LOUISIANA: FIVE HURRICANES AND THE DESTRUCTION OF CAMERON

 November 23, 2021 

In our travels from one birding spot to another, we drove south from Lake Charles, Louisiana to Cameron, Louisiana, about 50 miles. The area we drove through didn't really have any population centers, just small towns, but we began to see a trend: houses on stilts with not a lot around them.

In Southern California we have almost no houses with basements. In this part of Louisiana, they have almost no houses with ground floors. That area under the house does make a great place to park your car.

We figured that the area must be prone to flooding from the nearby Gulf of Mexico.

Many of the houses looked recently painted and/or remodeled, with new, unpainted wooden stairs leading to the front door.

Some of them had landscaping that looked a little battered.

When we drove past this church, it finally dawned on us that this was hurricane damage, so we Googled "Cameron hurricane" and discovered that this poor city has been hit by FIVE major hurricanes in the last 65 years. 

The brick façade of this church was pulled away from the plywood like a label being peeled from a jar.

The first hurricane to hit the area, Hurricane Audrey in 1957, included a storm surge of 12 feet and winds of 125 mph. It caused the death of over 300 locals.

The second, Hurricane Rita, hit in 2005 with 120 mph winds and storm surges of almost 18 feet, which is the highest to ever hit the state. It destroyed a good part of the town, but this time everyone had evacuated.

The third, Hurricane Ike, hit in 2008 when the town was still rebuilding from Rita. Its 12-foot storm surges destroyed more than 90% of the homes in Cameron.

After Ike, insurance rates went up and building codes got stiffer, leading to a 79% drop in population.

But the worst, unbelievably, was yet to come. On August 27, 2020, at 1:00 in the morning, Hurricane Laura blasted Cameron with 150 mph sustained winds, making it a category 4 storm. Even though the surge was "only" 9-12 feet, much of the town was again destroyed or severely damaged.

But wait! Just six weeks later Hurricane Delta, a category 2 storm, hit nearby, causing further damage and slowing the clean up from Laura.

I got nervous just driving through town! Some homes were just shells--no windows or stairs and damaged roofs.

Other homes were blown away entirely, only a concrete rectangle indicating something had once been there, such as this one on the top of a little hill. Many of the empty lots had an RV hooked up to the electrical lines.

Speaking of RVs, now we understood why there were so many RV parks--dozens and dozens of them! I for sure would want a mobile house if I lived here.

We stopped at this church, once home to the Wakefield United Methodist Church congregation. Oddly, the roof is more or less intact . . . 

. . . but the church bell is frozen upside down . . . 

. . . and it looks like a bomb exploded inside.

I was impressed by the graveyard attached to the church. It looks like a lot of work has been done to clean it up. Pictures I've seen of cemeteries after the 2020 hurricane show all the upright headstones lying flat or broken and some of the cement slabs blown off the graves. 

I'm always compelled to wander among the graves of a cemetery, wondering about the permanent residents. This woman must have made great chocolate chip cookies.

I was also intrigued by this stone with its photo of a sprawling cattle ranch.

Down the road, it was good to see that the public library had made it through the most recent hurricanes Laura and Delta (2020). Two previous libraries were totally destroyed by hurricanes Rita (2005) and Ike (2008). This one looks built to last.

However, the most wonderful site in Cameron (at least for Bob) had to have been this food truck, Anchors Up Grill. It was a good sign that local workers were lined up at the window.

Bob ordered a shrimp po'boy and crab poppers.

The po'boy was really good. The poppers, deep fried, were meh.

On our way to our hotel in Port Arthur, Texas, we stopped by an area on the coast that we would return to the next morning.

We saw the usual houses on piles . . .

. . . and what used to be houses on piles.

There were other signs of the recent storms. Beautiful as this coastline is, I would not want to live here, no matter how securely my house seemed to be built.