Photos courtesy of Jessi Parfait
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” ~ Maya Angelou
It’s been a year since Hurricane Ida ravaged the Gulf Coast, my lifelong home and the place where my ancestors, the Houma, have inhabited for thousands of years. Storms aren’t uncommon here. Nearly everyone I know has a hurricane story of staying, evacuating, rebuilding, or relocating. But for me, Ida was different. It was one of those life events that will be forever etched as a fixed point in time like the loss of a loved one. In a way, that’s an apt metaphor because it certainly launched me into a period of mourning but not for the things we lost. No - it set off a mourning for something even greater. But let’s back up to where this grief began.
The first storm I remember was Hurricane Andrew - in 1992. It destroyed my family home, and my grandmother no longer felt safe on the land she lived on for decades. So we moved ‘up the bayou’ as we like to say, a little further north in a place a little safer and didn’t typically flood. But when Hurricane Rita hit in 2005 - which struck mere weeks after Katrina- that area flooded too. Thankfully, my family managed to escape relatively unscathed with very little lost, but we decided to move again, a little further up the bayou in a community that my parents had never seen flood in their lifetime. We all thought we would be safe here.
Enter Hurricane Ida, on the 16th anniversary of Katrina- making landfall as a strong category 4 storm with sustained winds of 150 mph and gusts that exceeded that, becoming the second most intense and damaging hurricane in recorded history.
Hurricane damaged home in Houma.
The devastation was immense. I saw brick walls knocked over, mobile homes flipped upside down, people rummaging through rubble that was once their homes trying to find anything salvageable. It looked as though a bomb detonated. I have never seen anything like it, and hope I never will again.
Once Ida passed, I didn’t have time to think. With assistance and supplies from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, we were working on my family’s home only 2 days after the storm. The roads were littered with downed power lines, trees, and debris that local community members with tractors came together to clear on their own and I’m forever grateful to that work because without it, it would have taken days longer to make the drive. When we arrived the shingles of my parent’s roof were gone, leaving nothing but the bare wood beneath and the rain easily made its way into the home. Light fixtures looked like fish bowls, drywall had fallen from the ceiling, it didn’t take long for the mold to form and spread.
An aerial view of Jessi's parents' neighborhood after Hurrican Ida.
It may sound weird to say, but we were actually lucky. In the same neighborhood, homes looked as if they were split in half and entire roofs were taken off. We tarped the roof in temperatures that exceeded 90 degrees, in sunshine that felt taunting considering the weather a few days before. It was hot, we were sunburnt and exhausted and it felt like all we were really doing was putting a bandaid on a bullet wound.
Jessi's jambalya made to feed recovery volunteers.
For days, we cleared the house, saving what we could and stacking the rest in a pile by the road. When things were in a stable enough condition I began helping others, organizing volunteers, gutting homes in hazmat suits, cooking the biggest jambalaya I ever had to feed folks who had driven from all over the south to volunteer. We did this every day for a month and when I finally let the dust settle, the severity of it all finally set in.
Coastal Louisiana is a unique and beautiful place. Built by the mighty Mississippi River, the delta has been inhabited for thousands of years. There is human made architecture in Louisiana that predate the pyramids of Giza - earth mounds made by Indigenous people located on LSU’s campus were even recently named the oldest human made structures on the Americas. Our culture and food are exported and consumed by people all over the world, and tourists come here by the millions every single year to experience Louisiana’s wonders.
But if you pull back the curtain, you'll notice the sad story that's hidden in the maps of the last few decades. Louisiana has lost more than 1,800 square miles of land in the last 80 years and we’re projected to lose another 2,250 in the next 50 years. But this land isn’t just useless swamps. Their natural functions are necessary for sustaining a livable planet. The marsh is capable of absorbing storm surges and act as our first line of defense, a speed bump of sorts against hurricanes. The loss of wetlands means we lose our protection. Places like my parent’s home that would have never flooded before are now in danger, places that were once safe, but won’t be for much longer. My home is becoming uninhabitable.
But my story isn’t unique. The climate crisis is impacting everyone in different ways from historic fires, droughts, rain storms, tornados, and so on. It’s creating infrastructure collapse across the world, and fueling increasing uncertainty for so many people.
So why are we collectively behaving like everything is okay, as if our actions today won’t have a lasting impact on future generations? Why do we act like we can continue as is? We know what the root problems are. We know that the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are fueling the climate crisis - and are building in the very places that are the most vulnerable to climate disasters.
Right now there are over a dozen liquified natural gas (LNG) - or fracked gas - facilities being proposed and operational in coastal Louisiana. Plaquemines LNG, an export facility under construction right now in Southern Louisiana, will have the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of 31 coal plants or 26.3 million cars, every year for the 30 year life of the project. The area where this plant is being built was flooded for over a month after Hurricane Ida. No one can make this project make sense.
These facilities are enormous and pose serious hazards in the short term, but their long term impacts will be far worse. Global polluting industries and the banks that finance them treat the Gulf Coast as a sacrifice zone- as though our people and our culture are collateral damage in the pursuit of endless profits while we suffer. This is a clear cut environmental injustice.
It’s been a year since Hurricane Ida and many are still picking up the pieces of their lives while looking over our shoulders at the disturbances currently in the Gulf. We should have heeded the warnings about our climate decades ago. But the next best time is now.