Batting away snakes, Wilkie Declouet trudged through chest-deep water to reach his front door.
Hurricane Ida had flooded Ironton, a small historic Black community down the Mississippi River from New Orleans, only 10 miles outside the levee system that protects the city. Declouet, a 61-year-old father of four, was the first to return.
His house, raised on piers, had held. Almost nothing else had. A weathered white casket was stuck upright in the tangle the flood left behind. Inside it was a man Declouet had known. At least a dozen caskets lay scattered around Ironton for weeks after the storm.
“Ida was a storm that came up fast,” Declouet said recently as he sat under his rehabbed house. “And it was one of these things where they couldn’t decide whether it was going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5. They couldn’t decide.”…