It’s hard to find someone who lived in the Baton Rouge area a decade ago who wasn’t impacted either directly or through a loved one by the historic 2016 flood. Tens of thousands of Louisianians lost so much: homes, family heirlooms, cars, all gone in a matter of hours.
Ten years ago, South Louisiana faced a flood that redesigned what disaster looked like.
“In the days leading up to the flood, we knew we were going to get wet. We knew we were going to get a lot of rain, but never anticipated how much,” State Climatologist Jay Grymes told UWK. “You basically had what amounted to close to a 48-hour window of relatively steady rain. So two days, 20+ inches of rain, 30+ inches of rain in Watson.”
The rain wasn’t from a hurricane, but instead a slow-moving weather system.
All of that rain put a huge strain on local waterways.
“Even when the rain stopped, the river was still rising. The river rose 30 feet for everybody in the Denham Springs, Baton Rouge area,” Grymes recalled. “The April ’83 flood was kind of the benchmark at that time. So the question was, ‘Is this an ’83 repeat?’ Well, it looked like an ’83 repeat. It didn’t just break the ’83 record; it smashed it. August 2016 topped ’83 by almost five feet.”
That means five feet of water with nowhere to go. Roads became rivers, boats replaced cars, and thousands of lives changed forever.
Denham Springs
While much of South Louisiana was impacted by the Great Flood of 2016, one area hit hardest was Denham Springs. At the time, Mayor Gerard Landry had only been in his position for a year and a half.
“I’ve never had to go through, really anything, nothing like the ’16 flood,” Landry said. “But never had experienced a flood before. And unfortunately, there’s not a handbook when you walk into office on how do you handle a disaster.”
Landry remembers meeting with local leaders the night before the flood, and everyone felt like they were ready for what was coming. But they had no idea what was coming, and Landry wasn’t prepared for what he saw the next morning at City Hall.
“I got inside the door and I said, “Holly, look at this! The water’s everywhere now,'” Landry recalled. He raced to grab as many things as he could and move things to top shelves before the water got even higher, like lock combinations, hard drives, and computers.
In the end, the water rose over four feet inside City Hall.
“50 to 52 inches in City Hall,” Landry said. “Think about that. All your computers, all your desks, everything, all the equipment that you work with. If we were not able to pull it out, it was lost.”
On top of being mayor and working tirelessly, from a Walgreens parking lot, to make sure his town and people were okay, Landry’s own home was hit by the flood. It’s something that still makes him emotional talking about today.
“It brings back the feeling I had of not being able to help my family,” he said. “Thank God nobody got hurt and everything was okay. It’s still emotional. Here we are, ten years later, and it shouldn’t be. But it’s like you know, it’s like post-traumatic flood syndrome. You never forget.”
Grymes said the Great Flood of 2016 is the number one weather event in the Baton Rouge area, including Denham Springs, and Livingston and Ascension Parishes.
“We need to be ready for the fact that another one of these events is likely to happen somewhere in South Louisiana,” Grymes explained. “This is at least the third time we’ve seen numbers of this magnitude in South Louisiana in the last 60 years.”
UWK sat down with Grymes, Landry, and some of the 2016 flood victims who have been working over the last decade to recover and rebuild. You can watch our documentary: Hell and High Water here.
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