IDA - TWO YEARS LATER

As the sun rose on Monday, August 30, 2021, tens of thousands of our region’s 200,000 residents were homeless, water and power supplies were cut, and mangled debris was all that remained of many families’ homes and businesses. The pain and loss were tremendous.

New Orleans garnered national attention, but the depth of destruction here at home was far worse. Ida was our storm, and our people were hurting.

​Hurricane Ida really dealt a serious and costly blow to our community. And in the aftermath, we quickly came to realize that our salvation wasn’t anyone else’s responsibility. So many people stepped up and responded to the needs of others.

They went out and obtained supplies. They made contact with the powers that be to help us provide for the basic needs of the community. Fire stations and churches served as a connect points for food distribution, and for the distribution of water, ice and cleaning supplies. Volunteer firefighters, law enforcement officers, and church members spent countless hours and many sleepless nights tending to the needs of the community. Fire stations and houses of worship even housed soldiers from the Louisiana National Guard.

Two years later, the memories still haunt many of us. But two years later, the extent of our gratitude only grows for the local heroes from our communities who really ‘showed up and showed out’ when they were called upon prior to — and in the aftermath of — Hurricane Ida.
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In the wake of Hurricane Ida, those days were our finest hour. Many of us did some of our best work, and so many people served and so many people deserve credit for their selfless acts, for their random acts of kindness in the wake of the storm.

The real story of Hurricane Ida was not the images that we saw on Facebook and on television. The real legacy is people just helped peal away all that isolates us from each other, and that allowed for human to human connections.