Here Comes the Rain Again--Will Lake Charles, Louisiana, become America's latest climate sacrifice?

The aging civic center sits just beyond a string of waterfront mansions, lawns freshly mowed, and across from the bombed-out Capital One Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with dozens of wooden boards instead of windows. On a hot and sunny June morning, Jennifer Cobian, the soft-spoken assistant director of the Division of Planning and Development for the county government, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, uses a big, echoey room on the center’s ground floor to host residents of Greinwich Terrace, a low-income, primarily African American neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

Built in the 1950s for military families near the Chennault Air Force Base, the Terrace has been hemmed in by larger housing developments, strip malls, and Interstate 210 in the decades since the base closed. As the city built up around it, the Terrace found itself at the bottom of an increasingly full bowl. Low-lying, it’s uniquely vulnerable to the city’s 62 inches of annual rainfall—nearly double the national average—as water tries and fails to snake its way around buildings and roads, no longer able to seep into bayous and fields. The Kayouche Coulee, a concrete-lined ravine abutting the neighborhood, regularly overfills in rainy weather. This came to a head this past year, as the city, which is just 15 feet above sea level and 30 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, faced four federally declared natural disasters.

During that time, Cobian was struck by the calls she was getting from some Terrace residents, who wanted to know about FEMA buyouts, available in one-off cases to homeowners with sustained and severe damage. Instead, Cobian recommended that the Terrace be considered for a new, $1.2 billion voluntary buyout program, overseen by the state-run Louisiana Watershed Initiative, with federal funds from the Community Development Block Grant Mitigation Program. The idea, Cobian says, is for residents to get payments above the average home value in the area, if they agree to start over somewhere that’s not flood-prone: out of Greinwich Terrace, maybe even out of Lake Charles. She sees the program as the better of two unsavory options: either stay and risk more flooding, or get out.

On the same day, about five miles across town, the Golden Nugget, a 22-story hotel and casino, is in full swing, with cars lining up at the valet by mid-morning. The Nugget sits on the edge of the Bayou Contraband, one of hundreds of waterways that wind through Southwest Louisiana. Across the water, plumes of smoke rise from the plants that dot Calcasieu and Cameron Parishes, major arteries of America’s petrochemical corridor and home to one of the state’s two liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals. (Louisiana exports over half of the country’s LNG.) The structurally unsound I-10 bridge, which recently served as a backdrop for President Biden’s bid for new infrastructure spending, arcs into the horizon.

Read more: https://prospect.org/environment/here-comes-the-rain-again-lake-charles-louisiana/
(American Prospect)