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Hello, and welcome to Louisiana Spotlight.

I'm your host, Karen LeBlanc.

Louisiana has faced its fair share of natural disasters, but the hurricanes of 2020 and 2021 left an indelible mark on our state.

Hurricane Laura, a category four storm, devastated southwest Louisiana in August 2020.

Just over a year later.

Hurricane Ida, another category four storm, wreaked havoc on southeast Louisiana.

Tonight, we'll explore the aftermath of these storms and examine how Louisiana has recovered in the years since.

We'll look at the progress made in rebuilding homes and businesses and infrastructure, and we'll also discuss the challenges that remain from ongoing housing shortages to economic recovery.

And we'll examine how these storms have shaped Louisiana's approach to disaster preparedness and resilience.

But first, we'll hear from one resident of Grand Isle who is doing all he can to restore the island after Hurricane Ida devastated it three years ago.

Well, the town took a beating for it.

It really did.

And one of the things that we're trying to preserve is this hotel and the oleander, so that we can use it as a like a community center.

And no place for people to gather.

This is the oleander right here.

My name is Ronnie Sampey.

I'm the president of Restore Grand Isle and the Grand Isle Garden Club.

I've been president of the Garden Club for seven years, and I just started Restore Grand Isle 14 months ago.

Well, some of the small projects is like the, planting of oak trees to restore the oak forest on the island, which the island was famous for.

We have a community garden where we can feed people that live on the island, that are still suffering from the effects of Ida.

We have a nursery that, produces the oak trees that we're putting in the ground.

And one of our large projects is the Oleander Hotel, which is right in the back of me.

And we're looking to do that so that we can have a community center so that we can restore the island and the community.

The last storm really hurt us.

my big project with the garden club is we're replanting oak trees.

The Grand Isle was really known for its oak forest and for Ida, for Hurricane Ida.

And we lost 60% of our trees.

So I have a project going on.

To date, I have 235 trees in the ground that we put in since November of last year.

And if you notice, the buildings that are in the old barns are still here.

So it's a buffer for the homes that we have here on Grand Isle for the hurricanes.

There are homes on the island now that are over 100 years old, and they're built on the ground, and it still exists because of the oak trees being a barrier.

So one of the projects that the Garden Club took on was to replace the trees that were taken from the hurricane, and it's going to take years and years to do it.

But you got to start.

And that's what we did.

We started and we have 230, oak trees planted in a year.

One of the biggest problems we have is we've lost population.

There's no place for people to live.

And if you got go by the FEMA regs, then they can't afford to home.

And then they can afford the home.

They can't afford the insurance.

So we lost our population, our native population.

The thing is we have no local residents anymore.

We have lost half or more of the people who lived over here, and that causes us to have a problem with labor and the workers to be able to work in the restaurants and supermarkets, hardware stores.

And the bill at least service the community.

We don't have that anymore.

If we can get our government to assist us in setting up housing, we're working on a project now called Workforce Housing.

If you can get a job here on Grand Isle, then you will be eligible for housing.

And we thinking that if we can do it that way, we can bring back the community and the people who were living here before the hurricane.

We need residents.

And that's what our goal is, is try to build the community back with residents.

And along this road to recovery to help us better understand the current state of affairs.

I'm joined by expert Jacques Thibodeaux.

He is the director of the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, also known as GOHSEP.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Well, so we just heard from, Ronnie Sampey about, what's going on in Grand Isle, what's going on with the coastal communities as a whole in terms of recovery from these two hurricanes?

Well, the first thing is, when you look at this, this story, it just talks to the resiliency of the Louisiana people.

I've grown up in the parish my whole life.

I've gone to Grand all the whole time there.

And what he's talking about is a real world situation that we're all faced with.

On recovering from the 2020 and 2021 storms of Laura, Delta, Zeta and Ida.

And housing becomes a real issue.

He brought up a really interesting solution, which is perhaps the government investing or assisting with worker housing to bring people back to these communities, bring the workers back to rebuild.

Everything that you do must start at the local community.

So he's right on point where where whatever we can do economically to help Grand Isle and the residents and the people there, we have to do.

And it all starts with that local element and a commitment from the resources just to make things better.

So where are we in terms of the recovery process in the state as a whole?

I mean, Grand Isle wasn't the only coastal community or area hit by Laura and Ida.

What kind of progress have we made?

Well, if you look at where we are, the storms and sales were significant.

First off, when you look at Hurricane Laura, it caused, to date about $16 billion in damage.

And then we have hurricane Ida, just because of the nature of the wind, has caused $22 billion in damage.

So our recovery as we go through that go ship's primary job is to move those federal resources, mainly dollars to all the parishes.

