Day Three: 2016 Louisiana Flood

Floods are a type of hydro-meteorological natural disasters, an overflow of water mainly due to prolonged heavy rainfall which affect many different countries worldwide. The US are among those, and especially Louisiana. It is a small piece of land in the Mexican Gulf, completely flat and actually under the level of the sea; I have been there for one year – from early September 2016 till late June 2017 – as an exchange student, and I can say it’s a beautiful place, full of swamps and weird trees coming up right from the water. In mid-August the country was hit by a terrible flood which destroyed great part of Baton Rouge and all the surroundings causing a major damage accounted up to an estimated $15 billion. The deaths luckily were not many, just 13, but I guess it’s because people living there are quite used to it by now – besides, the event was actually compared to the disastrous hurricane Katrina of 2005…

Even though I was not present at the moment of the actual flood, when I arrived in the first days of September I still had the possibility to witness with my own eyes what had happened and the damages caused. Until December, just driving around the streets of Baton Rouge you could see the pile of wreckages laying still in front of the houses, memory of a past catastrophe. After the flood, 146,000 houses have been counted completely damaged – many of my friends did not have a house anymore and had to live in tends or campers, many of them did not have the money to afford a new house and kept living there for the whole year and longer…

The flood was caused by a mesoscale convective system (a complex of thunderstorms) hitting an area of low pressure situated next to an outflow boundary (a storm-scale boundary separating thunderstorm-cooled air from the surrounding air). Many rivers and waterways, particularly the Amite and Comite rivers, reached record levels overtopping all the levees build alongside, and rainfall exceeded 510 mm in multiple parishes. The storm poured three times as much water as hurricane Katrina, the equivalent of 323 trillion litres of water with an average rainfall rate of 5-8 cm an hour. A later official study affirmed that the amount of rainfall in the hardest-hit locations had a less than 0.1 percent chance of happening – a less than 1-in-1,000-year event – nonetheless the

chance that such disaster could happen again in the future may increase up to 20% with the given increasing global warming.

Despite all the losses and damages, we must admire the resilience of the Louisianans: a strong community net was put in place since the beginning to help rescue flooded people first and fix the damages later. Not only local people, but also Universities, governments, artists and business companies financially contributed a lot. I still remember myself helping cleaning and tidying up the mess made, helping do the groceries and paint the new walls; or the story half-legend of the man who cooked I don’t know how many pounds of food for I don’t know how many people. When I left the year after all the physical damages were almost entirely recovered – canals were functioning again, streets were put back in place, and the newly bought houses were ready – while the mark floating above the soul of the community was kept strong and ready as in the day right after the actual flood.