I can’t imagine any location in the US has been hit any worse than Lake Charles.” “It’s just been mind-boggling, insult added to injury again and again. “In terms of what they’ve been through, the only word is obscene,” said Keim. All of these disasters have occurred on top of the ravages of the pandemic. Further calamity hit in February, when a cold snap that gripped much of the US south caused pipes in Lake Charles to burst, triggering widespread drinking water problems. There was no respite for Lake Charles, however, with Hurricane Delta delivering a blow to the city just six weeks later. And I thought, ‘This is going to take them years or decades to recover from this’.” It was unbelievable, catastrophic damage. I went there and it was just far worse than I imagined, I was shocked,” said Barry Keim, a climate scientist at Louisiana State University. Laura was the joint-strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in Louisiana, whipping up winds of up to 150mph and destroying large chunks of the city. “But, you know, eventually you do kind of get to a point where you ask Mother Nature: what more can you do to us?”Ī year of horror for Lake Charles – in south-west Louisiana, between Houston and New Orleans – started when Hurricane Laura slammed into the city in August. His own children were marooned at school. “We are a very resilient people, we are a very strong population,” said Nic Hunter, Lake Charles’ mayor, whose staff had scrambled to rescue electronics from a flooding city hall. The latest disaster, which saw 15in of rain in just 12 hours, left people navigating the streets by kayak, salvaging what they could from homes still being patched up from hurricane damage and wondering if the past year is an omen of a deepening climate crisis. Since last summer, the city has been hit by two major hurricanes, a paralyzing deep freeze, and now flooding rainfall that has inundated hundreds of homes.
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