Ethermac Exchange-Residents in a Louisiana city devastated by 2020 hurricanes are still far from recovery

LAKE CHARLES,Ethermac Exchange La. (AP) — Every other day Lois Malvo waits for her son to bring six buckets of water from a spigot in the backyard. He then bathes his 78-year-old mother using water heated on the stove and washes her with a spray pump he bought online.

It’s been four years since hurricanes Laura and Delta decimated Lake Charles in southwest Louisiana, and Malvo is still without plumbing. Unable to afford repairs without federal funds she fears will never arrive, Malvo remains in a crumbling home where the floor sags and wires poke from the ceiling.

In the midst of peak hurricane season, recovery continues at a creeping pace in a community the Weather Channel once called America’s “most weather-battered city.” Some residents in Lake Charles, a mostly Black city where one-fifth of the population live in poverty, are stuck in similar conditions as they were immediately following the 2020 hurricanes. They fear they’ve slipped through the cracks, even as some have been approved for federal funds but face a nearing deadline to close on their award or risk losing it.

While some homeowners continue to wait for financial relief, others are in legal limbo with insurance companies they say gravely underestimated their damage. Then there are those who simply cannot find housing, after the hurricanes destroyed apartment complexes and neighborhoods.

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“It’s very, very frustrating to live like this,” Malvo said. “Sometimes I’m so down I just feel like giving up.”

State of Lake Charles

Hurricane Laura, one of the most powerful storms to strike Louisiana, tore through Lake Charles in August 2020. Six weeks later, Hurricane Delta delivered another blow, largely following the same destructive path.

Evacuated residents returned home from the storms to catastrophic damage, saying it looked like an atomic bomb had detonated. A few months later, winter storms caused pipes to burst and knocked out water systems.

The back-to-back hurricanes inflicted an estimated $22 billion in damage throughout the U.S., according to the National Hurricane Center, with Louisiana taking the brunt of the hit. Delta and Laura were also blamed for causing 49 direct deaths nationwide and in the Caribbean..

While there are signs of rebuilding and growth in much of Lake Charles, other areas appear frozen in time. Students learn in modular classrooms outside a still-unusable high school. A 22-story office building, once a city icon, remains an abandoned eyesore and is slated for demolition. FEMA-issued blue tarps covering damaged roofs have disintegrated to tatters.

Federal funding delays

Residents waited years for substantial federal funding to reach Lake Charles as Congress dealt with another crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.

It wasn’t until 2022 — a year and a half of struggle later and months after Louisiana grappled with more disasters, flash flooding and Hurricane Ida barreling into Louisiana’s southeastern coast communities — that financial relief homeowners longed for was announced.

Of that, $1 billion was allocated to Louisiana Restore; the state’s program tasked with distributing federal funds to homeowners impacted by natural disasters. Immediately, more than 8,000 homeowners affected by Laura and Delta completed the first step to qualify. About 60% were invited to apply based on factors like the extent of their home’s damage according to Restore’s assessments.

Tasha Guidry organized grassroots efforts, assisting dozens of people to qualify for Restore by helping them prepare up to date wills and succession documents reflecting the current ownership of the house.

Guidry managed to get her own home rebuilt by Restore, but like other residents The Associated Press interviewed, she acknowledged it was a battle and some of the most vulnerable in the city lost out on receiving sufficient recovery funds.

“The process was very tedious,” she said. “A lot of our people gave up because they didn’t understand how to navigate the process.”

Restore received 3,935 applications from homeowners impacted by Laura or Delta. About two-thirds were offered funding, totaling $201 million. So far, $91 million has been distributed among 1,444 homeowners. Around 1,400 people were rejected and a few thousand weren’t approved to apply.

A remaining 440 homeowners approved for Restore funding have just two months left to close on their award or risk losing it.

Rejection reasons vary from having FEMA-assessed damages less than $3,000, carrying a certain level of insurance, homeowners being unable to account for prior recovery money they received or missing documentation.

