Recovery efforts slowly underway in La. flood zone

DENHAM SPRINGS, LA. — In 23 years of coaching football, Dru Nettles never had to deliver a pep talk like this.

Most of his players and coaches on Denham Springs High School’s football team lost homes when floodwaters ravaged their city in suburban Baton Rouge. Their battered school remains closed, but the team has a season-opening home game to play in two weeks.

B e f o r e t h e y p r a c t i c e d Wednesday for the first time since the floods, Nettles sat them down on the purple logo at midfield and asked if they had seen aerial photographs of their inundated school.

“If you look at the back of campus, the one thing that didn’t go underwater was this logo,” Nettles said. “Awesome sign right there that this ‘DS’ was shining ... to give people hope.”

The promi se of Friday night football is tonic for a city at the epicenter of the catastrophe. Even the most modest signs of recovery are lifting weary spirits in Denham Springs, where flooding damaged an estimated 90 percent of homes and businesses.

Block by block, garbage trucks equipped with metal jaws are scooping up mounds of rancid debris. Postal workers are delivering mail again. I n s u r a n c e a d j u s t e r s a r e inspecting gutted houses. A fast-food restaurant near the interstate that had been underwater reopened.

“Everybody is trying so hard to get back to normalcy as much as they can. Yes, we are seeing progress. Every day, we finally see another business come back online,” said Denham Springs Mayor Gerard Landry.

But he fears it could take years for this cit y to fully recover after more than 2 feet of rain fell over a threeday period two weeks ago.

“The devastating thing is that so many people didn’t h a v e f l o o d i n s u r a n c e , ” Landry said. “In most parts of this city, it was not required.”

Elvin Watts had no flood insurance for his shop in the touristy downtown antiques district.

Watts, 69, estimates he lost up to $85,000 of inventory — almost everything he had inside Theater Antiques Mall.

“Little by little, it’s going to the curb because it’s starting to mildew,” Watts said. “We’re pretty much back to square one here.”

The floodwaters spared little in this city, where many of the 10,000 residents were drawn by top-notch public schools and proximit y to Louisiana’s capitol.

City Hall and the police department’s headquarters both flooded. Landry has moved his staff to the old city hall, which had become a museum.

Volunteers are helping repair police headquarters while dispatchers handle radio calls from a mobile command center in the parking lot.