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

LAKE CHARLES, Louisiana — Every day, Lois Malvo waits for her son to fetch six buckets of water from a backyard faucet. He then bathes his 78-year-old mother with water heated on the stove and a spray pump he bought online.

It’s been four years since Hurricanes Laura and Delta devastated Lake Charles in southwestern Louisiana, and Malvo still has no plumbing. Unable to secure funds for repairs without federal funding that she fears will never come, Malvo continues to live in a crumbling house with sagging floors and wires sticking out of the ceiling.

Amid the height of hurricane season, recovery continues at a slow pace in a community the Weather Channel once called America’s “most weather-ravaged city.” Some residents of Lake Charles, a predominantly black city where a fifth of the population lives in poverty, are stuck in similar circumstances as they did right after the 2020 hurricanes. They fear they have slipped through the cracks, even though some have been approved for federal funds but face a looming deadline to complete their awards or risk losing them.

While some homeowners are still waiting for financial relief, others are in a legal limbo with insurance companies they say have grossly understated their losses. And then there are those who simply can’t find housing after the hurricanes devastated apartment complexes and neighborhoods.

“It’s very, very frustrating living like this,” Malvo said. “Sometimes I get so down I just want to give up.”

Hurricane Lauraone of the most powerful storms to ever hit louisiana tore through lake charles in august 2020. six weeks later, Hurricane Delta delivered another blow, much in the same devastating manner.

Evacuated residents returned home after the storms to find catastrophic damage, saying it looked like an atomic bomb had gone off. A few months later, winter storms caused pipes to burst and water systems to fail.

According to the US government, the successive hurricanes in the US have caused an estimated $22 billion in damage. National Hurricane Centerwith Louisiana taking the hardest hits. Delta and Laura were also blamed for 49 direct deaths nationwide and in the Caribbean.

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

Residents waited for years for significant federal funding to reach Lake Charles, while Congress was dealing with another crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.

It wasn’t until 2022, a year and a half after the battle and months after Louisiana had endured more disasters, flash floods and Hurricane Ida ravaging communities along Louisiana’s southeastern coast, that the financial aid homeowners so desperately wanted was announced.

Of that, $1 billion was allocated to Louisiana Restore, the state program charged with distributing federal funds to homeowners affected by natural disasters. More than 8,000 homeowners affected by Laura and Delta immediately completed the first step to qualify. About 60 percent were invited to apply based on factors such as the extent of damage to their home, according to Restore’s assessments.

Tasha Guidry organized local initiatives and helped dozens of people qualify for Restore, helping them draft current wills and probate documents that documented current ownership of the home.

Guidry had her own home rebuilt through Restore, but like other residents interviewed by The Associated Press, she acknowledged it was a struggle and that some of the city’s most vulnerable didn’t receive enough money for repairs.

“The process was very tiring,” 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 affected by Laura or Delta. About two-thirds were offered funding, totaling $201 million. So far, $91 million has been distributed to 1,444 homeowners. About 1,400 people were denied and several thousand were not approved to apply.

The remaining 440 homeowners who qualified for Restore financing have just two months to complete their applications or risk losing them.

Reasons for denial range from the fact that the damage determined by FEMA is less than $3,000, the homeowner has a certain level of insurance, cannot account for previously received compensation, or lacks documentation.

Among those turned away was Antoinette Chretien, who used insurance money and a FEMA loan to partially repair her home. But it wasn’t enough. The house still smells of mold and is still tilted.

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

In total, 80% of the program’s $1 billion fund is earmarked for homeowners affected by the 2020 or 2021 hurricanes. About $169 million “remains unobligated,” the state said.

In downtown Lake Charles stands a brick house with a cutout and a piece of tarp covering missing sections of roof. The home’s owner, Terra Hillman, lives in a FEMA trailer in the backyard — a “sardine can,” she says, compared to her now-rotted home.

“It’s literally falling apart before my eyes,” Hillman said. “It’s like watching someone with cancer slowly die.”

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

Hillman recently got a notice that she is in violation of local ordinances by still living in the trailer. She said FEMA wants her out, even though she has nowhere to go.

“I don’t really know if I can handle this anymore,” she said.

According to the two hurricanes, more than 200,000 residential property claims have been filed in Louisiana. facts from the state’s Department of Insurance. Insurers paid out at least $5 billion in claims to homeowners. According to a report According to NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Laura caused an estimated $17.5 billion in damages in Louisiana alone.

Residents and officials say insurance companies have made recovery more difficult for Lake Charles. Some homeowners were forced to go to court to get fair deals. Others couldn’t afford the time and expense of a lawsuit and settled for a fraction of what they thought they were owed.

As claims mounted, a handful of companies went bankrupt or fled Louisiana, transferring tens of thousands of claims into the state’s bailout program. The Louisiana Insurance Crisis continues, resulting in fewer businesses operating in the state, resulting in higher premiums.

The hurricanes have wiped out neighborhoods and apartment complexes, leaving a shortage of affordable housing. None of the city’s 463 public housing units are currently habitable, and hundreds of Section 8 homes have been lost, leaving fewer options for the city’s poorest residents, said 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 shortly after Delta.

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

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

Breaux isn’t alone. Lake Charles’ population is estimated to have declined 6.2% from 2020 to 2023, the 12th-largest decline in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

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

New homes are also being built to better withstand future hurricanes, said Thomas Corley of SBP, an organization that has helped Lake Charles and other hurricane-stricken communities rebuild. They are being fitted with roofs that can better withstand high winds and watertight kitchen cabinets.

For some, the road to full recovery can take a lifetime. The hurricanes left residents grappling with trauma and fears that flare up when ominous weather forecasts and stormy skies return.

Darleen Wesley and her family lived in a house with boarded up windows and a leaky roof for years while they waited for repairs to their home and sued their insurance company. Now they are finally back in their rebuilt home after living in their backyard workshop for months during construction.

Still, Wesley’s daughter calls her in panic when there’s a thunderstorm. And Wesley tries not to think about what might happen when the next hurricane hits.

“And then I’m back to square one,” she said. “How do I prepare for this again?”

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Cline reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Brook is a staff 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 under-reported issues. Follow Brook on the X social platform: @jack_brook96.