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Kyle Peveto, Miller, V. Todd, Bailey, Anthony
(08/11/25) A pair of natural disasters stunned south Louisiana in 2005.
When Hurricane Katrina hit the coast on Aug. 29 and Hurricane Rita followed on Sept. 24, much of south Louisiana sustained tremendous damage. The storms caused more than 1,100 deaths, according to the Louisiana Department of Health; displaced several communities; and led to $108 billion in damage, according to the National Weather Service. LSU AgCenter economists estimated that the state’s agricultural sectors sustained nearly $1.6 billion in losses from the storms.
With personnel across the state dedicated to serving others, the AgCenter committed to help shelter and provide care for displaced people and their pets, rescue livestock and support Louisianans in the aftermath of the storms.
“You are never prepared for these kinds of things, and it’s not something that you expect to have to deal with when you take a job doing extension work,” said Paul Coreil, the current chancellor of LSU Alexandria. In 2005, Coreil was the director of extension, which is a system of educating and assisting people on important topics such as agriculture and healthy living. “Extension has a tradition of helping people in crisis and improving quality of life. It’s so close to the mission that we felt very strongly that we needed to be responsive to the whole state.”
Hundreds of AgCenter employees —
including many whose own homes were damaged or destroyed — worked long hours in
the months following the hurricanes. A few of them recounted their experiences
to mark the 20th anniversary of hurricanes Katrina and Rita and to discuss how
these storms affected Louisiana and the AgCenter.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane in Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi River. The storm caused extensive flooding and an estimated $125 billion worth of damage in its wake. AgCenter file photo
After Katrina struck, safety was of top importance. Communication was difficult, and it took administrators several days to locate all AgCenter employees.
Coreil: “We couldn’t find a lot of employees. We just couldn’t connect to them. Really, we didn’t know if they were alive or dead because so many people escaped and migrated out any way they could. And we ended up finding people all over the country — I mean, Chicago and St. Louis and Houston and Dallas and Arkansas. People just went wherever they could go and many of them didn’t have a home to go to. Survival was the mode for many of them.”
Frances “Frankie” Gould was AgCenter director of communications in 2005. She is now an associate vice president in the Office of the Vice President of Agriculture.
Gould: “We did not know where 40 of our people were. Usually, you report to your supervisor in your department, region or parish or research station coordinator. They were unaccounted for. Eventually, the 40 people were located, they had all been displaced from their homes, many went out-of-state.”
AgCenter facilities in the path of the storm sustained damage or were destroyed. The AgCenter Citrus Research Station in Port Sulphur in Plaquemines Parish was inundated by 5 to 6 feet of saltwater, killing or harming the majority of citrus trees and destroying or heavily damaging all buildings and equipment. The work of the station then changed to focus on a variety of coastal issues, and it closed in 2011.
The LSU AgCenter Coastal Area Research Station (known as the Citrus Research Station in 2005) was located near Port Sulphur in lower Plaquemines Parish. This aerial photo was taken the day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. AgCenter file photo
A boat sits capsized after Hurricane Katrina. One of the greatest obstacles to the rebound of the state’s commercial fishing industry was that Katrina and Rita virtually destroyed all the infrastructure. AgCenter file photo
A traveling lift carries a repaired ship, the Pat-Al, through a shipyard crowded with rows of boats damaged by the hurricanes. The hoist, a Marine Travelift, was donated to Plaquemines Parish by the citizens of Valdez, Alaska AgCenter file photo
Coreil: “We knew for sure that the Orleans Parish Extension Office was gone. I mean, it was devastated — completely underwater and everything. And in Plaquemines, St. Bernard and all the parishes south of New Orleans, the most important priority was finding and seeking out our employees and making sure they were safe.”
Lauren Faust was a St. Bernard Parish 4-H agent in 2005. She is now the southeast region coordinator. She was unable to gut her flooded home for several months.
Faust: “We lived at the Lod Cook Hotel on the LSU campus for two weeks following Katrina. We didn’t get back in to see our house until after Hurricane Rita because we weren’t allowed back in St. Bernard Parish.”
“We went to the school system and said, ‘What do you need us to do?’ And they said, ‘We need y’all to come do after-school programming.’ I want to say they started in November with 300 kids, and there were more than 1,000 by the time school ended in May. … We were working with second, third, fourth, fifth grade. And we were just pulling programs, any kind of 4-H curriculum we could find at the time. The kids were dealing with the stress of losing everything.”
