For some at the Jesse James Mobile Home Park, Hurricane Laura destroyed everything

July 18, 2024

LAKE CHARLES, La. — The Jesse James Mobile Home Park on Country Club Road sits behind luxury apartments, elegant homes and the Golden Nugget casino overlooking the water. It is a place with affordable rent and friendly neighbors, a haven for retirees on fixed incomes and parents eager to get their children into some of the city's best schools.

But Hurricane Laura’s lashing winds and heavy rains turned homes filled with fish tanks, photo albums, bookshelves and televisions into a heap of mangled metal and debris Thursday, in one of the fiercest storms to barrel through this city of 78,000 people in decades.

“Everything I own is in that house. And I lost half of it,” said Carl Webb, 62, vice president of the Cajun Navy in Lake Charles, his eyes wet as he leaned on a pole and surveyed his yellow trailer, for which he said he did not have insurance because he is on a fixed income.

Lake Charles bore the brunt of Hurricane Laura as it rampaged through this coastal region overnight, blasting windows from tall buildings, blocking roads with fallen pine trees and plucking traffic lights from their wires and smashing them to the ground. Thousands remained without electricity, and many were left homeless at a time that already has been so terrifying because of the coronavirus pandemic and rising unemployment. The vicious storm delivered another cruel blow.

“Oh no, not this,” said Adrianna Oliver, 33, sobbing as she strode into the park and saw a debris field instead. Then she saw her home, wedged between two trailers that seemed impossibly intact. Hers was destroyed.

Winds had smashed in the front door. Her refrigerator was exposed. Her fish swam in the tank.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

She told her 8-year-old daughter to hop on her back and they walked gingerly over sticks of lumber with protruding nails, tangled metal and shards of glass.

“It’s okay. It will be okay,” she said aloud, as her husband, Chris, searched through the debris to find the closet, and then the clothes, and then the baby pictures of their three children, ages, 8, 11 and 13.

Around the corner, the hiss and smell of a gas leak filled the air. As the utility company worked to fix it, Nicole Suire tried to sleep in a little brown trailer with the windows smashed in. She, her boyfriend, Kenneth, and their 14-year-old son, Darien, said they had stayed behind in the trailer park because they packed too late, and when they tried to flee at the last minute, as that monster Laura intensified and neared, the roads were already closed.

They were the only residents left there when the sky darkened, the winds howled, and the rain began to lash. Together with their dog, Enzo, they lay flat on the living room floor listening to things smash and crunch and wail.

Then the windows exploded, part of the wall peeled off, and they took refuge in a hallway, as glass shattered and wood splintered. Then they fled to the bathtub and hid under a mattress for hours.

“Everything was rocking. It was crazy,” Suire said, pointing to the trailer, which had been shoved off its bricks. “It’s barely hanging on.”

She said she had been through hurricanes before, “but never anything close to this.”

“It was horrible,” she said.

The force of the storm was clear, in the daylight. On a high bridge overlooking the Golden Nugget casino, tall metal lightposts were snapped like broken pencils. Electrical wires hung low across boulevards like clotheslines. Glass glittered on the roads.

The Jesse James park — named after the 92-year-old owner, not the outlaw — used to have a reputation: It was crime-ridden and drug-addled and almost a magnet for hurricanes. But residents and the manager, who has lived here for years, say they had cleaned up the area by requiring renters to undergo background checks; neighbors took ownership and responsibility and have been watching out for one another.

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“This is going to hurt,” said the manager, Donald Jeanise, 24. “Seventy-five percent of the people that lived here just lost their homes. I just lost my business.”

He said the longer-term residents had formed a close-knit group. Some renters were seasonal workers who came in for construction or oil field jobs. Many are on fixed incomes, and it is a safe neighborhood where someone who does not own a car can walk to a nice supermarket. The park had some of the cheapest rents in the city, about $225 a month.

Webb and his neighbors had formed a friendly little corner of the trailer park. One trained her security camera on his house for protection. Another mowed his lawn.

He liked it here so much that he rebuilt the trailer after Hurricane Rita damaged it in 2005.

But he was not sure he could afford to do it now, again.

His eyes watered as he stood next to his grandson, Hayden Yates, 17. They had salvaged baby photos, his fishing gear.

“I help. I don’t ask for help. I give help,” he said, gathering himself. “We’ll be all right. I’ve got a camper. Worst-case scenario.”

Webb had survived a devastating motorcycle accident that left some doctors thinking he might not walk again, but he did. While he was recovering with family, his neighbor watched over his house for more than two years.

That neighbor, Jackie Robertson, lost his home on Thursday, too, and has no place else to go. A janitor at a local hospital, he routinely mows his neighbors’ lawns because he likes to. He, his new wife, and her three children had made a home in their trailer. He paid $3,500 for it a dozen years ago.

“I got nowhere to stay now,” said Robertson, 64, sitting in his 1998 Chevy pickup truck with more than 200,000 miles on it. “I told my wife, ‘We’re homeless.’ She started to cry.”

He had been calling the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help all day, but he said the line was always busy. He said he did not have much, but he had managed to get computers for his wife’s children and a big-screen TV.

“And look what I got now,” he said, gesturing to an oak tree that had smashed into his home.

Another trailer had been flung on top of that.

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