Kyle Peveto

In 2005, hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged thousands of buildings in south Louisiana and forever altered home construction in the state.

“A third of our housing stock in the state had been damaged,” said Claudette Reichel, a now-retired LSU AgCenter Extension professor focused on residential building science. “I mean, it was massive.”

Regulations and building codes changed to address flooding and windstorm damage resistance, and more than ever, homeowners sought resources to ensure they were prepared for the day another storm struck.

Home builders and homeowners found answers in the LSU AgCenter LaHouse Research and Education Center, a house designed and built on campus to exhibit a variety of sustainable, storm-resilient building methods and landscaping.

“We had the vision to create LaHouse starting in 2000, and in 2005 we started construction,” said Reichel, who spearheaded the LaHouse project and became the director of the center. “It was being built to demonstrate science-based, proven solutions for the challenges and issues of this region’s climate and natural hazards.”

Hurricane Katrina would stall construction of the LaHouse showcase home located at 3622 Gourrier Ave. on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, but the storm did not prevent Reichel and the LaHouse staff from educating Louisianans. The LaHouse contractors and construction workers were needed elsewhere after Katrina hit, and the buildings stood partially finished until 2008. Reichel saw this as an opportunity.

“So, we just said, ‘OK, let’s shift gears. Let’s just leave it like this and showcase it in this midconstruction stage, because it really shows everything better,’” she said.

For the next two years, thousands of professionals and consumers came to see it with the wind-, flood- and termite-resistant construction features fully exposed.

LaHouse was inspired by a Florida demonstration home built in the mid-1990s. At the time, Reichel was a housing consumer education specialist, a role that focused on home repair, kitchen design and other traditional home improvement topics. Beginning in the 1980s, she expanded her program scope into energy efficiency, disaster recovery and resistance, and healthy homes. In 2000, Reichel pitched the idea of creating a facility focused on the emerging issue of sustainable housing at a meeting with AgCenter leadership. She worked with corporate partners and raised private donations to build LaHouse without public funding.

“We engaged lots of folks in the planning and design, and we formed action teams,” Reichel said. “That whole process took years.”

Reichel believed that the topics LaHouse would emphasize and integrate — energy efficiency, indoor air quality, disaster mitigation and sustainable landscaping — had not been addressed holistically because the government agencies and researchers who studied and promoted these ideas rarely worked in concert.

“We wanted to demonstrate sustainability as the integration of energy efficiency, disaster resistance and health all melded together, but we didn’t want to do it just one way because there’s not just one way to achieve it,” she said.

The home showcased multiple products and techniques, and the design incorporated four different high-performance building systems.

“It was more of a showcase of a number of ways to achieve the objective of integrating everything for true sustainability,” Reichel said. “That was the vision for LaHouse.”

After Katrina hit in August 2005 and Rita hit in September, a state law mandating a uniform building code passed the Legislature and was signed into law. Reichel worked with building scientists and engineers to create a curriculum to teach builders, and they toured the state, making six stops, hitting each region of south Louisiana and reaching hundreds of builders. Before construction resumed on LaHouse, the team at the facility hosted open houses regularly.

Following the storms, Reichel became an in-demand expert for journalists across the country.

“After Katrina and after the water receded, mold was a big deal. Someone with the Associated Press called LSU looking for someone who knew something about mold,” she said. “I did 60 interviews about mold from reporters all over the country. After that, my coworkers started calling me the ‘Mold Queen.’”

In July 2006, the federal Department of Energy asked Reichel to speak at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., about the hurricane’s impact.

“I didn’t speak about the construction stuff,” she said. “I spoke about the stories of what happened and how overwhelming it was and the process to try and figure out what to do and to bring people together.”

That launched an outpouring of public and private program support and partnerships.

While Katrina did not alter the mission of LaHouse, the storm led Reichel to deepen her own technical knowledge. She sought training on building-science principles and best practices, disaster resilience, advanced residential construction methods, indoor air quality and other topics.

“It forced me to actually ramp up my expertise, my knowledge base,” she said.

For years after Katrina struck, Reichel continued to speak about the extension response to the hurricanes in 2005 and was a nationally sought-after speaker on housing disaster resilience, even beyond her retirement. LaHouse was completed in 2008, and Reichel continued to educate Louisianans and the Gulf region on sustainable home design, leading seminars, speaking to the media, creating a great deal of online content and producing dozens of helpful publications that remain on the AgCenter website. Today, Reichel is retired from the AgCenter, but as an emeritus professor, she continues learning, writing and teaching.

“The AgCenter and extension program is a really impactful program without being regulatory,” she said. “You can make change with regulations, but this is all about the mission of extension, which is the dissemination of research-based knowledge and being a change agent, and that’s what we did.”

Additional information: LaHouse displays lessons learned from hurricanes Katrina, Rita

The LSU AgCenter LaHouse Research and Education Center was built in the 2000s, and construction was halted because of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. LSU AgCenter file photo

Construction on the LSU AgCenter LaHouse Research and Education Center halted after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 because many construction workers were needed to rebuild storm-affected areas of south Louisiana. LSU AgCenter file photo

Claudette Reichel, a now-retired LSU AgCenter Extension professor focused on residential building science, speaks to visitors to an open house at LaHouse Research and Education Center in 2015. LSU AgCenter file photo