Angola to Zydeco: Louisiana Lives

The Forgotten

197 The Forgotten Hurricane Rita decimated Cameron Parish, but residents say they’re still living in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina. august 23, 2006 T he clouds, like giant dirty cotton balls, tumble in from the Gulf of Mexico, and the rain pours down. On a two-acre patch of land near Sweet Lake in north Cameron Parish, four campers sit in a row. In one of them, seventy-threeyear -old J.C. Boudreaux and his seventy-one-year-old wife, Regina, are keeping an eye on their five-year-old grandson, Michael, who’s keeping his eyes on the children’s program Wonder Pets! on the small television. Occasionally, Michael turns around on the couch and looks out the window to see if it’s still raining. When he gets bored and moves around the camper, the adults move in their seats to let him pass. The FEMA camper’s main room has a small sofa, a computer desk, a television, a dining table, a kitchenette, and a refrigerator . Strands of plastic ivy trim the three small windows. A plastic divider curtain separates the main room from the bathroom and bedroom. “J.C. sometimes gets down in the dumps,” Regina says. “I say, ‘Hey, everybody’s in the same boat we’re in. You might as well suck it up and smile.’” “I want to go home,” J.C. says, “but we don’t have a home The Forgotten • 198 to go to. It’s not there. You wake up in the morning, and you say ‘I’m tired of the camper. I want to go back.’ But you can’t go back. That’s the problem. It will never be the same, no matter what. If we go back, our neighbors aren’t there. We can’t get gas. We can’t get groceries. No doctors. So we’ll just wait around, and I don’t know how much longer we can wait. We’re getting a little age on us. We can’t wait no fifteen or twenty years.” J.C. and Regina weren’t the only ones in their family who lost their home to Hurricane Rita. Of their seven children, six of them and their families lost their homes. Except for their oldest son who lives in Alabama, all of their children were living in Cameron Parish. Some of them live in the other three campers next to J.C. and Regina’s on land owned by one of their sons. J.C. was born outside of Gueydan but has lived most of his life in Cameron Parish. In 1948 he starred in Robert Flaherty’s film Louisiana Story, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He later met Regina, a young woman from Creole, at a dance, and they married in 1952. Five years later, the couple was living in Cameron with three children. “Hurricane Audrey came and uprooted us,” J.C. says. “We lost everything we had then.” Regina also lost five members of her family. When Audrey came ashore on June 27, 1957, J.C. was working on a crew boat for an oil company. He learned about the approaching storm from his employer. “Back then,” J.C. says, “We didn’t have the weather communications like we’ve got now.” J.C. and Regina evacuated to Lake Charles with their children. When they returned, their home had vanished. They weren’t able to buy a new home for another five years, when J.C. took a job with Cameron Telephone, where he worked for thirty years. 199 • The Forgotten It’s easy for the older Cameron Parish residents to draw comparisons between Audrey and Rita. Both storms wrecked their lives, and both made landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border. But data from the National Weather Service points out some differences. While Audrey hit land with sustained winds of 145 miles per hour, Rita’s sustained winds were 120 miles per hour, with gusts of up to 150 miles per hour. During Audrey, Cameron experienced a twelve-foot storm surge, but Rita hit the city with a surge of fifteen to twenty feet. The major difference was the evacuation for the storms. Most residents heeded the mandatory evacuation during Rita, resulting in fewer than ten deaths; few evacuated for Audrey, and more than five hundred people, mostly in Cameron, drowned in the storm surge. J.C. thinks there was more...