Wednesday marks the 20th anniversary of another devastating hurricane – Hurricane Rita. The storm reached the maximum intensity of Category Five before weakening to Category Three when it made landfall in Johnson’s Bayou, near the Texas border, on September 24th, 2005. J.C. Falcon was an air personality on KTDY-FM in Lafayette at the time – he says two of his brothers had major water damage in their homes.
” One of my brothers lived in Erath. He had over 30 inches of water in his home. I had another brother living south of Abbeville. He had almost 40 inches of water in his home,” Falcon said.
Falcon says the one thing that made him realize how bad of a storm Rita was, was what he saw eight miles in from Vermilion Bay.
“There were redfish flopping around in a canefield, miles north of where redfish usually are. And that kind of drove home to me how bad the flood and the storm surge was,” Falcon said.
Falcon says while many people, including his brothers, were determined to stay in the area because that’s their home, others ended up moving out permanently. As such, some areas have never recovered.
“If you drive down towards Cameron Parish, you’ll see that a lot of the places that used to be there aren’t there anymore. And it really changed the landscape, changed communities. It’s not like it used to be,” Falcon noted.
