Mardi Gras, Crawfish, Festival, and Saints: On Recovery Season in the Gulf Coast
A photo essay by Virginia Hanusik
Time is marked by seasonal cultural cadence in South Louisiana including, but not limited to Mardi Gras season, crawfish season, festival season, and Saints season. However, when it comes to actual weather, there are only two distinct times of year: when it’s hurricane season and when it’s not.
I drove to Grand Isle from New Orleans at the beginning of March, over six months since Hurricane Ida’s eye made landfall not far from the shore of this inhabited barrier island. It was sunny and warm and the type of day that makes you question whether the last chance to feel temperatures drop below 75 degrees has passed until November. The town was busy with construction vehicles continuing to move the sand that landed across the entire width of the island during the storm, and individuals making repairs on their properties. Official assessments deemed 100% of structures on Grand Isle were damaged with 25% completely destroyed. At this point, the official start of the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season was less than three months away.
Hurricanes are not new to Louisianans, but the window of recovery time in between is shrinking as storms become simultaneously more severe and more frequent due to climate change. In 2020, there were 30 named storms and 11 storms that made landfall, making it the most active hurricane season on record. Louisiana was in the cone of uncertainty—the projected path and intensity of a hurricane or tropical storm issued by the National Hurricane Center—eight times.
In 2021, Grand Isle took nearly a direct hit from Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 storm that became one of the country’s most powerful and the worst in the island’s history. Devastating damage was done to the island’s levee protection system including the “burrito levee”, a 13-foot tall tube filled with sand, which keeps the Gulf of Mexico from knocking into Grand Isle’s beachside properties. Without this protection, a storm much less severe than Ida could leave the island uninhabitable.
As a seaside and fishing destination, the “off-season” is generally composed of locals who call the island home all year long. When I visited in March, I spoke with homeowners who felt as if they were in a race against time to prepare for the next hurricane season. The dread of knowing that this season may be more active than the last was compounded by the fact that Louisiana’s coast continues to shrink each year. This deterioration of land is due to the leveeing of the Mississippi River, the creation of oil and gas pipelines, and rising sea levels. Looking at the fractured landscape of Jefferson Parish where Grand Isle is located, the land loss crisis is largely a product of human engineering. The state has lost around 2,000 square miles—an area approximately the size of the state of Delaware—to the sea since the 1930s. What was once marshland is now open water, making it easier for storm surges to impact communities farther inland.
For the more than 1,000 full-time residents of Grand Isle, the cycle of rebuilding and recovery continues with an uncertainty of what the season will bring and whether the island, along with the rest of South Louisiana, will be spared this year.
Virginia Hanusik is an artist whose projects explore the relationship between landscape, culture, and the built environment. She is a Rising: Climate in Crisis Resident at Tulane University’s A Studio in the Woods where she is working on a body of work about the inequality of disaster relief along the Gulf Coast. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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