Published September 24, 2015
Ten years ago today, Hurricane Rita made landfall along the Louisiana-Texas border. Coming less than a month after Katrina’s surge across the Louisiana-Mississippi border, Rita scared millions across the Gulf Coast as it developed into the fourth-most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. Lessons learned from Katrina prompted mass evacuation of Houston and other cities as Rita approached, saving lives. Katrina’s official death toll is just short of 2,000 people; Rita’s is slightly more than 100. In the collective memory of America and the rest of the world, Rita is the forgotten hurricane of 2005.
Not so in my family. Like many others in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, we lost someone whose terminal illness in the months after the storms was part of the unofficial death toll from the deadly hurricane season of 2005.
My oldest sister and her family live in Lake Charles, Louisiana, 30 miles north of the Gulf, 35 miles east of the Texas state line. They live directly behind the house that was my mother’s home during the summer of 2005. I was living in Baton Rouge, about two hours’ drive east of Lake Charles, where I was born and raised. Affected by Katrina mostly in terms measured in lost power and lost sleep, I had settled into what was the new normal in Baton Rouge: taking alternate routes on surface streets every day because of the crush of people who relocated to Louisiana’s capital from the New Orleans area after post-Katrina flooding.
When it was obvious that Rita, a Category 5 hurricane at its most powerful, was not expected to hit Baton Rouge, we decided that my family’s best evacuation option was to head my way. For two weeks, my two-bedroom apartment was home to me, my mother, my sister, her husband, their two children (a daughter and a son), a dog and a hermit crab (my nephew’s). Tight quarters, for sure, but nothing like the many situations after Katrina in which 20 or more people crowded into a home or an apartment.
Shortly before Katrina made landfall and knocked out my electricity on Aug. 29, 2005, the monitor for my desktop computer died. Using my laptop on battery power a few hours after the storm hit, I placed an order for a new monitor, one that was much larger than I really needed. Using a gift certificate my mom had given me, I also ordered cases of protein shakes for reasons I can’t even remember. What I do recall is receiving a notification — in red letters — during the ordering process, telling me that shipping delays were expected in my region because of extreme weather conditions and flooding.
The monitor arrived a few hours before my family knocked on my door to stay with me to ride out Hurricane Rita from a safe distance. The protein shakes arrived in time for us to put them in the refrigerator long enough for them to be cold when the electricity went out upon Rita’s arrival to the west of us. The monitor turned out to be a good buy; before my power went out, and after it was restored, the whole family could easily watch streaming coverage of the hurricane and its impact upon Lake Charles by gathering around my computer desk. We saw video and photographs that were hard to believe. The seawall and other familiar landmarks downtown were gone, covered by water. Trees were down everywhere, some on roofs. Later, when we were able to drive down Enterprise Boulevard, we saw that its much of its faux ceiling of tree branches that stretched across both sides from the median and either side had been knocked down by the storm. The city of Lake Charles suddenly had a lot more sky.
My sister’s home, and my mom’s, survived with minimal damage. Two weeks after Rita’s landing, my family returned to Lake Charles. Less than two months later, my mom began having a series of medical tests for issues related to her lungs. Over the next several months, we became familiar with such terms as BOOP (bronchiolitis obliterans with organizing pneumonia), idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, lymphoma, and more. There were X-rays. There were CAT scans. There was a diagnosis, and a prognosis. There was a second opinion. There was relief, and joy, when our whole family gathered for Christmas, celebrating what appeared to be a promising outlook for my mom.
By the spring, it was obvious the celebration was premature. She had more tests, and then left for Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. She never returned to Lake Charles, except to be buried. She was in the hospital for her 75th birthday on May 18, 2006. She died July 3.
In her final months at her home, she said, “Things just aren’t right in Lake Charles.” In her final months of life, in the hospital, she often wondered aloud whether hurricanes Katrina and Rita stirred up so many toxins in south Louisiana that her immune system was compromised. We suspected there was a connection, whether the combination of stress and environmental factors brought on the illness or triggered an acceleration of something that had already been in her body, dormant, but waiting. She and her brothers spent their summer vacations in their school years picking cotton in south Louisiana, and exposure to pesticides is a consideration for lymphoma, as one of my sisters pointed out today. My mom and her last surviving brother, who died in 2012, both had medical charts near the end that referenced scars from the idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, scars that develop over some time.
From six months to two years after Hurricane Rita, there were a lot of obituaries in my hometown paper, the American Press, of people whose families similarly speculated about a connection between the post-hurricane environment and terminal illness. There has been much said and written about the post-Katrina environment on the other side of Louisiana and the many people who consider their loved ones’ later deaths to be in that number of uncountable but suspected Katrina-related deaths. In the case of our mom, we’ll never know for sure, but we’ll never think there was no connection. True, she had lived 75 years when her health took its final downward spiral, and all of that time was in Louisiana, a state dotted with petrochemical and industrial plants. She never lived in what is called Cancer Alley, but she lived her whole life between the bookends of the refineries near Houston and near New Orleans, the last 50-plus years in the shadow of the emissions that blanket Lake Charles. But she had a heart-valve replacement a few years before the 2005 hurricane season, and her outlook was good for a woman in her 70s.
There is coverage elsewhere of the Hurricane Rita anniversary that’s better than what I can provide here. It includes this Associated Press story, and one by the Houston Chronicle. This story about Cameron Parish is one of several in the past few days by The Advocate, the paper I was working for in Baton Rouge in 2005. There are places you can read about the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico, or that formed in the Atlantic. The top 10 of the latter includes three from the 2005 hurricane season: Wilma, at No. 1, Rita, at No. 4, and Katrina, at No. 6. For more about the unofficial death toll of Katrina, I recommend Spike Lee’s “If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise,” a worthy sequel to his compelling documentary, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.”
I’ve been largely off the grid lately, spending time on personal projects and reflecting upon several grief-tinged anniversaries, including the days 35 years ago when my dad went into the hospital before his birthday (Sept. 22), when soon after he found out that he had lung cancer, and when he died (Nov. 1). The fall, my favorite time of year, comes with several family birthdays, including mine, but it comes also with sadness. I wrote very little about Hurricane Katrina on its 10th anniversary, and I wrote more about my mom on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. I broke radio silence today to remember her in remembering Rita, and to share the smile that came to me as I recalled the Betty Boop items we gave her in the hospital, and perhaps to remind people that as with every natural disaster, there is a hidden toll beyond the official death count. Today, my family, like many others, needs no reminding. My thoughts are with all of them.
May you and yours stay out of harm’s way.