Jennifer and Dean Bye were just getting by before Hurricane Ida slammed into southern Louisiana in 2021. The couple own a house in a comfortable subdivision in Paulina, a town about an hour west of New Orleans, that they share with their three kids. They had their challenges before the storm — Jennifer had recently been diagnosed with uterine cancer around the same time that one of their children was diagnosed with nonverbal autism — but the Byes were making it work. Then Ida turned everything upside down.
“The living room fell in and everything had to be gutted,” Jennifer, a nursing assistant, said. “We lost everything we owned.”
After pummeling the Caribbean, Hurricane Ida made its U.S. landfall on August 29. The storm had evolved from a Category 1 into a Category 4 in the span of just 24 hours, a rapid intensification powered in part by unusually hot seawater in the Gulf of Mexico. It dumped a foot of rain on Louisiana and meandered north, blowing through 17 states before it reentered the Atlantic Ocean north of Maine. The storm, ... Read more