And all the municipalities are out there to make things better for the people.

So we've been in it now for four years and we're going to continue to be in this until we get get everyone through.

What are some of the biggest challenges that the state has faced in the recovery process?

Well, the hardest aspect of it is when you're talking about what happens with recovery.

It's a long term thing.

You look at the emergency management cycle, starts with prepare, then goes to respond, and then you recover and mitigate and prevent.

So you look at some of the elements.

We're still recovering from Hurricane Katrina and Rita and Gustaf and Ike.

And it just gets exacerbated when you wind up having Laura, Delta, Zeta and then a Hurricane Ida, when you get the devastation of your electrical grid and your infrastructure.

That's that's the real challenge.

when you have no electricity, you have no natural gas, you have no water, you have no sewer.

and it becomes a very difficult recovery process.

So to circle back to what Ronnie said, definitely restoring the infrastructure is very important.

Also restoring the population.

And that goes back to housing.

And what he said is a struggle statewide.

And that is if you can afford to build to FEMA specs.

Great.

maybe you can afford the house, but you can't afford the insurance because of where you live in these hurricane zones, so to speak.

How do we fix this?

This is fundamental.

We can restore infrastructure all we want.

But if we can't create a situation where people can afford to live in these communities.

Well, I think it comes back to you.

Look at what we're facing right now, particularly after Hurricane Ida is the insurance crisis on what we had where we had insurance companies go default.

We have situations where you're trying to do a recovery and FEMA always asks the homeowners start with an insurance at first.

Well, if you have no insurance and then maybe, maybe you haven't done a succession on a house that's passed through multi generations.

That becomes a challenge.

It's GOHSEP█s job to break down those barriers and continuing to push for the residents and bring in FEMA money in the form of recovery dollars.

And we also transition it to a housing process where we have the long term recovery subcommittee that we manage with the Office of Community Development, Louisiana, directly for housing.

And it all it all starts with and ends with providing a place for the people that live here to come back to and to live.

The recovery effort is closely tied to the pace at which the FEMA dollars come in, and we hear time and time again, that pace is so slow.

Is there anything that the state can do to expedite or assist in that?

There is.

And we have one of the things that we identified as a critical issue when we came into go step on January 8th with Governor Landry, is we identified it.

Go step had an internal policy on recovery that when you went through all of a parish or municipality, went through all of their FEMA documentation, and it took about 22 months and they received an obligation go ship would basically pay 80% of that obligation.

And then what occurred is the remaining 20% would be, facilitated once all the requirements are met.

We came in and made an administrative change and move that to 90%.

So what that did was that freed up $300 million in FEMA money that was sitting at Go Ship.

It was 150 different agencies and is as critical as that was.

It's a win for the parishes, but it's really a win for the people.

And the next time we have a major storm and you have $100 million in damages or $1 billion in damages, and you're paying 90% upfront instead of 80%, it's a huge win for the parishes that are there.

Absolutely.

Well, the speed of recovery aid is always under scrutiny.

And we spoke with Grand Isle Mayor David Carmody about the slow pace at which recovery aid is being released.

Take a look at this.

I'm proud to tell you that, you know, we are we I construction going on, you know, and I try to explain to the people teach you about 18 months at 24 months to get your money from the federal government.

When you belong to Jefferson Parish, you know, you try to get money from them, and then they send it to you or you get it from the state.

First it comes to the parish, to us, and that's a process too.

So it's just a lot, a lot of like waiting on ten of the houses, waiting on some federal money for drainage, you know, then you got to go to take survey everything we did everything right.

I'm I mean, be talking about it study studies and studies and looking at it, you know, by the time you get it fixed, is it not a hurricane?

And as the mayor said, by the time you get it fixed, there's another hurricane.

And therein lies part of the frustration for everyone, including your job.

So let's talk a little bit about this coordination between all agencies.

We touched on it, but what more can we do?

Well, you can always do more.

And one of the things that we trying to do here to help with it, it's a little bit different mindset.

I spent 31 years in Louisiana National Guard and spent a lot of nights down there with Mayor Camardelle.

And what we're trying to do is more of a regional concept where we can focus more on the coordination at the local level first, and then the parish level and then state agencies.

We do it.

We rehearse all the time, and we practice all the time.

And we just got to continuously get better.

In emergency management, you really have just three missions and you got to be able to save lives, protect the property and maintain infrastructure.

So we've got to have that ability to do all three of those as quickly as we can and really move federal resources to the hands of the local governments.

So there are critics out there that say, you know, why rebuild in areas historically, you know, are going to get hit again by another hurricane?

It seems to be a fool's errand to reinvest in communities that are certainly going to face another hurricane.

what do you say to that as a state agency?

