Merging "Twindemics": The Storm After the Disaster

In August of 2021, Hurricane Ida — one of the most powerful and expensive hurricanes in American history — robbed Lousianans of their homes, businesses, and sense of safety, all while COVID-19 continued to cause mass suffering across the state and country. And eight months after Hurricane Ida’s devastation of southeastern Louisiana, suffering, loss, and grief remain widespread throughout the region. While Ida faded in the minds of many Americans, months after this “twin-demic” upended life in southern Louisiana, a daunting reality has set in: Climate disasters already are — and will continue to be — even more devastating to human well-being than pandemics like COVID-19 for impacted communities. While public health and economic crises will come and go, climate change will be a constant force that only produces more extreme, more widespread, and more frequent climate disasters. I spoke with members of the community in Louisiana's gulf coast to see how a deeper understanding of the devastation can help us understand the destruction associated with increasingly strong climate disasters, the resilience of climate-impacted communities, and the need to develop a national strategy that can address the causes and consequences of climate change.

Sitting on a low-lying road that connects Schriever to Houma, Fletcher Technical Community College, like the rest of Terrebonne Parish, was devastated by Hurricane Ida. Already reeling from significant challenges and enrollment declines stemming from COVID-19, by August 2021, Fletcher hoped their most challenging days were behind them. However, Fletcher, and the community it serves, quickly realized that Ida would be even more disruptive than the most severe pandemic that the United States has experienced in more than 100 years. Eight months after the storm, an instructor at Fletcher from Houma described her experience:

“We took showers from a bucket from our neighbors swimming pool. We didn’t have running water for four days. We didn’t have electricity for about a month. You can’t charge your cell phone so there’s no technology at all. … My son stepped on a nail trying to pick up debris in the yard, and there’s no going to the hospital because the hospital is closed and there’s no gas to get in the car to get there. … It was like a warzone but there were no bombs. … Our family of three is still living in one bedroom and one living room . But we’re lucky because we didn’t have to move to a camper.”

Exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, Ida devastated entire communities that surrounded Fletcher. Businesses, homes, schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods seemingly vanished between August 29th and August 30th, 2021. Across southeast Louisiana, communities — even those not directly hit by the storm — were without power for weeks, if not months. While the rest of the country debated mask requirements and how schools could safely operate in the second year of a global pandemic, in southeast Louisiana, life was singularly organized around hurricane recovery. Schools and jobs were closed not because of public health guidance, but because of the sheer damage to the state’s electrical grid and the destruction of many buildings.

But how could one college ever fill the needs of communities that were entirely destroyed from a hurricane?

Months after landfall, Ida’s destruction remains front and center for the rural communities most ravaged by the storm. At Fletcher, this devastation is obvious. Students, staff, and members of the Fletcher community live nearby the college in FEMA trailers — many of which did not arrive in Louisiana until January 2022, more than four months after the storm hit. The painfully slow and drawn out recovery effort has been eerily similar to the oft-criticized recovery following Katrina, which was marked by inequities for Black families and families with low incomes. While Katrina’s damage centered on New Orleans, Ida’s devastation was felt most painfully in small communities like Schriever and Houma. This reality makes community members question if they’ve faced a particularly painful recovery process precisely because they live in smaller, more rural areas of the state. As one member of the Fletcher community said:

“People feel like we’re washed away or ignored because we’re not New Orleans. That’s my overall statement about the government response. Many lives were impacted. But we’re not New Orleans so they don’t care.”

People I spoke to in Houma said they feel “very forgotten about,” and that they “would have gotten the coverage” if in a bigger city like Biloxi or New Orleans. But after the storm, life resumes. And for Fletcher’s leadership and administration, work became even more meaningful — and intense. Angie Pellegrin, the college’s executive director of Title IX & Equity Initiatives, explained:

“As a college, we’ve asked what we can do to help students and ensure they don’t face barriers? … We hosted some pretty intense distribution events on our campus to make sure people had water, supplies, things they need. … I had a student that was living in a tent for a very long time, and they just got a mobile camper, but they are trying to figure it out. Not having internet is part of the daily reality.”

With a deep understanding of its community's needs, Fletcher is doing what they can to help meet the growing economic and health needs of its students and their families. The college is launching an on-campus childcare center to help student parents balance family and school responsibilities and opened an on-campus consignment in partnership with a local food bank to ensure their students have access to food and personal items. Fletcher recognizes the increasing mental health needs of their students. Pellegrin explains:

“We’re also opening mental health support groups, and mental health services, on our campus. Before I could try and connect students to the local mental health provider, but we’re coming back to grassroots and saying okay, let’s make sure there is a place to go, and let’s provide that on campus.”

These efforts, while honorable and deeply important to Fletcher’s students, come with direct costs to Fletcher’s staff. Faculty and staff — many of whom are dealing with the same mental health, economic, and housing problems as Fletcher’s students — are working longer than ever as they try to help their community recover. But how could one college ever fill the needs of communities that were entirely destroyed from a hurricane? The work of local public institutions and nonprofits has been nothing short of miraculous, but without substantial and well-coordinated state and federal action, it will never ensure southeast Louisiana recovers from yet another climate disaster. As the United States faces increasing threats from extreme climate disasters that will disrupt communities across the country, we need a coordinated approach to dealing with the causes of climate change — and the destruction it brings — that’s equal to the magnitude of the problem we face.

Despite an overwhelming amount of evidence that shows climate change is caused by humans, deteriorating the earth, and causing more extreme and widespread environmental catastrophes, the United States lacks a unified approach to actually addressing the scope of the crisis we face. We are not prepared to change our lives, reorient our economy, and increase government spending such that we meaningfully mitigate climate change. Instead, we debate piecemeal solutions and the actions of individual consumers as if one person’s decisions to become environmentally conscious is sufficient to transform the world and prevent mass climate-related suffering.

What will it take for everyone to understand that we are running out of time to prevent our climate from changing even further — and that the price of government inaction is far greater than the price of any necessary policy?

Unfortunately, we can deduce the answer to this question by looking at our response to COVID-19. Much like we let Fletcher sort out how to help their community recover from a major hurricane, we let local governments, nonprofits, and small businesses try and navigate a pandemic that’s taken the lives of more than 6 million people globally. We gave colleges, schools, local communities, and small businesses confusing and conflicting guidance; we backed away from implementing national public health policies that could have thwarted the brunt of the disease; we shifted the attention to the individual choices people made rather than on the systemic public health failures that caused the pandemic to spiral. We failed.

We haven’t failed with climate change yet. We can still mitigate climate change before catastrophic weather events reach every corner of the country. We can still decarbonize our economy and ensure our climate doesn’t heat past the point of no return. But we are running out of time. The United States needs to orient every facet of the government and economy around offsetting climate change and helping those already impacted recover. Anything else will ensure that the disasters stemming from climate change will make COVID-19, and any future pandemics like it, for all the death and despair it brought, look like nothing more than a minor blip in a long path towards climate destruction.

The country can learn from Fletcher and community-based organizations across Louisiana. Let’s hope we learn the right lessons.

COVID-19 has been extremely tough on communities and has made operating a college extremely challenging. For this reason, New America’s Center on Education & Labor has given out small grants as part of their "Bringing Adults Back to College" work. Fletcher Technical Community College is a recipient of one of these small grants.

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