Athletes from a hurricane-torn US city try to return to normalcy

One afternoon in late October, Londyn Resweber, 14, was racing toward the twilight of disaster. Little was intact two months after Hurricane Ida swept across the only inhabited island off the coast of Louisiana, with sustained winds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h) and squalls that reached the ten-foot mark. Almost everything that kept the city going had been destroyed.

Resweber raced past the Grand Isle School, which may only be reopened for face-to-face teaching after Christmas. It also passed through dunes formed by sand removed from the island’s main road and the Green Lantern statue that someone placed on the beach, an apparent landmark of hope and challenge, as if only a superhero had the ability to protect the island, tough but vulnerable, against the next big storm.

For Resweber, running is one of the few things that remains familiar, habitual and customary. Louisiana’s state cross-country racing championship would take place the following Monday. And the Grand Isle School is a force among high schools. The school’s team, known as the Trojans, won the men’s state title in 2016 and came in second in 2019 and 2020.

Last year, when she was in eighth grade, Resweber came fifth in the women’s first division competition. She wants to win this year and has been training daily and posting her times online, as do her teammates, scattered across Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Ohio, like the shingles of island homes swept away by the storm.

Grand Isle, an island 11 kilometers long, is in the midst of rebuilding, with many buildings hidden behind fences, but a lot of uncertainty remains amidst hope. The island serves as an important storm protection for New Orleans, located about 50 miles away on the other side of a vast estuary, and is renowned for fishing and bird life. But because it’s regularly attacked by storms, the island has become a stark symbol of the challenges Louisiana faces from climate change: rising sea levels, coastal erosion, increasingly powerful hurricanes, rapid intensification, and ever-increasing rainfall. heavier.

The runners, their coaches and school management hope that competing in the state championship will somehow signal that the island, after drowning, is determined to return to the surface.

“We have to pick up the pieces,” said Resweber.

Fortunately for her family, the house they live in, built on twenty-foot-high pilasters, has suffered relatively little damage. But most of the buildings on the island looked battered and strangely out of place when people returned after the evacuation. An aluminum boat had been folded in half like a dollar bill. Planks torn from a nearby roof were stuck in the side wall of a house like arrows. For a time, Resweber’s family had to use water pumped from the pool for flushing and washing their hands. To shower, they used water left to heat in the sun in boxes on the porch.

“They looked like chicken soup boxes,” Resweber said.

Her grandfather is police chief in Grand Isle, and her father is a member of the state police; the two have a duty to be present as the island struggles to recover. But Resweber was the only member of the cross-country racing team to have returned to the island by the end of October. About 150 of the 1,400 permanent residents were back, according to the mayor. Almost every house suffered damage. A quarter of them were destroyed.

The regional power company has restored electricity using large generators, but Grand Isle’s water remains unsafe. Mineral water donations were available at the school. The internet connection is still intermittent. Of the 136 students at the Grand Isle School before the storm, 52 chose to enroll in other schools to complete the school year.

Only 20 children were present on the island for a community Halloween party. Christine Templet, the school’s principal, fears that virtual learning — forced last year by the coronavirus and this year by the hurricane — will prove insufficient.

“I really care about their ability to retain what they’re learning in this way,” she said.

One of these days, when the internet went down, Torey Resweber, 43, drove a 10-kilometer drive around the island until he found a wireless spot outside an unoccupied house so that his daughters, Londyn and Presley, could 7, could attend classes online.

“I parked there and they were able to use the truck as a classroom,” she said.

Local, state and federal authorities face tough questions about the resources that must be devoted to restoring the island. A recent headline in The Times Picayune/New Orleans Advocate, a local newspaper, asked a serious question: Is protecting Grand Isle against a new storm that has the same destructive power as Ida is worth the cost?

“People are devastated, mentally, emotionally and financially,” said Denny Wright, 70, a physical education teacher at the Grand Isle School and coach of the men’s team, men’s running team, and men’s basketball team. “I know the island is on the mend. But what that recovery will bring, I don’t know.”

He and his wife, Peggy, have driven more than 4,000 miles by car since the hurricane hit on Aug. 29, and have spent short stays with relatives and friends in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. In late October, with their clothes hanging on hangers in the back of their SUV, they returned to the Grand Isle to see what the state of their home was. It had sustained roof damage during the hurricane, and mold had hit the built-in cabinets, which hung out of the walls. Since then, a contractor has practically demolished the interior of the house and installed new partitions.

Peggy Wright, 67, was standing on the porch, contemplating the skeleton of her home and the catastrophic damage to other neighboring homes, and her concern was that many people might not have the money to go back, given the cost of insurance and rebuilding. Tears ran down her face.

