Four years, four storms, four stories….LADRM has an incredible story because of people like you….volunteers have been rebuilding south Louisiana. Not the government, people like you are changing lives, giving hope and showing God’s love to the victims of these devastating storms.

 

South Louisiana has been devastated by powerful hurricanes in the last four years. Four years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there are still blue tarps on   houses that haven’t been touched by work and lives that are destroyed because they were uninsured or underinsured. One year after hurricanes Gustav and Ike, there are the same instances in South Louisiana. The Louisiana Methodist Disaster Response Ministry funded by UMCOR and other agencies is using Case Management to do what the government hasn’t been able to accomplish. By identifying homeowners that need help we purchase materials with the grant money and have recruited volunteers from around the country as the labor.  So far we have used 70,220 volunteers to rebuild New Orleans and South Louisiana due to the storms of 2005 and 2008.

 

 

 

Hurricane Gustav was the second most destructive hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season making landfall on the morning of September 1 near Cocodrie, Louisiana. An estimated 153 deaths had been attributed to Gustav in the U.S. and the Caribbean.

Hurricane Ike was the third most destructive hurricane to ever make landfall in the United States.   Damages from Ike in US coastal and inland areas are estimated at $24 billion in the United States, 112 people were killed. Ike was the third costliest Atlantic hurricane of all time, behind Hurricane Andrew of 1992 and Hurricane Katrina of 2005.

Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the costliest hurricane, as well as one of the five deadliest, in the history of the United States among recorded hurricanes.  The most severe loss of life and property damage occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana, which flooded as the levee system catastrophically failed, in many cases hours after the storm had moved inland. Eventually 80% of the city flooded along with large tracts of neighboring parishes, and the floodwaters lingered for weeks. Economist and crisis consultant Randall Bell wrote: "Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the largest natural disaster in the history of the United States. Preliminary damage estimates were well in excess of $100 billion, eclipsing many times the damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992."

Hurricane Rita was the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the most intense tropical cyclone ever observed in the Gulf of Mexico. Rita caused $11.3 billion in damage on the U.S. Gulf Coast in September 2005. Rita was the seventeenth named storm, tenth hurricane, fifth major hurricane, and third Category 5 hurricane of the historic 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.

Rita made landfall on September 24 between Sabine Pass, Texas, and Johnsons Bayou, Louisiana, as a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. It continued on through parts of southeast Texas. The storm surge caused extensive damage along the Louisiana and extreme southeastern Texas coasts and destroyed some coastal communities. The storm killed seven people directly; many others died in evacuations and from indirect effects.