I have two recent news stories, one from Louisiana and one Mississippi on the impacts of Ike and Gustav on a weary post Katrina/Rita populace. We’ll begin with the chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians in Isle de Jean Charles located in Terrebonne Parish. The Times Picayune tells the story, here is a long excerpt:
Chief Albert Naquin is tired. Tired of seeing his community flooded. Tired of begging for help.
More than a week after Hurricane Gustav pushed water over the ring levee protecting the island in south Terrebonne Parish, where descendants of several American Indian communities still live, Naquin, chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, declared: “This is my last one. I’m not going to keep doing this.”
Naquin says it is time for the island’s remaining residents to move farther inland, surrendering their way of life to the twin threats of storm surge and coastal erosion.
Even as he spoke, another reminder of the island’s vulnerability was closing in. Hurricane Ike brought a 9-foot storm surge a little more than a week later, overtopping the island’s 6- to 7-foot levee and swamping homes again. The exasperated chief reiterated what he said after Gustav: This is the last hurricane season he will seek relief for those who refuse to move off the island.
People on the island do not give up easily. For generations, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians have lived on the low-lying ridge, which they jokingly call “the bathtub.” Their community has flooded in so many hurricanes that some residents regard hurricane season as an annual test, an ordeal they endure so they can remain connected to the land.
But storm surges are not the only enemy. The island is slowly eroding into the Gulf of Mexico. Most residents do not have the money to continually rebuild, and the community already knows it will never get stronger levee protection.
So, Naquin and tribal leaders once again will try to rally the community of 150 to 175 people to move to higher ground. This time, he hopes tribal leaders will be successful.
“How much beating can you take before you give up?” asked Naquin, 61. “I’m getting too old to be fighting and trying to help people that don’t want to be helped.”
Until the 1950s, American Indians on the island were so isolated that the community was reachable only by boat. The elders still speak in their native Cajun French.
The struggle to stay is really a desire to cling to familiarity, to roots and island traditions and to land where generations have buried their dead in an area now marked by a slender 10-foot-tall white cross. Naquin understands the comforts and sentimentality. He regales visitors with how the island used to boast the best fishers and farmers around, how a single building was the grocery store, dance hall and church.
“I was born on the water,” said oyster fisherman Edison Dardar, whose home flooded in Hurricane Andrew and has been rebuilt. “This is my home.”
In the early 1800s, French, Cajun, Spanish and Indian people lived along southern Louisiana’s bayous, including bands of the Choctaw, Biloxi and Houma Indians. Isle de Jean Charles was officially considered “uninhabitable swamp land” until the state sold plots of property, according to history Naquin provided. Jean Baptiste Narcisse and three other family members bought the first plots, and the island’s original families grew from Frenchmen who married American Indian women.
The island survived, even as hurricanes washed away other coastal Louisiana towns. In 1893, a hurricane destroyed the Cheniere Caminada settlement near Grand Isle, killing at least half of the 1,600 residents. Cheniere Caminada survivors moved north to Leeville, but a 1915 hurricane devastated the town, killing dozens.
Island residents have seen their world change, pointing out how flooding has worsened during the years since Hurricane Betsy in 1965. A few residents have elevated their homes, but saltwater encroaches the marsh on all sides of the island, taking the land where people farmed and gardened just 40 years ago.
Like other bayou communities, Isle de Jean Charles is a victim of coastal erosion, subsidence and sea-level rise. The oil and gas industry’s construction of canals for vessels and pipelines enabled saltwater from the Gulf to invade and destroy freshwater wetlands. Levee building also caused southern Louisiana communities to be cut off from the Mississippi River and its sediments, which would have replenished the land and prevented it from sinking.
Now we head to Pearlington and find a similar theme with the residents there. Charles Russ is still defiant however. J.R. Welsh reports for the Sun Herald:
Charles Russ is a stubborn old cuss.
From the front porch of his house near the banks of the Pearl River, he has watched life, hurricanes, and high water pass by for more than 40 years. And he’s still here.
His recollections of violent storms go back to Hurricane Betsy in 1965, followed by Camille four years later. “I rode Camille and Betsy out sitting right in this house” with minimal damage, he said last week
But Hurricane Katrina was different. The 2005 storm ripped off his front porch, damaged the roof and destroyed doors and windows. It also swept away a house across the road that was built on stilts 17 feet above the ground, and dismantled another that had stood next door since 1885.
“I had to rebuild” after that one, Russ said.
He wasn’t alone. Katrina submerged most of the homes in Pearlington, and now, storm-weary residents are again throwing out rotted carpet and ruined drywall after hurricanes
Gustav and Ike brought more high water within the past month.
Flood levels varied, but an estimated 139 Pearlington homes took on water during Gustav, and a smaller number were hit by Ike. It’s beginning to get old, and people are getting discouraged.
“It gets pretty disgusting after a while,” said Larry Randall. “You think you’re moving forward, and then… here we have high water again within two weeks, back to back.”
Randall, a lifelong Pearlington resident, had nine feet of water in his home during Katrina. Since then, he has volunteered almost daily at a recovery center in the former gymnasium of Charles B. Murphy School, trying to help hold things together. The school’s main building was also destroyed by Katrina.
Things are so discouraging that Lester Dell, another Pearlington resident, feels almost as sorry for the volunteers who come to help rebuild homes after the storms as he does for his neighbors. He said many are repeat visitors who come from other states after helping rebuild here from a previous storm, only to find their efforts in ruins following a new one.
“All their work… the new drywall, the counter tops, the kitchen cabinets they put in last time… they’re gone again,” Dell said.
Some are wondering whether Pearlington – a quiet, wooded riverside hamlet that now has a down-at-the-heels look – will even survive. Residents have left, never to return, taking big chunks of the tax base with them .
No one is sure exactly how many now remain in homes scattered through the community’s wooded byways. Russ, a former county supervisor who now serves on the Hancock County Planning Commission, said Pearlington had 470 homes and about 1,700 residents before Katrina.
“We’ve had a pretty good bit built back,” he said. “Percentagewise, I think Pearlington is doing as good as anybody, better than some.”
However, others are so heartsick that they dream of leaving. Randall hears it all the time at the recovery center, where he sits behind a desk in a makeshift office.
“We’re trying to get as many to come back as we can,” he said. “But a lot of them have told me they’re going to fix it up as cheaply as possible, and put a for-sale sign on it.”
Aside from a possible exodus, the community has other problems. There is a sense of isolation and children are bused to schools miles away. And even though the county utility authority is planning new water and waste treatment facilities, Pearlington residents still live the way they have for many decades – with wells and septic tanks.
Flooding presents huge problems with such things, including possible floodwater intrusion and contamination. But home is home, and for now, the stubborn and the proud hang on.