As Hurricane Francine churned offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, Danielle Morris, a resident of the village of Dulac out in the swampy Louisiana coast, made a tough call.
“We’re crazy and we’re staying,” she said, speaking by phone before the hurricane hit, as she stocked up on gasoline for the family’s generator. Some might agree with her judgment of her own sanity – Morris lost her previous home in Hurricane Ida in 2021.
But as Francine receded inland and headed north as a weakening weather pattern Morris – and hundreds of thousands of others like her – breathed a sigh of relief. The storm had lashed Louisiana, like so many others before it, but it had not caused significant large-scale damage or loss of life.
Still, the storm raised alarm for some on the Gulf. Before it hit, Francine fed off the unusually warm waters of the Gulf and rapidly developed into a category 2 storm. That was a surprise – but one that is becoming more common, scientists say, as global climate change is causing sea temperatures to rise. For many residents, their relief was also tinged with fear – Francine had hit harder than many expected and that might be a sign of the future.
Francine’s winds reached 100mph (160km/h), as it tore through many of the same bayous and towns that were rocked by Hurricane Ida in 2021, which displaced thousands on Louisiana’s fragile and rapidly disappearing coast.
Louisiana loses roughly a football field of land an hour. Lower Terrebonne parish – where Dulac lies – is home to Indigenous and tribal communities who have already been facing mass displacement due to climate-driven land loss. Morris is herself a member of the Grand Caillou/Dulac tribe of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw.
Riding out the storm was not easy. “It’s bad,” Morris messaged the Guardian around 6pm, as the eyewall approached her home. “We watching trees fall. Wind is super bad.”
There have been no reported deaths or injuries from the storm, though dozens required rescue from rising waters in Lafourche parish, while in New Orleans, one man was pulled from his flooded vehicle in a dramatic rescue broadcast live on television. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power.
Ursula Ward, in Morgan City, was also displaced by Hurricane Ida in 2021, which forced her out of Houma. Last night, Hurricane Francine path took the storm between the two cities.
She, too, was surprised at the storm’s strength.
“This can’t be a category 1 storm,” she wrote around 7pm, roughly two hours after landfall. At that time, her street had flooded and wind was blowing water in her house. She had not yet heard the news that Hurricane Francine had been upgraded to a category 2.
Those who live in mobile homes had no choice but to evacuate. That includes many who lost their old housing to past storms. Both Ward and Lertrelle Ray were displaced from the same housing complex for low-income residents by Ida. Ray, who was pregnant at the time, was so stressed that she went into labor early, needing an emergency C-section about two weeks after Ida hit.
Now she calls her youngest daughter a “Hurricane Ida baby”.
“Every year – like when she turns three – I think, ‘Oh Lord, it’s been three years since Ida.’”
Since Ida, Ray and her four children have shared a Fema trailer north of Houma. Residents of mobile homes were required to evacuate before Hurricane Francine; Ray received a phone call on Tuesday telling her she needed to leave. So Ray packed up her car and drove to Mississippi, where she and her four children waited out Francine at a friend’s place.
Now, she is scared she has lost her Fema mobile home, too. She doesn’t anticipate being able to return and check on her home until Friday.
“It kind of felt like I was homeless until I got the mobile home. And it still kind of feels like that,” since she isn’t permanently housed. But she can’t move because “everyone went up on the rent” since Ida.
Housing prices in Terrebonne skyrocketed after Ida, and today there are very few public or subsidized housing options for people displaced by storms in the area. Ray says she pays about twice as much for her Fema mobile home as she did for her old apartment. She worries Francine will make her search for housing even more difficult.
On Wednesday afternoon, people in Houma and lower Terrebonne were busy clearing their yards of branches, aluminum siding and other debris. Trucks from power companies made repairs and attended to utility poles that were knocked over by the powerful wind. Further down the bayou, some houses in the mandatory evacuation zone did flood, while water still stood in yards and under elevated homes, and downed trees littered some properties.
Despite the widespread power outage, a taqueria truck still operating south of Houma was serving people using a generator. Inside an adjoining store, where the lights are dark and the refrigerators silent, the cashier, Dulcinea, pointed up at stained and missing ceiling tiles.
“It all got wet,” she said in Spanish. “It was a surprise. And will be a problem for the owner. But this was not as strong as Ida.”
Morris started clearing debris and helped tape her grandparents’ damaged roof.
“It was worse than we expected,” she confirmed. Though it “seems like it lasted forever”.
Still, Francine was not as bad as Ida, she added. And her new home is more prepared for severe weather, with hurricane screws and and a reinforced metal door they closed when the winds got high.
Though flooding reached the tires of the boat trailer in her yard, the waters drained away by the middle of the morning.
The hurricane made landfall the day after the debate between the presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
While Harris has touted a more climate-friendly platform, during the debate, neither pledged to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, which will be necessary to maintain a habitable planet, according to scientific consensus. Rather, both supported fracking and an increase in domestic oil production.
But back in Dulac, Morris was focused on local solutions. She was grateful the new levees and floodgates in Terrebonne had held up to the storm. She had been worried beforehand, as the angle of Francine’s approach brought feet of storm surge. But the structures held firm. “Without the locks, we would’ve got flooded real bad,” she said.