“Oh my heart,” she said.

Denny Wright has coached 48 years, mostly basketball, at the high school and college level, “always blowing his whistle to stop practice.”

On the couple’s honeymoon in 1976, he insisted that Peggy accompany him to a New Orleans Jazz game to see Pete Maravich. As an assistant coach at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, he advised head coach Joe Dumars, a point guard who won NBA titles with the bad boys of the Detroit Pistons in 1980 and 1990 and is a member of the Hall of Basketball fame.

Asked whether the hurricane would convince him to retire, Wright said, “I can’t make that decision right now. There’s a lot to know.”

For now, he’s going to follow the advice he’s always given his athletes. “Go all the way”. Complete your task.

Wright was sitting in the shade of his garage, using a laptop and a wireless Internet connection to teach gym class to eighth graders. As the state cross-country championship approached, he told Jaide McCullough and the other member of the running team who had to leave the island that “you all need to pick up the pace. We need to make sure we’re giving our best effort.”

Logan Camardelle, a sophomore who placed 10th at a state championship two years ago, is living with his sisters in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and attends classes virtually at the Grand Isle School. He runs down the street with his brother-in-law and sometimes uses a treadmill to run a few miles. A buildup of fluid in his knees forced him to stop training for a while, but Camardelle said he will be back for the championship.

“When I got to 10th place, it felt so good that I was able to imagine what it would be like to have a better ranking in the top five,” he said.

Logan is the cousin of David Camardelle, 65, long the mayor of the Grand Isle, who always says he will stay on the island as long as there is enough sand to plant a United States flag. Logan really wants to go home, to get back to the beauty and tranquility of the island, to the discipline of cross-country and basketball training, but he knows that storms will continue to come. A friend of her father’s lived in a $210,000 (about R$1.14 million) beach house for just two months, before it was devastated by the hurricane.

“I don’t know how many of the people’s homes on the island will be able to take one more blow like that,” said Logan Camardelle.

David Camardelle talks about Grand Isle as “the first line of defense” of New Orleans. He urgently called for more large boulders to be placed in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to serve as breakwaters and preserve Grand Isle beach. And he asked that clay, not sand, be used to fill the fabric tubes that serve as the backbone of the island’s protection system. The four-metre-tall structure, known locally as the “burrito dam,” ruptured at certain points during the hurricane, causing certain sections of State Highway 1, the only road leading into the city, to become buried under 1.5 meters of water. sand.

Chip Kline, the chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority, told a recent meeting of the organization that the federal government needed more creative ideas to protect the Grand Isle. During Hurricane Ida, the sand dam melted in spots, like sugar in coffee. Many scientists expressed support for programs to help people leave Louisiana’s vulnerable coast, where federal resources devoted to reconstruction and recovery are likely to decline as storms become more frequent.

“The question is not whether the Grand Isle will become uninhabitable at some point in the future, but whether it will be uninhabitable,” said Torbjorn Tornqvist, a geoscientist specializing in coastal issues at Tulane University. “This applies to many places in Louisiana. And ultimately it applies to New Orleans as well.”

Bobby Jackson, 15, who plays basketball and is on the Grand Isle School’s cross-country team, trained five days a week before the storm. He is living with his grandparents in Robertsdale, Alabama, and had planned to run for the state championship even though he lost the enthusiasm to train for the contest.

“I’m used to training with the team,” he said. “They encourage me. It’s not something I have here.”

His grandparents’ home on the island, where he lived, had its roof ripped off by the hurricane, and most of the interior was ruined, he said. The fiberglass backboard of his basketball hoop cracked. He’s not sure his grandparents will choose to return to the Grand Isle. They’re getting old, Jackson said, and “it’s hard to go back to something like what happened there. Very depressing. Rebuilding will take too long.”

His father, a fisherman, stayed on the Grand Isle. Jackson says he plans to move in with him if his grandparents don’t return when the school reopens. He wants to play basketball.

“I refuse to live anywhere but the island,” he said. “For me, she’s perfect.”

The Resweber family feels the same unconditional attraction. On Londyn’s long-mile run across the island in October, she passed a reopened restaurant whose sign was a door torn down by the storm and repurposed. The green paint on the street signs had been completely removed by the wind and sand, leaving them white. The narrow streets looked like tunnels of devastation.

She will try her best to improve her place from last year, fifth in the state championship, said Resweber.

“If you can’t, that’s fine. I know I’ve been through a lot,” she said.