Louisiana anglers respond to historic flooding

College angler Tyler Rivet and others rescue Louisiana residents affected by severe flooding this week.

Greg Hackney had just finished 13th at the Bassmaster Elite Potomac River presented by Econo Lodge, when he got the unlucky call that there was trouble back home in Louisiana.

A friend contacted him and said that torrential rains had hit south-central Louisiana, and that flooding was rampant. The friend’s parents’ home was taking on water, and thousands of other residences and businesses in the greater Baton Rouge area were suffering the same fate.

Instead of heading west for an upcoming Major League Fishing event as he planned, Hackney bought a plane ticket home. He arrived at New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport at approximately 10 a.m. on Monday, rented a car and drove west toward his home, an hour away in the Baton Rouge suburb of Gonzales.

For most of the drive, Hackney saw no reason for alarm, noting that everything looked perfectly normal.

Then he crossed the Blind River about 10 minutes from his home, and Hackney got a first-hand look at the flooding that inundated portions of the Bayou State for the past week.

Editor’s note: See more photos of the flooding.

“When I got home, Interstate 10 was still open and I drove right on through,” he said. “But after the Blind River, it was bad. And it got worse, and worse, and worse the farther (northwest) I went…Most of the people were gone by then, but we went to help a friend who had to leave his pets behind. When we got to their house (in St. Amant only a few miles away,) I parked the boat and got out and walked into the second story of their house.

“The air conditioner was still running, if you can believe it,” Hackney continued. “My friend asked if we should turn off the electricity. I told her ‘I’m not touching anything,’ and we grabbed the pets, and got the heck out of there.”

What Hackney ran into was actually water that was moving southward from immediate areas north of his hometown, and that water still was rising in communities further downstream on the Mississippi River on the morning of Thursday Aug. 18. Reports of 30-plus inches of rain in a 24-hour period in the nearby communities of Walker and Denham Springs swamped the area’s natural drainage (namely the Amite River), and the water crested several feet above record stage.

When the Amite and connecting rivers and bayous spilled their banks, untold millions of gallons of water ran in a swath almost parallel with Interstate 10, which served as a manmade levee of sorts. When the water could find an “end around,” which it did in East Baton Rouge Parish, it ran between I-10 and the river (which acted as another levee). A strong south wind over the past few days pushed additional water in from the Gulf of Mexico, which swelled the marshes and bayous even further and kept the floodwater from flowing to open water as it normally would.

The result is staggering, and it’s ongoing. As of the morning of Aug. 18, there were thousands of people living in temporary shelters around the Baton Rouge area. Federal, state and parish governments are devising housing plans for the displaced. Twenty Louisiana parishes (counties for the rest of the U.S.) have been declared federal disaster areas. Thousands of homes and businesses have been trashed, causing billions of dollars in damages. At least 12 people are dead, and many others remain missing.

Some in the national media have called it “Katrina 2,” in reference to the Category 3 (when it made landfall) hurricane that flooded New Orleans in 2005 and destroyed much of southeast Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

But this weather event is different in that the effect has been more localized. The destruction, however, is painfully real, and it’s an ongoing threat for communities across south Louisiana.

“It’s just horrible,” Hackney said. “It was absolutely devastating. Half to about two-thirds of my parish (Ascension), the people lost everything. The water was chest deep in some houses, and at others, it was to the rooftops. Some were completely covered. There was 12 to 15 feet in some of the neighborhoods, easy.”

Nicholls State University’s Tyler Rivet confirmed that amount – and maybe then some, in the Denham Springs area a couple of days earlier. Rivet, who is part of the Nicholls State bass fishing team, was part of a 15-boat convoy that left from the small town of Raceland on the morning of Sunday Aug. 14 to help people in need to the west.

What the rescuers found was staggering, he said.

“On most of the streets, the police were turning people back, but we found a way in,” Rivet said of his arrival on the south side of Denham Springs, which is about 12 miles east of Baton Rouge. “We knew there were people back there that were stranded. I have a 14-foot push pole on the boat, and I put my hand on top of it and went all the way down in the water with it. I didn’t touch ground, and we were over a street.

