DULAC, Louisiana — Shortly after Hurricane Francine’s storm surge flooded a cemetery in the Louisiana bayou town of Dulac, Lori-Ann Bergeron arrived Thursday to check on the graves of three generations. Their headstones were fine, but nearby caskets had emerged alongside broken crosses and soggy bouquets.
“It happens almost every time the water rises, but this is the only place for them,” said Bergeron, 51, who remembers her sister’s coffin being exhumed when Hurricane Rita devastated the area in 2005.
“It was hard having to bury someone twice,” she said.
From cemeteries to homes to businesses and parks, Gulf Coast residents are still reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Ida three years ago we cleaned up the mess left by Francinewhich hit Louisiana on Wednesday as a Category 2 hurricane.
The storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of utility customers, sent floodwaters into coastal towns and raised fears of flooding in New Orleans and surrounding areas.
“The human spirit is defined by its resilience, and resilience is what defines Louisiana,” Gov. Jeff Landry told a news conference. “There are certainly times and situations that test us, but it’s also when we in this state are at our best.”
There have been no reports of deaths or injuries, he said.
The storm, which fueled the extremely warm waters of the Gulf of Mexicoflooded much of the South, including parts of Arkansas and Florida. Flash flooding threatened cities as far away as Atlanta, Jackson, Mississippi, Birmingham, Alabama, and Memphis, Tennessee.
Francine slammed into the Louisiana coast with 100 mph (155 km/h) winds Wednesday evening in coastal Terrebonne Parish, leaving vulnerable coastal area that has not yet been fully restored from a series of devastating hurricanes in 2020 and 2021. The system then moved rapidly toward New Orleans, battering the city with torrential rains. The city woke up to widespread power outages and streets covered in debris.
Running water almost surrounded a pickup truck in a New Orleans tunnel, trapping the driver. A 39-year-old emergency room nurse who lived nearby waded into waist-high water with a hammer, smashed the window and pulled the driver out. The rescue was captured live on WDSU.
“It’s just second nature, I guess, as a nurse you just go in there and let it happen, right?” Miles Crawford told The Associated Press on Thursday. “I just had to get him out of there.”
The water was up to the driver’s head and it continued to rise, he said.
News footage from coastal communities showed waves from lakes, rivers and Gulf waters crashing against seawalls. Water poured into city streets in blinding downpours. Oak and cypress trees leaned in the high winds, and some power poles swayed.
At the height of the storm, 450,000 people in Louisiana were without power, the Public Service Commission said. Much of the power outages were due to falling debris, not structural damage. At one point, about 500 people were in emergency shelters, officials said.
“The amount of money invested in resilience has really made a difference, from the power outages to the number of homes saved,” said Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who attended the governor’s news conference.
In the southern Louisiana coastal town of Cocodrie, where many families have vacation homes on the bayou for fishing, police guarded a road to prevent looting as people cleared their belongings.
Brooks Pellegrin, 50, and his family cleared mud from their campsite, a two-story building with a large dock on a canal about 14 miles (22 kilometers) from the Gulf of Mexico. They worked Thursday afternoon, raking marsh grass and hosing away muddy floors after a 10-foot (3-meter) storm surge washed away the building’s back wall, porch and much of the boat deck.
“We built everything so we didn’t have to do that. This one brought in a lot more water than Ida,” Pellegrin said. “It had a lot more punch than I expected.”
For many people in the area bordering bays, marshes, lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, flooding and hurricanes have become a normal occurrence, said Craig Webre, sheriff of Lafourche Parish.
Water covers about a quarter of the area in the parish, which is home to about 97,000 people south of New Orleans. In 2021, Ida made landfall in the southern tip of the parish as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph (241 km/h).
That storm was “catastrophic” and “the most significant hurricane” to hit the area. After the 2021 storm, 90% of homes in the area needed roof replacements and many homes were damaged beyond repair, Webre said.
Over the years, the area has become more resilient to storms, improving drainage and pumping stations and replacing roofs that are better able to withstand hurricane-force winds. Residents are also more likely to evacuate when there is a significant storm threat, Webre said.
“This population is very resilient. They are very independent. They are very pioneering,” he said.
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Cline reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Associated Press writers Kevin McGill in New Orleans, Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg, Florida, Jeff Martin in Atlanta and Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this story.