Louisiana’s Black Rural Residents Feel Neglected in Wake of Hurricane Francine

On Tuesday, six days after Hurricane Francine smashed into Louisiana’s coast as the strongest storm of this year’s hurricane season, the Biden administration announced a major disaster declaration for the state and ordered federal aid to supplement the recovery process.

How quickly states and local counties can help individual households largely depends on how quickly they can set up their programs, which depends on these kinds of declarations. By comparison, the Biden administration declared Hurricane Beryl, a Category 1 hurricane that hit Texas this summer, a major disaster the following day after it made landfall.

As nearly half a million people went without power and experienced 100 mph winds and subsequent home damage in Louisiana after Francine, a majority of the areas that received the damage were rural counties, where a large share of the state’s Black population lives.

As Black rural residents picked up the pieces while waiting for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which couldn’t offer direct aid and recovery funds until Biden’s declaration, they believed that the slow pace to declare a declaration had a lot to do with neglect of rural communities.

“I have a call to the Biden administration and the national media, because when people hear about Louisiana, they hear about New Orleans, but they don’t hear all the little places, and that has to do with people not caring about our rural Black areas,” said Ashley Gaignard, the founder of Rural Roots Louisiana, a community organization in rural Louisiana.

Rural communities of color are overrepresented in FEMA’s National Risk Index, which identifies the most at-risk communities for climate disasters, but at the same time, the federal Government Accountability Office says rural communities have the hardest time accessing aid from government recovery programs.

Mary Landry, a resident of Donaldsonville, Louisiana, said it shows her, “For little places, people like us, it’s like, we don’t matter.”

Her home in Donaldsonville remains without power after a massive oak tree collapsed onto her roof. She initially reached out to FEMA immediately after the storm, but they turned her away, telling her to wait for an emergency declaration. She says no local agency or FEMA has come to assess damage in her community. (On Monday, FEMA told Capital B they were waiting for the federal government’s disaster declaration before they began interfacing with impacted residents.)

On her street, most homes are either without power or experiencing roof damage. The county nor the utility company, Entergy, said they could help.

Studies show that homeowners in rural areas, particularly in Mississippi, New Mexico, and Louisiana, are the most likely to be without property insurance. Poverty rates in rural communities are also 25% higher than in urban ones, making out-of-pocket costs even more difficult to afford.

Ultimately, Landry had to pay thousands of dollars to a group of men she saw doing recovery work down the road for them to remove the tree from her living room. A group of community organizations, Rural Roots Louisiana, the Louisiana Just Recovery Network, and Community Organized Relief Effort, then helped tarp her roof to the best of their ability.

Now, she waits.

“That, to me, that’s not fair,” she said. “You know, we are struggling as well, and it feels like there’s a reason why we’re neglected.”

Across the state, more than 10,000 people remain without electricity, and hundreds of homes sit with gaping holes in their roofs and facades damaged by wind and tree damage. In addition, communities were whipped by rains, and subsequent drainage and canal issues, leading to hundreds of seriously flooded homes. Early estimates found that Francine caused $1.5 billion worth of damage in Louisiana. In comparison, the overall costs from Beryl are estimated to be double that amount, mainly because it hit a major city, Houston.

“As rural areas, we only have one or two people to advocate on our behalf. We have the parish president and our mayor,” explained Gaignard. “Some people have been left in their houses all these days without power and with damage, and now we’re seeing rain again.”

Her organization helped more than a thousand Ascension Parish residents receive meals, water, and ice in the two days following the storm.

“But we can’t do everything, and we can’t help everybody,” she said. “Like there’s a few people that lost everything: home, car, and everything, and I don’t have resources to help with that.”

Residents who sustained losses can begin applying for assistance at www.DisasterAssistance.gov, or by dialing (800) 621-FEMA (3362). Disaster-stricken households now qualify for $750 to cover immediate expenses automatically, although FEMA has said that their larger assistance funding pot has already been exhausted by the number of weather disasters this year.

The agency, which Congress funds, has faced issues getting funding because of the highly partisan nature of the federal government.

“We try to keep it moving, that is all we can do, especially when the storms are out of our hands,” Landry said. Still, “it’s concerning when the people meant to help us are slow to come out.”