The pictures of the 1000 year flood in Baton Rouge and the surrounding areas show the catastrophic damage that 31.39 inches of rain in just over 2 days can cause, even in an area with such routine flooding that many homes are built elevated from the ground. To put that into perspective, that is 1/2 of the area's average rainfall for a year falling in under 3 days-- the average rainfall of a notoriously rainy, hurricane prone area. There's only so much that can be done to alleviate that amount of rainfall; it's such a rare event that it's not worth building infrastructure to manage.
One half of a year's rainfall in three days.
The pictures of the flooding that I saw first were pictures from an area that I'm very familiar with. The photographer's discovery and documentation of the "LSU Northgate flooding" reminded me of the McKinley neighborhood flooding that routinely shut down my high school.
I got up from the couch. I walked out the front door. I stood on a porch looking out onto a street with a month for a name, watching water wash the driveway, flow out to the curb, and speed away without even creeping into the road. And I said "There but for the grace of Bob, I am on this side of the fence." Track that green line running up the middle of the map. That's the fence.
| East of the Fence | West of the Fence | ||||
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You think that these photos were taken on different days, don't you? I took my photo to prove to my friends that while I was right next to the flooding that this photographer was posting to Twitter, I was in no risk.
Here are some things that you don't see: That house on the right is elevated, most likely by at least one yard. My house is also elevated several feet but that doesn't matter because it is also on a slight hill, which further doesn't matter because even street level is elevated. Every yard in this neighborhood rises above the road. But behind the fence, all bets are off. For all I know, the yard of the house on the right is 3 yards from mine.
The Fence is magical but it does nothing to keep the water out. It divides the area into "desirable" and "undesirable." While there are now exceptions, it used to divide the area into "middle-class white" and "poor black." The reason is in the very far left side of the photo at the top: lake front property.
Note: The map above has South at the top to emphasize the lake front. The rest of the maps will have North at the top, as is standard.
How did this happen?
The Creation of the LSU Lakes
I wasn't able to find information on the creation of the Lakecrest Subdivision (AKA The Month Streets), but there is enough cohesion to assume that the land features were installed by the developers during initial phases. They may even have repurposed some of the dredged swamp detritus to help build up the overall elevation plus the berms that elevate each row of homes. At least one of the homes is a lakefront mansion, on land high enough to block the view from the street. The lakefront homes could probably be described as mansions as well.
Just the buildings. They're on berms so that the main campus doesn't flood, but the surrounding land isn't on berms, so the entrances, parking lots, fields, etc. routinely flood. I went to McKinley High and the flooding there became an economic issue for the school district, changing the emergency plans on flood days.
During the long-running school desegregation case in East Baton Rouge Parish, redistricting and busing was never enough to increase the number of white kids in this Historically Black High School. Thus, McKinley High was designated the only high school to have a Gifted & Talented program, an overwhelmingly white program for "high IQ" students. This additionally meant that the students were raised in homes with significant educational privilege, like my own. This also skewed the program demographics middle to upper-middle class. It was a well-funded program for well-off white kids who took classes with each other all day, making the campus, in effect, two separate segregated schools. The classes were even centralized in different buildings.
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| "Lake McKinley" Photo by Brianna Paciorka. |
This meant that the student parking lot was typically filled with the cars of well-off white kids who drove across town to school because riding the bus for over an hour wasn't awesome. One day in the 88-89 school year, there was an unanticipated flood. The buses weren't able to return immediately and the student parking lot was locked. While students stood above the lot and watched, it flooded at least three feet deep before it was unlocked, flooding the cars of the rich kids, whose parents promptly sued.
Lake McKinley is not a new lake; it's an intermittent lake, a recurring, incidental lake, the least useful oasis in a swamp.
For the remainder of the school year, any sign of flooding got school cancelled for the day. The neighborhood floods. The school grounds flood. We had to walk through floodwater to get to the buses. But rich white people sue and voila! The problem is solved for only the rich white people.
The neighborhood stays a flood zone.
Environmental Racism and Louisiana
Forcing poor minorities into flood plains is a long tradition in Louisiana. If you watched the New Orleans flooding during Katrina, you may have noticed the French Quarter being fairly unscathed but the neighboring 7th Ward taking a heavy hit. The Quarter is high ground. The Lower 9th Ward, hit extremely hard in Katrina, is very low ground.
In Baton Rouge, Highland Road is a dividing line for many miles, resting at the top of a bluff with undeveloped flood plain at the bottom. The "south" part of Baton Rouge doesn't run very far south of Highland because of the flood plain. White people live at the top of the bluff and no one lives below it unless they are poor.
This Flood is Different, Though
The problem in this flood is simply the amount of water that fell in a small period of time. Homes that were not in floodplains flooded. However, if you look at the rescue footage and the shelter footage, you will still see a high racial disparity. That's because while some high ground white areas were hit, floodplains are still floodplains and floodplains flood, as if by definition. Black neighborhoods were still disproportionately affected.What is different about this storm is that middle-class-plus white people were also affected, that the flooding exceeded the flood plains due to the huge amount of water.
