The storms and the pandemic exacerbated a pre-existing housing crisis in the region. I am one of those people,” one wrote.Īnother person wrote it’s no surprise that the public doesn’t know about the hurricanes in Lake Charles, because the storms “garnered about 6 hours of national media attention.” A third said, “Seeing our beloved city on the top of a list that reflects negatively and gives no explanation is, quite frankly, a slap in our faces.”īetween Monday, April 26 and Tuesday, April 27, the Times updated the story to include a single line about the hurricanes in Lake Charles - though it did not issue a correction or an update on the site to signal the change.Īs the nation pores over the first wave of 2020 census data - which helps determine everything from congressional representation to the amount of federal funding that will stream into states and localities - it’s unlikely that Lake Charles’ population will be appropriately accounted for. “Most of America has forgotten us and multitudes of families are still living elsewhere while waiting for insurance companies to pay for home repairs. Lake Charles residents commented on the Upshot story, calling out the paper’s lack of coverage. This neglect - and misinterpretation - is the culmination of eight months of underinvestment and underreporting on this crisis in southwest Louisiana. The Atlantic’s Weekly Planet newsletter noted that the swath of people moving from Lake Charles was caused by the decline in oil prices last year, rather than by the hurricanes. The same is true of Bloomberg CityLab’s analysis. It puts a number on the countless anecdotes I’ve heard reporting on storm recovery: stories about advocates trying to reach displaced voters ahead of the presidential election, scattered across the state and beyond stories about teachers calling the families of their students, attempting to figure out where they are stories about renters who got evicted from their apartments, now sleeping in their cars with their kids or packed into mobile homes with relatives.īut national coverage of these trends left out this critical context: A New York Times Upshot piece from April 19 did not initially refer to Lake Charles or the hurricanes that devastated the city in August and October of last year. Recovery will take years.īecause so little information is available about the scale of displacement in Lake Charles and the surrounding region, the USPS data serves as a useful yardstick. They’re still cleaning up debris, rebuilding their homes and businesses, and attempting to find housing. In February, Winter Storm Viola brought snow and freezing temperatures that busted pipes and cut off water service.Īs another hurricane season approaches, southwest Louisiana residents have received little federal aid or attention. Hurricane Delta brought torrential rains in early October. Hurricane Laura ripped through the region with 150-mph winds in late August, tearing off roofs and knocking out power. Southwest Louisiana has been through a lot in the last year: in addition to four federally-declared disasters, it was also a COVID-19 hotspot in July. It’s glaring evidence of a disaster, worsened by climate change, that displaced thousands of people. a city hit by back-to-back hurricanes during the most severe Atlantic hurricane season on record - tops the list for out-migration between 20 out of 926 metro areas surveyed. But most of the analyses by national outlets have missed a major story: According to the USPS data, Lake Charles, La. Postal Service change-of-address requests and Census Bureau data shows slight shifts out of coastal cities into smaller metros as newly remote workers had the freedom to move where they pleased. As 2020 population and migration data is slowly released, news outlets, policymakers, and researchers are trying to make sense of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted where and how we live. U.S.
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