VOA – CONNECT
EPISODE # 200
AIR DATE: 11 12 2021
TRANSCRIPT
OPEN ((VO/NAT))
((Open Animation))
BLOCK A
((PKG)) WEATHERING THE STORM
((TRT: 27:00))
((Main characters: 2 male; 2 female))
((Sub characters: 0 male; 3 female))
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Courtesy: AP/KTRK))
((Text-over-video))
On August 27th, 2020, Hurricane Laura made landfall in southwest Louisiana as a powerful Category 4 storm.
((Black and White image Courtesy: Amazon & Brandon Green))
((Text-over-video))
It wrecked homes and buildings, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands and devastated the coastline.
((Courtesy: Reuters / Bailin Rogers))
((Text-over-video))
Six weeks later, Hurricane Delta slammed into the same area.
((Courtesy: Jason Sparks))
((Text-over-video))
Four months later, a winter ice storm struck, knocking out power and gas and once again forcing residents from their homes.
((Text-over-video))
In May 2021, disaster-weary residents suffered through yet another strong storm that included tornadoes and flooding.
((Topic Banner: Weathering the Storm))
((Reporter/Camera/Producer: Arturo Martinez))
((Camera/Drone: Steve Baragona))
((Map: Cameron Parish, Louisiana))
((Map: Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana))
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Courtesy: Reuters))
((Location / Text-over-video))
Cameron Parish, Coastal Louisiana
11 months after Hurricane Laura
((NATS))
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
My daughter's name is Gabby. That's what the G is for.
This was on our fireplace. A lot of that stayed. This is my son's.
You know, after the storm surge went down, there was water everywhere, as far as the eye could see, even covering the road.
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
You know, I often imagine, “Well, what was it like? How did it happen? Was there a wall of water? Was it just tornadic activity?”
I didn’t want to get upset.
I can remember what it smelled like. And cooking breakfast and sitting on the porch in the morning, drinking coffee and watching the birds.
It's just really hard to explain what it feels like to see it like this. My husband just kept stacking up cinderblocks because what else are you going to do? It's not like…it's not like you have anything to repair. It's just like it was never there and that's a mental struggle every day.
((NATS))
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
I just keep telling myself that immense pain and loss, as long as there's a purpose, is worth going through. We are at the tip of the spear in a lot of ways when it comes to coastal living and climate change and the impacts that subsidence, sea level rise has. But it's not, we're not the only ones. And I think that's something that people who live in coastal areas of the world need to consider. That's an issue that impacts way more than just the people who live here in Cameron Parish.
((NATS/MUSIC))
((Lerlene Dyson Rodrigue
Commercial Fisherwoman))
This is horrible.
Miss Betty.
((Lerlene Dyson Rodrigue
Commercial Fisherwoman))
This is just one of many cemeteries that have been totally destroyed.
The hurricane took most of the coffins out of here.
Oh, Lord. This is horrible.
((NATS))
((Lerlene Dyson Rodrigue
Commercial Fisherwoman))
It's my dad's. I just pray to God they find him, because he is the father of 15. Something literally moved the top off, but as you can see, the frame.
And it's like these storms, just they get worse and worse. I mean, for Rita, my mom went missing twice. She went missing for Rita, then Ike, and then they finally found her, put her back in the ground, and here comes Laura and now is Daddy.
The love of water my dad had, I think that's what drawed me into the water, was being one of his girls and did what he did and just…and that was one of my phrases all the time, “I know my dad’s smiling down on me.”
((NATS))
((Lerlene Dyson Rodrigue
Commercial Fisherwoman))
After Hurricane Laura, we were in a motel in Abbeville for five and a half months and finally I looked at my husband and I'm like, “I can't do this anymore.” So, we are living here because this one is not livable yet. When we got back, the middle section, from that door to the second window, the roof was gone. So, this is going to be home for a little while. But we're home. That's the point.
((NATS))
((Lerlene Dyson Rodrigue
Commercial Fisherwoman))
Some of the things, from August the 27th till we got back here in February, it's all a blur. I know we were at a hotel for five months. I know all of that. It's just, I can't tell you in between.
And I will show you how I left this place when we left for that storm. See, she was right behind me. My granddaughter was right where my shed is. And this was the flyover of Cameron, right after Laura. I know. I cried. That is main town and I'm about right here somewhere.
