LAROSE, La. — Three weeks after Hurricane Ida, the clean-up has begun on Hamilton Street, but there is still a long way to go.
Ted Falgout’s 350-acre alligator and crawfish farm is covered in a foot of dark brown muck washed in from the marshes that surround the bayou community as Ida’s winds whipped the area for hours.
“Oh, this was a lush, green yard, like everybody else’s yard,” he said. “Now it looks like a disaster area. It is.”
“I’m 70-years-old and I was born in Larose and we built this house 41 years ago,” Falgout said.
In all that time in southern Lafourche Parish, he’s never seen anything like Hurricane Ida. The monster storm kept Larose in its punishing winds for hours.
Falgout’s farm is called T-Bois. That’s Cajun French for “little woods,” but now there’s little left.
“What I see is a mess. Got a foot of mud throughout the entire farm, actually,” he said. “For the first three mornings after the storm, my first order of business was to come here with my tractor and pick up the dead fish. I had thousands of dead fish. Huge catfish, redfish, sheephead. You name it. And look, you can see the blue crabs. Look at the dead crabs all over the yard.”
Falgout rode out the storm on a steel houseboat, down the road from his home.
Video shows the wind-driven water piling up, spilling over the levee banks.
“We have about a plus-six elevation on the levees,” he said. “And we had probably a nine-foot surge.”
That meant water not just on the land, but inside Falgout’s home.
“We had about a foot of water inside the house and it carried that same amount of mud throughout the house. It’s, uh, it’s something," he said.
A walk through the house triggers memories familiar for so many in southeast Louisiana.
Falgout has ripped out the lower parts of the walls.
“Close to four feet in here,” he said while in a den on a slab, “and then about a foot in here (in a raised part of the home).”
Now, most of his life is in piles on the muck-covered front lawn, waiting to be picked up.
“Tell you what. Even my wife never broke down and cried yet. But it’s coming,” he said.
Since the storm, Falgout has done what he can to clean up. “Every day I get up at daylight and work ’til dark.”
But it’s been a slow process, and the biggest question is what to do with all the muck that was pushed in from the marshy areas that surround Larose.
“I have no clue on how going forward this is going to unfold. You know? How this will dry.”
One thing he’s certain about when discussing the recovery? “It’s going to be slow and painful.”
There is some hope about power. Crews are getting ready to try to restore it. Falgout says it could be back in a few days, bringing light to the pitch-black nights.
And people have dropped by with meals while the slow rebuild and clean-up begins.
While most of the land appears unusable right now, there are some glimmers of hope.
A peach tree is starting to bloom again -- something Falgout says usually doesn’t happen this time of year.
Falgout says this is home, and it’s where he’ll stay.
“I love this place and have a lot invested here and I’m going to fix it back,” he said.
It’s a bit overwhelming these days, but he says he’ll figure it out.
“It’s the price for living in paradise, you know? Hunting and fishing is great and -- but you stand the risk of getting knocked down.”