re: August 14, 2016: Baton Rouge floods

Woke up to a Facebook reminder of it. That sucked.

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Was leaving my parents the night of the 13th
My dad told me to watch the water at the end of their street as it didn’t drain fast
Went right into it & flooded my car
Was a blessing because if I’d made it back to my apartment me & my dog would have been screwed

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I spent the night at my parents' house and it rained and rained and rained that night. Dad was at work, so it was just me and Mom. At one point the rain was so bad, I went out to the backyard by myself and got the dog in. He had a big covered pen attached to the workshop, so wasn't in the rain or anything, but it was bad enough that I was scared he would flood. So I brought him in and we went to bed.

Next day I'm working and supposed to be going to New Orleans for work and then fly out from BTR the next day for work. As I'm sitting there at like 8am, the backyard is just rising. My parents have a drainage canal that runs through the backyard and that sucker was full speed flowing like a whole river.

My dad had moved my car to higher ground, but I was like.. I need to GTF out of here. He was trying to get me to stay because "you don't need to drive in this rain". Finally, he agreed I can leave and had to carry me out to my car on high ground down the street.

I drove off fine because the ground gets higher and then I took Hooper/Harding to interstate, so was high and dry.

My parents' house is like 5' off the ground as it is, and by that night, they were stuck on the second floor because the bottom floor was flooding so badly. Eventually, they decided to bail. It was so bad the fridge was floating in the kitchen when they went down.

Mind you - My mom can't swim and the dog is like 100lbs. Somehow my dad got non-swimming Mom who is freaking out about her house + the dog into the truck and they drove through the flood without the truck breaking. My brother still drives that truck today, lol.

Crazy stuff.

My parents didn't deal with FEMA and paid to redo the house themselves, so they've been back in it pretty much since immediately after. Their neighbors' homes sat vacant for the LONGEST time. One still is half painted one color, half the other.

Yikes

Do you have a link to that thread?

How many pages was that thread back then? Had to be pretty long..

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The only good thing that came of it for me was that I got really good at house demo work. By the end of the week I told a friend “I may not be able to build a house, but give me a pry bar and a hammer and I can take one apart”

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Right? I mean it was a miserable situation but once you resign yourself to the fact that we are all in the same shitty boat and there's nothing we can do about it, it gets easier.

I can't tell you how many times I did the busting through some drywall joke,
With either a


Or



Just to bring some levity.

It was rough but my job has gone under so not like there was anything else to do. And people needed help. What else can you do?

Yep, that smell.

I was staying at a friend of mine's mother-in-laws house while I was there and when I came home after the first day of demo work she looked at me and said "No offense, but you need to take all that off immediately and let me wash it, and go take a shower, please don't sit down anywhere"

The next year when I went to the first Harvey flooded house, I walked in, caught a whiff of the smell, and was instantly transported back to BR in 2016.

quote:

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someone post a screen shot of PJ’s post in the original thread

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LINK

I'm talking about the day we got twenty inches of rain

Yes, that was March then. Definitely flew under the radar by comparison.