((Courtesy: WX Chasing))
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Lerlene Dyson Rodrigue
Commercial Fisherwoman))
In my family, everybody's back except my daughter. She refuses to come back. She, her and the kids can't. They can't do that again. They refuse to do it again which, you know, if it's not in your blood, you can't do it. But as far as me, there was no choice. I tried that urban jungle and it didn’t work for me.
To look at this place now and to where it was and where it's been and what we've had to deal with for the last 15-20 years, it's just, some of it's breathtaking because I don't even know where I found the strength to do this all over again. And it's just, sometimes I walk out that door and be so happy to be home. And then sometimes I walk out that door and it's like, “What the hell was I thinking?”
But what do you do when everything you know is here, but it's all gone, you know?
((NATS/MUSIC))
BLOCK B
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
That Gulf of Mexico environment, with higher temperatures, creates a breeding ground for intense hurricanes. And we are seeing the population not return. Our population right now may be as low as, say, maybe 3,500 people which is down from 10,000. That's significant.
So much of the damage hasn't been repaired.
It's almost a year after Laura made landfall and I'm one of the 40 percent of the people who live here, who have no electrical transmission lines.
Our hospital is not functioning. We have no more pharmacies. We have no more grocery stores. We have no more…all of those things have been destroyed. Is it worth saving? Well, quite frankly this coast is a working coast. We drive an energy that drives the rest of our nation. From here, we provide more than a quarter of the energy to the rest of our country. And we export the third largest amount of liquefied natural gas besides Qatar and Australia, just this one parish. That matters. That means something to the rest of the world. And other countries depend on the United States for that natural gas.
So, if they stop asking for it, then maybe we'll stop producing it. But to say that my house got taken away by a hurricane that is caused by fossil fuel energy production and energy use, I don't think it’s a fair behavior on the part of those who criticize energy consumption when they, too, are users. So, unless they're completely off the grid, I don't believe that energy production is any more to blame than energy consumption.
I like being warm in the wintertime. I like being cool in the summertime. If there were a better way for our planet to allow people to do that, then I think that we would all be pursuing it. And so, if an energy transition is what can bring that about, I'm all for it.
((NATS/MUSIC))
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
One of the things, I think, that is saddest to me about all that's happened is, you see all these trees on our right? These are oak trees and so many of these are dead. And they're killed from the saltwater intrusion from the Gulf. When the oaks start to die, then we know that we can predict future land loss of those ridges that allow us to keep the cheniers [beach ridges] intact.
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
We're losing about an American football field size [half a hectare] of land every hour. And the more of that coastal protection that we lose with each storm that we experience here, increases the impact to the metropolitan areas
((Location / Text-over-video))
City of Lake Charles, Calcasieu Parish
74 km inland from Cameron Parish
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
further north of us, say 50 miles [80 km] inland, because the wetlands act as a wave impact absorber. The people who have lived their entire lifetimes in Lake Charles, they really had no idea how intense it could be.
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Deidra Jones
Resident, Lake Charles))
Joyce, how many people down here? Okay. We got nothing but abandoned houses down here.
About 30 families on this street, probably more than that, that’s displaced. Some of them are living in hotel rooms. I talked to this lady last week that stayed in that house up there. She was crying. She said, “Miss Deidra, do you know when we're coming back home?” I said, “Baby, I don't know.”
I've been here before Housing Authority took over these houses. 31 years and I come back after a year and some from a hurricane.
Look at my house, Joyce. Look at all the commodes and stuff. That don't make no sense.
((Joyce Nash
Resident, Lake Charles))
And it's almost a year.
((Deidra Jones
Resident, Lake Charles))
Almost a year. That don't make no sense. We still don’t have no answers.
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Kyle Lacompte
Oil Company Operations Supervisor))
One of the scenic views of Lake Charles.
There’s another plant over there. I guess, it’s common to our backdrop.
I’m an operations supervisor at an oil company that kind of focuses on chemicals, whether it be rubber or pantyhose or your dish soap. So, it makes a variety of things.
((Kyle Lacompte
Oil Company Operations Supervisor))
I feel like you’d have to be pretty willfully ignorant to say that nothing is changing about our climate. So, I definitely think fossil fuels has a part in climate change, but a significant portion of our community relies on the oil and gas industry for their job. So, it’s definitely, it’s very important for our area. Thousands of jobs.
