‘Everything’s working fine’ for LaPlace residents who avoid Hurricane Francine flooding

‘Everything’s working fine’ for LaPlace residents who avoid Hurricane Francine flooding (Piper Hutchinson / Louisiana Illuminator)

LAPLACE – Sisters Josie and Johnnie Boynton were grateful. 

Hurricane Ida ripped the roof off of Johnnie’s house in August 2021, and a hail storm tore up her new one a few months later. 

But Hurricane Francine, which made landfall southeast of Morgan City as a Category 2 hurricane Wednesday and whipped through the River Parishes, was nowhere near the kind of storm Johnnie and her neighbors had lived through with Ida or Hurricane Isaac in 2012. 

By midafternoon Thursday, whatever trees had been felled were cleared from streets, and power had been restored for all but about 4,800 of Entergy Louisiana’s 19,400 customers in St. John the Baptist Parish. 

Josie, a retired school teacher, was hard at work cleaning downed sticks and leaves out of her sister’s yard. The pair had ridden out the storm at Josie’s house in Kenner and returned to LaPlace to check out the damage at Johnnie’s. 

It wasn’t nearly as bad as they feared. Johnnie’s roof was intact, her air-conditioning was whirring, and the worst to contend with was about 6 inches of standing water in neighborhood streets. WVUE-TV Fox 8 reported other neighborhoods in LaPlace saw stormwater in homes. But in Johnnie’s neighborhood, the houses sit behind slightly sloped yards, offering some protection from stormwater.  

Along the flooded street, the whir of generators could still be heard at some houses, and a country music hymn floated out of an open garage. 

Two blocks down, Rob Potter’s three young children were splashing in the road and chasing one another with sticks, which they were using to gauge the depth of the flooding. 

Potter said there was about a foot of standing water at the peak of the flooding, with a few inches encroaching about 5 feet into the green grassy yards. 

For previous storms, Potter said he recalled 3 to 6 feet of water quickly rising from the road and flooding houses. Thankfully, the water came nowhere near his house, Potter said. 

Power flickered off around 6 p.m. Wednesday as the storm rolled over LaPlace, Potter said, and came back on around 2 p.m. Thursday. For a community used to days or even weeks without electricity, that was something for which he was grateful.  

Flooding would subside that evening or sometime Friday, several residents predicted, making it easier for the neighbors to get where they needed to go. 

For Josie, that was one of two places. 

“[Hurricanes are] why we have churches and bars. We go and pray and then we go and celebrate it,” Josie said. 

To Josie, Johnnie and her neighbors, the residents of LaPlace had much to celebrate. They still bear the scars and anxiety past storms have inflicted on them — as do their homes. Johnnie pointed to the dark mark on her front door from 6 inches of floodwater during Ida. 

There weren’t any churches open in St. John on Thursday evening, though a reporter might not have looked hard enough. But at Hammerhead’s, a sports bar that has served LaPlace for two decades, the party had begun. 

The business opened as soon as it regained power, with patrons already lined up to get in by that point. Inside, revelers enjoyed the AC, cold beer and a hurricane-themed playlist. 

“I figured everything would be f—ed up,” bartender Scott Marks said to his fellow barkeep. “Everything’s working fine.” 

Marks said the crowd of around a dozen people was a bit smaller than the usual Thursday crowd, but Hammerhead’s planned to stay open as usual. 

Both in the shelter of the sports bar and in the hot sun, LaPlace residents anxiously anticipate the completion of a new levee system that would help prevent the worst of the flooding on the parish’s northern end. The Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity project will raise existing protection to guard against storm surge in St. John and neighboring St. Charles Parish from a 100-year level Category 3 storm.    

A contract was awarded for the system earlier this year with the goal of completing the system in time for the 2027 hurricane season.