Does it feel sometimes like a fool's errand?

No, not at all.

It's what we do.

Okay.

This is Louisiana is a resilient people, and we live through hurricanes all the time.

The people that may not be from here just don't understand that we don't give up, and we don't give up on each other.

It's what we do.

It's based on our resilience.

Is it sometimes.

Is it nerve, nerve wracking to me to see people not evacuate?

Of course it is.

But their strength is what is so empowering and they always come back.

There's been a big conversation about resilient housing and shoring up our housing stock as a possible solution.

What can the state do, to assist in creating a more resilient housing stock?

There's already programs that are out there.

We we basically lock in $450 million a year after every disaster.

And FEMA has mitigation money to raise houses to make 901 centers more resilient to to harden sheriff's offices with with generators.

We're already doing it.

It's not near enough.

We need as much federal help as we can, and we need to protect our coast.

Well, one of the most pressing issues in the aftermath of these storms has been housing.

Of course, that's what we've been talking about.

Now, we're going to hear from Mayor Camardelle again about the ongoing housing challenges that his constituents face.

What I'm focusing on is in my heart right now that I'm really working hard on, is to build workforce housing, right?

I'm a church doctor.

And furthermore, right behind here, there's a property available that we're looking at that we think we can put some nice little homes in it.

And that means you wake up in the morning, you can put your kid going to school.

That is going to work, mom is going to work.

Workforce housing.

I want to get a young couples back.

They want to come back home.

In your opinion, based on what you've seen, what have been the most effective strategies in the housing shortage and tackling this or the housing shortage basically comes it starts with the sheltering process.

We have the sheltering process.

It's an emergency management function.

We do that pre-storm in what's called congregate sheltering schools.

And community centers.

And then after a storm and migrates to what's called a FEMA, non congregate housing, where we use travel trailers, hotels, and it migrates to a longer strategy that HUD uses, called the Rapid Housing Program to the Office of Community Development.

And it transitions sheltering to housing.

It's always a challenge.

You can never do enough.

And it's one of the areas that's always a key element of our strategy that goes out.

So we've talked about what happens, in terms of personal responsibility.

the state level, the federal level.

But there's Mother Nature and there's climate change.

And certainly climate change plays a role in our vulnerability along the coast and throughout Louisiana in general.

When we talk about wind and hurricanes, what are we doing at the state level to address the threat of climate change as it relates to all of our vulnerability?

Right.

Well, the first thing that I tell everyone is you.

You can never beat Mother Nature.

The best you can do is fight, draw, and you just can't win against her.

So what we do is what really emergency managers we're being faced with is what's called rapid intensification, where we're seeing in the course of the last 72 hours the storms really that may not in the past have developed in anything into major storms.

And what it forces us to do is compress our timeline.

And we have to now plan on when storms are off the coast of the the Africa and then as well as east side of the Caribbean.

So the Hurricane Debbie, we track for six days before it entered into the Caribbean.

The systems out there now, we're tracking now because of this rapid intensification.

That's the impact to the emergency managers.

All right.

Well, final thoughts before we wrap up our interview on we're in the midst of hurricane season, more hurricanes bound to be in our future.

Final thoughts to all the Louisiana people out there.

Stay strong and we got you back.

Very good.

Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise and insight.

Thank you very much.

We now want to switch our focus to Southwest Louisiana and the recovery process in Lake Charles following Hurricane Laura in 2020, LPB sat down with Mayor Nic Hunter a year after Laura to see how the city was recovering.

Here's some of what he had to say back then.

After a year, I will say that I would have hoped to have had more support from our federal government.

and it took me a while to get there before I wanted to say that publicly, because I don't want to come across as whining or I don't want to come across as a community that simply has their hat in their hand, going to D.C. and saying, hey, fix this for us.

Other communities have received supplemental federal disaster aid days, weeks after one singular event.

I'll go back to Hurricane Katrina.

And by the way, they needed it.

And I'm glad they got it.

Ten days after Hurricane Katrina.

Washington, D.C. acted with federal supplemental disaster aid.

It happened 30 days after Hurricane Andrew happened, 90 days after Superstorm Sandy.

Here we sit.

Having gone through four federally declared natural disasters, more than any other city in American history, 365 days later and we do not have a penny of supplemental disaster aid.

The road the Road Home program happened after Hurricane Katrina.

Over $9 billion was funneled through HUD to help reestablish people in sustainable, healthy housing.

After the 2016 Baton Rouge floods, the Restore program filtered down $650 million for the same purpose.

Zero.

Zilch.

Nada.

After what we've been through, for a program similar to Road Home or Restore, we are an extremely self-reliant population here.