LAKE CHARLES, La. — A blue tarp covered a hole in their roof, torn open when the last hurricane blew through. Friday night, the next hurricane tried to rip the tarp away.
Earnestine and Milton Wesley had decided to ride out Hurricane Delta in their Lake Charles home, damaged just weeks earlier by Hurricane Laura.
As the wind rustled the tarp above them, they grabbed it through the hole in the ceiling and held on tight. Water poured in, flooding their den.
“We fought all night long trying to keep things intact,” Milton said. “And with God’s help we made it.”
Delta made landfall Friday evening near the coastal town of Creole with top winds of 100 mph. It moved over Lake Charles, a city where Hurricane Laura damaged nearly every home and building in late August.
No deaths had been reported by Saturday evening, but a hurricane’s wake can be treacherous. Seven of the 32 deaths attributed to Laura came the day that hurricane struck. Many others were caused by carbon monoxide poisoning from generators, and 10,000 utility workers were dispatched Saturday to get power restored to thousands of customers.
Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter estimated that hundreds of already battered homes took on water. And people were already exhausted and stressed — for two weeks the Wesleys had been sleeping on their back porch to escape the heat because they had no power.
“Add Laura and Delta together and it’s just absolutely unprecedented and catastrophic,” Hunter said. “We are very concerned that with everything going in the country right now that this incident may not be on the radar nationally like it should be.”
Before Friday’s storm, the streets were already lines with mountains of debris from the prior storm — piles of soggy insulation, moldy mattresses, tree limbs, twisted metal siding, ruined family treasures.
While Delta was a weaker storm than Category 4 Laura, it inflicted most of its damage with rain instead of wind. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said it dumped more than 15 inches of rain on Lake Charles over two days and more than 10 inches on Baton Rouge.
The floodwaters surged up the Wesley family’s front yard, and they were terrified it would pour inside but it stopped short of the door. It carried with it bags of trash and muck, swept up from their neighbors’ piles of debris from the prior storm.
“The water was something else last night,” Milton said. “We’ve never seen it flood so bad out here, to the point I could have swam out here last night, that’s just how deep it was.”
On Saturday, they joined other southern Louisiana residents starting the routine yet again: dodging overturned cars on the roads, chain-sawing fallen trees, trudging through knee-deep water to flooded homes with ruined floors and no power, pledging to rebuild.