Among the rejected was Antoinette Chretien, who used insurance money and a FEMA loan to partially fix her home. But it wasn’t enough. The house still smells of mildew and remains crooked.

Chretien said she was initially promised that Restore would help rebuild her home but was recently refused because she had already received some assistance for repairs.

In total, 80% of the program’s $1 billion fund has been earmarked to homeowners impacted by the 2020 or 2021 hurricanes. Around $169 million “remains unobligated,” according to the state.

Insurance woes

In downtown Lake Charles, a brick house sits with a chunk gouged out and a patchwork of tarps covering missing pieces of the roof. The home’s owner, Terra Hillman, lives in the backyard in a FEMA trailer — a “sardine can,” she says, compared to her now rotting home.

“It’s literally falling down and collapsing before my eyes,” Hillman said. “It’s like watching somebody with cancer slowly die.”

Hillman says she has an estimated $300,000 worth of damage to her home. Her insurance company paid her around $30,000.

Hillman recently received a notice saying she’s violating local ordinances by still living in the trailer. She said FEMA wants her out, though she has nowhere to go.

“I don’t really know how much more I can take it,” she said.

The two hurricanes resulted in more than 200,000 residential property claims filed in Louisiana, according to data from the state Department of Insurance. Insurers paid out at least $5 billion in claims to homeowners. According to a report by NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Laura alone caused an estimated $17.5 billion in damage to Louisiana.

Residents and officials say insurance companies have made recovery harder for Lake Charles. Some homeowners were forced into litigation to get fair deals. Others couldn’t afford the time or cost of a court battle and settled for a fraction of what they believe they’re owed.

As claims mounted, a handful of companies declared bankruptcy or fled Louisiana, shifting tens of thousands of claims to the state’s bailout program. Louisiana’s insurance crisis continues, with fewer companies doing business in the state, resulting in higher premiums.

Housing crisis

The hurricanes wiped out neighborhoods and apartment complexes, leaving affordable housing in short supply. None of the city’s 463 public housing units are currently livable and hundreds of Section 8 houses have been lost, leaving fewer options for the city’s poorest residents, according to Ben Taylor, executive director of the Lake Charles Housing Authority.

Some displaced residents were forced to leave Lake Charles.

Ramona Breaux and her two children moved two hours away to live with relatives in Houston. Breaux, 60, is disabled and lives on a fixed income. For more than a decade she rented a subsidized home in Lake Charles, which burned down soon after Delta.

Since then, she has been unable to find an affordable living space in the city where she was born and raised.

“I want to come home,” said Breaux, who spends Sunday mornings online watching services at the church she left in Lake Charles.

Breaux isn’t alone. The population of Lake Charles dropped an estimated 6.2% from 2020 to 2023. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, it was the 12th steepest decline in the nation.

Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter said the city is doing what it can. New housing developments expected to be finished next year should leave the city with more rental units than it had before the storms.

New homes are also being built to be more resilient to future hurricanes, said Thomas Corley of SBP, an organization that has helped Lake Charles and other hurricane-impacted communities rebuild. They’re being topped with roofs that can better withstand powerful winds and waterproof kitchen cabinets.

Post-hurricane trauma

For some, the road to full recovery may take a lifetime. The hurricanes left residents grappling with trauma and anxiety that ignites when threatening forecasts and stormy skies return.

Darleen Wesley and her family spent years living in a home with boarded up windows and a leaking roof as they waited for home repairs and fought their insurer in court. Now they’re finally back in their rebuilt home after spending months living in their backyard workshop during construction.

Still, Wesley’s daughter calls her, panicking, whenever it thunders. And Wesley tries not to think about what might happen when the next hurricane hits.

“And then I’m right back where I started,” she said. “How do I prepare for this again?”

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Cline reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Brook on the social platform X: @jack_brook96.