LCV Winter 2012 - (Page 61)

dumped on the town was devastating, and it drove away an estimated 600 of the 2,300 people who had lived in delcambre before the storm. hurricane ike hit the town almost as hard three years later, and residents who had stayed in town but failed to raise their homes to meet the flood elevation guidelines set by fEma were hammered by flooding again. Looking critically upon delcambre’s vulnerability to the elements, Broussard fretted that, absent a dramatic reversal of fortune like that envisioned by the harbor makeover proposal, the little town might just slowly waste away. flooding to subside. when they finally made their way into henry, the displaced houses that they saw had been washed into the cane fields and cow pastures braced them for the worst. their home, it turned out, was still there, damaged, but salvageable, not entirely ruined or washed away altogether like so many others. for the next seven months, they lived in the home of their friend Charles “Peanut” Vallot in abbeville. for five of those months, storm victims teddy and Gayle Broussard of Erath lived there too. “three families in one home in abbeville,” Luquette Storm victims in coastal Louisiana were left to navigate a maddening, often booby-trapped bureaucratic maze before finding assistance. Champagne’s supermarket wanted to come back to delcambre, but it couldn’t. in the months after rita, as the owners wrangled with insurance companies, the damaged store was made available to a methodist mission and used as a hurricane relief center, warehousing donations of furniture, used appliances and clothing for the area’s needy storm victims. their court fight against their insurers ultimately proved successful, but by the time the owners saw any money, the delcambre building — also flooded by ike — was in such bad shape that it was beyond repair. they often reiterated their commitment to delcambre, though, and continued to look for alternate sites in the town where they might situate a new store. “it’s killing us not to be in delcambre right now, but we can’t,” Luquette lamented. as the people in Erath, delcambre and henry worked their way back from disaster, Luquette remained acutely aware of the community’s struggle. he saw it. he knew it. he was living it himself — not only as a civic-minded citizen active in the Knights of Columbus and the volunteer fire department, not only as the supermarket manager juggling myriad and complex business difficulties arising from three flooded stores, but also on a personal level as a storm victim. he had spent the night after rita’s landfall at City hall, and his wife mary and daughters Kimberly and Karissa had stayed with friends in abbeville. it was three more days before they could get back to henry to check on their home. it’s an eerie feeling for an evacuee, waiting for the water to go down, knowing deep down that the damage back home is going to be bad — really bad — but eagerly, almost desperately wanting to see your house for yourself that first time. the Luquettes endured that anxiety like all their neighbors as they waited for the said. “we were friends, but before we left, we were family. we’d been knowing each other for years — we see each other, we talk, but you know it doesn’t really get personal. But this, before it was all over, our families just knitted together. “You lose your two businesses, you lose your homes, you lose everything, and you just start over. Everything happens for a reason, though. it made truer Christians out of people, it really did. it brought families together that weren’t together. it made new families out of friends.” Back on south Kibbe street in Erath, Champagne’s supermarket finally reopened six months after that fateful meeting with the banker. freshly painted, shelves fully stocked, new coolers and freezers up and running, the store never looked better. Employees at Champagne’s had looked forward to the day for a long time, but they were hardly prepared for what happened when they threw open the doors on January 11, 2007. the opening day was one big family reunion, filled with hugs, tears, more hugs, a palpable sense of the camaraderie that makes american small-town life so endearing, and finally, shopping carts full of groceries. “You couldn’t imagine it,” Luquette said, his eyes welling with tears even months later as he recalled the experience. “Just the warm feeling that everybody had. Everybody became not just friends, but one big family.” and Erath had found its pulse again. __________________________________________________ Excerpted with permission from Hell or High Water: How Cajun Fortitude Withstood Hurricanes Rita and Ike by Ron Thibodeaux, published by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press in 2012. For more information, log on to www.ulpress.org/catalog.php?item=129 Ron Thibodeaux was hired as an associate editor for Louisiana Cultural Vistas and KnowLA.org, the Digital Encyclopedia of Louisiana, in November 2012. Previously, he was the St. Tammany bureau chief of The Times-Picayune and an employee of the newspaper for 31 years. Winter 2012-13 • Louisiana CuLturaL Vistas 61  http://www.ulpress.org/catalog.php?item=129 http://www.KnowLA.org

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