“There was a guy in a house back there who said he was built up 20 feet, and the water was about 2 inches from coming into his house. But he said he was going to stay.”

In the nearby Juban Road area a day later, the “Cajun Navy” from Raceland found a neighborhood that was “basically an island,” the 22-year-old Rivet said.

“We counted 350 people back there, and we got them out in the boats. There were a lot of kids. It was depressing. People were breaking down and crying seeing all the flooded houses. And the really sad thing is 90 percent of them, close to 100 percent of them; they said they don’t have flood insurance.”

That’s a reality adding to the tragedy taking place in this part of Louisiana. Unlike portions of the state which are prone to flooding (and where building a home requires having federal flood insurance) most of the East Baton Rouge, Livingston and Ascension Parish area is not common flood ground. It has people calling the tremendous amount of rainfall as “biblical” and a “500- or 1,000-year flood.”

Rivet said the rising water was “like a hurricane on the ground.”

“The current in the Juban Road area was crazy,” he said. “It was knocking our boats into houses.”

And as previously mentioned, the problem has not completely abated. With the wind still blowing from the south, much of the flood water from last week’s downpours remains hemmed up between the interstate and the Mississippi River. Towns southeast of Baton Rouge closer to New Orleans (small towns such as Gramercy, in particular) were keeping a watchful eye on Thursday morning.

The same goes in southwest Louisiana, as the runoff meanders through the delta, seeking a place to drain. Lafayette (a city of more than 125,000 in city limits alone) suffered substantial damage during the rainfall and flood, and the farming communities to the west also remain nervous about the potential of flooding.

Elite Series angler Dennis Tietje lives in Jennings, some 90 miles west of Baton Rouge. While his home is fine, he worries for friends 10 miles south in the small town of Lake Arthur. The town is at the base of the Mermentau River watershed, which drains the rain-swollen River Nezpique, Bayou Des Cannes, Plaquemine Brule, and Bayou Queue de Tortue.

“They’ve been sandbagging for three days down there, and the water is about 8 inches from topping the pump system,” Tietje said on Wednesday afternoon, Aug. 17. “We got 21 inches of rain here the last day and a half, but if you go 15 miles to my west, they got 3 inches. From here to about Denham Springs, the water just had the train effect right over that line. And these rivers (in the Mermentau watershed) aren’t expected to crest until Friday. There’s just no place for the rain to go. It’s just spreading out (over the floodplain).”

Port Arthur was hammered during Hurricane Rita in 2005 – a lamentable sucker punch that followed Hurricane Katrina by only a matter of weeks. Though any damage there may come nowhere close to what has been seen farther to the east, Tietje said there is a chain reaction of events that takes place when a disaster of this magnitude occurs.

“This is farming country; mainly soybeans and rice,” he said. “And 20 percent of the crop is still in the fields. We’ll probably lose that crop. So it effects everyone.”

Tietje said his family owns a pizza restaurant in Jennings, and has been offering free meals to workers and volunteers helping out parishes whether they are in disaster or recovery mode.

The same charity applies to Rivet and his small armada, who have been turning down money for helping rescue people in need the past week. He was back in Raceland on Wednesday morning to pick up supplies and was bringing them to the Lamar Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, where several thousand people and pets await word on where they can stay in the rebuilding process.

Rivet said no matter, he and the rest of Louisiana will be ready to help.

“I think the effort to help says something about south Louisiana,” he said. “We stick together. When someone needs help, we’re coming.”

Many efforts are underway to assist those who have lost their homes during the historic flooding. For a list of some of the major charitable groups aiding the cause, click here.

Andrew Canulette is an award-winning writer who lives in Slidell, Louisiana, about 90 miles east of Baton Rouge. He covered Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath for the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2005, and the newspaper received a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its work. He also reported for local and national media following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010. Though his home parish of St. Tammany (on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans,) has been declared a federal disaster area because of the recent floods, he and his family (including those in Baton Rouge) were not adversely affected by the August flood.