The talk about climate change, the talk about alternative fuels would directly impact this area without an alternative as far as like type of job. There’s a lot of instant defense because, you know, it’s tough to tell someone like, well, you just learn a new skill or whatever and you can pivot to another, you know, it’s like when you can’t like easily see what you can pivot to, you’re not going to just jump, “Oh, for sure. Let me take this leap of faith.” But, if my company came and started saying, “Hey, we’re going to make batteries” or whatever, I’m all on board. My thing is, I need a job.
((MUSIC/NATS))
BREAK TWO
BUMP IN ((ANIM))
BLOCK C
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Craig Colten
Professor Emeritus, Louisiana State University))
People in coastal Louisiana tend to live in these long narrow slivers of land along bayous and rivers that were formerly natural levees.
What we are seeing with climate change is after each event, we see this in Lake Charles this past year, you have one calamity and people begin to rebuild, and then you have another calamity on top of that. They begin to rebuild again and you have another calamity. So, you have this cumulative effect and each time a storm hits, it drives the resilience of the population further down and they have farther to go to get out of the depressed state of the economy and their social well-being.
((Craig Colten
Professor Emeritus, Louisiana State University))
And what we're seeing here, playing out in coastal Louisiana writ large, is kind of a fracturing of the population. We're seeing younger, middle-class people moving away. Many, many of the people in their 20s and 30s and 40s are moving away and not coming back. Their parents, the elderly are staying, and in many cases, the very poor are staying.
So, you have people on fixed income and the poor concentrating in these areas. And in some of these towns, the small towns in the coastal area, population loss can be most dramatic because you lose your threshold population. They shut down your post office. You can't support the grocery store. You can't support the schools. And that puts a community into a position where there might be at a tipping point and everybody begins to head up the bayou, head inland, to go to a community where they can send their kids to school without a 45-minute, hour-long bus ride. But, I think, these coastal cities will see pulses of outmigration, not complete collapses of cities. But each time there's a big event, the population will decline a bit and there'll be a surge out and they'll become shrinking cities over the long term.
((Craig Colten
Professor Emeritus, Louisiana State University))
And that's what's going to be the real telling factor and how well we respond to these multiple, overlapping events.
((MUSIC/NATS))
((Polly Glover
Resident, Louisiana))
I brought the wrong paddle.
Yeah, y’all need to come and eat.
((NATS))
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
So, Polly. What you got in here?
((Polly Glover
Resident, Louisiana))
We've got Cameron’s finest shrimp.
((NATS))
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
Yes. I haven't seen shrimp like that in a long time.
Wow, I'm sending this to my husband so that he can see how big they are.
((Polly Glover
Resident, Louisiana))
He should have come.
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
Yeah, he should have.
We had a party. It was great. And every dish we had, except for the dessert, had Tabasco products in it.
Did I text you those pictures of us at Josephine’s?
((NATS))
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
I'm part of the generation here that keeps coming back. At some point, I think, people in that situation have to really evaluate, you know, what the purpose is. People, who live in coastal areas of the world, need to consider what's the healthiest place for their kids to be. And I never did really understand why outsiders want to know, why do you want to live here? Well, why did they want to live where they live? No one is immune to natural disaster. We just continue to face it. It's not a situation where, just because someone lives in somewhere in Europe or Asia or any other continent, they're going to escape it. I don't think that's a fair question.
((Clair Marceaux
Director, Cameron Parish Port))
And we're not, you know, not going to be climate refugees. I mean, I guess we already are in some ways. But, I think, it's a question that everyone in the world needs to be asking, not just us.
((NATS/MUSIC))
CLOSING BUMPER ((ANIM))
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NEXT WEEK / GOOD BYE ((VO/NAT))
((Banner))
In coming weeks
Underwater Adventures
((SOT))
((NATS))
((Fred Foster
Diver))
Just being suspended like the whole world’s moving, but you aren’t if you don't want to. And you don't weigh anything, but you weigh everything. The whole thing is kind of there.
((NATS))
((Joseph Shields
Diver))
We're shouldering almost 90 to 100 pounds of gear on us before we get in the water. Once we get in the water, all of that becomes neutral and weightless.
CLOSING BUMPER ((ANIM))
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BREAK THREE
BUMP IN ((ANIM))
SHOW ENDS
