Never forget

On anniversary of Rita, Delcambre residents want nation to remember

BY KENNETH HICKSON, THE DAILY IBERIAN

The American conflict in Korea in 1950 is often referred to as the “Forgotten War” because it came on the heels of World War II and just before the war in Vietnam.

In Louisiana, it’s not a war, but a hurricane that many believe is forgotten. That hurricane is Rita, a storm that already seems to have lost its national attention because it lies in the shadows of Hurricane Katrina. But, for the people who survived Rita, they hope the country will never forget.

For the Teche Area, Delcambre was the hardest hit and today, exactly two years after Rita, the small town is still recovering.

“I guess we got a long way to go before we completely recover, but we’re on our way back,” Mayor Carol Brous-sard, who had around 2 feet of water in his home after the storm, said. “We still don’t have a grocery store or a drug store and people are still living in FEMA trailers.”

For Philip and Brenda Oubre, who live between Delcambre and New Iberia, you could say the anniversary of Hurricane Rita is bitter-sweet because it also marks the day they were married. Philip Oubre recalled the rough times following the storm.

“We got about 3 feet (of water) in this area,” Oubre said. “The wind wasn’t bad, it was the water. I went to work (the morning of Rita). My neighbor’s son called me and I said, ‘is it already in my house?’ and he said ‘it’s coming out the windows.’”

“I had eating-size shrimp in my swimming pool. I had blue-point crabs, croakers and hardhead catfish in my pool,” Oubre said. But, he said, “when you started feeling sorry for yourself, you just had to look around.”

“Nobody died so it could have been worse,” Brenda said.

Oubre said much of the damage to his home was electrical because the power came back on while the home still was flooded. He said while his home is complete, two years after Rita, people in his area still are repairing their homes.

“On one side of me, I had two neighbors just walk away from their homes and my neighbor on the other side of me is about 90 percent finished.”

Paul Mayard still is repairing his home because he said some of the damage began happening just recently.

“We’re starting to put sheetrock on the walls right now because we’re just developing problems with our pre-finished paneling. It’s coming apart,” he said.

Mayard said he grew up on the waterfront in Delcambre and remembers storms like Hurricane Audrey flooding the area.

“I had 6 feet of water in my mother’s house (after Audrey),” he said. But, Mayard said he had never seen a storm push water so far inland until Hurricane Rita. “It looked like a big lake,” he said.

Rita was one of the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. It weakened to a category 3 hurricane before making landfall at the Louisiana-Texas border but still caused $11.3 billion in damage along the Gulf Coast.