the roads are still difficult to navigate, there’s still debris to dodge (roofing nails and other sharp, tire-puncturing hazards are everywhere), and whenever I get out on the roads, I’m too busy driving and trying not to die at four-way intersections nobody knows how to properly react to when the stoplights are out to take photos. (There’s this nice gallery from a local photographer over on Facebook, though.)

So to everyone who wants to help but doesn’t live here or who has never been through anything like Hurricane Laura – and very few of you have – then maybe instead of trying to identify or one-up us with your personal natural disaster stories, just listen. Listen, maybe nod in agreement here and there, then offer to help if you can. If you can’t, then sometimes just listening is enough.

As for the rest of you who aren’t actually interested in lending a hand and just want to either talk at us or demand we just get on with our lives as if nothing is wrong, we’re doing the best we can with next to nothing and every chip stacked against us.

Give us a break.

Want some books? 'Course ya do!

NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

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