CAMERON, La. — Vacant slabs, weed-choked lots and solitary stairs to nowhere permeate this tiny town in southwest Louisiana. All that remains of the Klean-N-Kruise carwash is a rusted white sign overlooking an empty, overgrown lot. Residents travel 30 miles away for anything they can’t get at the local gas station because there is no grocery store.
And everywhere there are the campers.
Hurricane Rita was one of the fiercest storms on record when it roared ashore near the Texas-Louisiana state line on Sept. 24, 2005. Coastal towns splintered as seawater pushed 20 miles inland and tornadoes wrecked homes. At least 11 deaths were blamed on the storm, which caused more than $11 billion damage.
In any other year it would have been the worst hurricane of the year. But this was the year of Hurricane Katrina. And the communities along Louisiana’s western coast felt abandoned. They still do.
As Katrina’s 10-year anniversary was marked by a week of events including visits from three American presidents, in communities along the western coast where people still live in small trailers in their yards because they can’t afford to rebuild because new structures have to meet FEMA flood standards, Hurricane Rita’s wrath is ever-present.
“People would like to move back. It’s just so costly. You’ve got to build up,” said Shon Manuel, who stays in a camper in Cameron to be close to his business, Dockside Bar & Grill. “It’s like they don’t want you here.”
Forty percent of all structures in Cameron Parish, a coastal community next to the Texas state line, were destroyed. Even now, it has yet to fully recover. Cameron Parish had about 10,000 residents before Rita. That’s fallen to fewer than 6,700 since the storm, according to U.S. Census data.
Despite the widespread destruction, Rita was dwarfed by Katrina’s $151 billion damage toll and loss of life. Katrina struck southeast Louisiana and Mississippi a month earlier, killing more than 1,800 people. When the levees broke, 80 percent of New Orleans flooded.
“To this day, we’re the forgotten Rita victims,” said John LeBlanc, mayor of the small town of Erath in Vermilion Parish, the coastal, Cajun parish to the east of Cameron Parish.
Vermilion dug out and rebuilt.
It took two years for the local grocery store to reopen in Erath. But the town and Vermilion Parish haven’t lost population.
“We didn’t just stand there with our hands out. People here, we’re Cajuns. We started working,” LeBlanc said.
By the numbers
The storm: Rita hit the Texas-Louisiana state line as a category 3 hurricane, with winds topping 120 mph and pushing a storm surge that reached 20 feet in some places.
Toll: At least 11 deaths in Texas and Louisiana were blamed on the storm, along with an additional 100 deaths in the evacuation of the Houston area. Rita caused more than $11 billion damage. It ranks as the ninth-costliest hurricane nationally when based on insured losses. At one point, Rita halted 98 percent of oil and natural gas production in the Gulf.
Agriculture: An estimated 2,000 square miles of farmland and marshes got soaked with seawater, devastating crops and livestock. Damage to the agriculture, forestry and fishing industries was estimated to reach $593 million.
Housing: More than 23,600 homes were deemed severely damaged or destroyed in southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas.
Sources: The U.S. Census Bureau, The Rita Report, Insurance Information Institute, the LSU AgCenter and Associated Press archives.