Before Katrina made landfall, the AgCenter’s Grant Walker Educational Facility, a 4-H camp in Grant Parish, became a Red Cross shelter for evacuees.
Over the next three weeks, more than 800 people passed through the camp. After Hurricane Rita hit, more than 50 people from southwestern Louisiana found shelter there, and after that, it housed hundreds of powerline workers who came to restore power to affected areas. Another shelter in need of volunteers was the River Center in Baton Rouge, which took in up to 6,000 evacuees. Todd Tarifa, now the AgCenter associate director of youth development, was a West Baton Rouge 4-H Youth Development agent in 2005.
Todd Tarifa, who now serves as the AgCenter associate director of youth development, was a West Baton Rouge 4-H Youth Development agent in 2005. He and former East Baton Rouge Parish agent David Carter unload meals at the Baton Rouge River Center which was housing 6,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. AgCenter file photo
Tarifa: “They were sending 18 wheelers of meals in these big, Hefty plastic containers, and we were unloading that. We got volunteers from 4-H to go in and unload that stuff. We did that for days. Then then the River Center really filled up and became like a tent city. … The most impactful part was the kids because the kids, they didn’t have anything. Adults lost everything, but we can kind of deal with it mentally. A kid loses everything. They lost their school, they lost their toys, a lot of them lost their pets. A lot of emotions.”
Parker Coliseum on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, the home of livestock shows and the AgMagic youth educational program, became a temporary pet shelter for companion animals rescued after Katrina and for pet owners who could not take their animals with them to emergency shelters. A joint project of the AgCenter, the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, state agencies, animal welfare groups and volunteers across the state ensured the animals were safe.
Gould: “People had taken their pets to vet hospitals to board, or other places for them to be kept. Those places realized that the animals might not be safe, so they put them in transports and started bringing them up the interstate, trying to find any place that worked.”
Coreil: “Parker Coliseum for multiple weeks was engulfed with taking care of these rescued animals, and there was a tremendous amount of volunteer effort and coordination of volunteers to help to walk these dogs and feed and clean out the pet carriers that we had.”
Gould: “We weren’t set up to get them, but it just gradually happened. Well, not ‘gradually’. It was pretty fast. We had cages in the arena and then we had the cattle stalls in back for the bigger dogs and other animals.”
Coreil: “Many of them needed medicines and everything, but the [LSU School of Veterinary Medicine] was wonderful. The AgCenter staff jumped in and volunteered together with the community volunteers, and then many of the pet food companies donated truckloads of dog food and cat food to help feed these animals.”
Gould: “We cared for more than 2,300 at Parker Coliseum. So, some people were able to come get their animals after the storm — 2,000 were reunited with their owners. Others were put up for adoption because no one ever came to get them. We had dogs, cats, we had some ducks, chickens, tortoises, rodents and a pig. … The Katrina pet experience led to a state law passed that you are allowed to take your pets with you to shelters.”
Dr. Scott Buzhardt, a veterinarian at the Zachary Animal Center, and LSU student volunteer Dana Wooley examine one of the many dogs and cats at the animal shelter in Parker Coliseum after Hurricane Katrina. AgCenter file photo
A few weeks later, Hurricane Rita struck the southwestern Louisiana coast.
Coreil: “We had Katrina that was an international disaster and then you have Rita, and it didn’t get as much international news or coverage because the population centers aren’t in southwest Louisiana. There is a lot of marsh, and it’s a smaller population. Cameron Parish is one of the smallest parishes in the state, but the damage was severe.”
Coreil began his career as a Louisiana Sea Grant and AgCenter Extension agent in Cameron Parish. After the storm hit, he found a way to be there to help.
Coreil: “I needed to go see what was going on in Cameron because it was close to my heart. … It was hard to tell where you were at. The homes weren’t there.”
Hilton Waits, a 4-H agent in Vermilion Parish and parish chair for the Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service, remembers the water rising as storm surge buffeted the parish.
Waits: “Within just hours, the whole one-third of the south part of the parish was on the water. The water just started coming in. It was really amazing how fast it came in.”
Cattle stranded after Hurricane Rita are rounded up to higher ground. AgCenter file photo.
Coreil: “And we had agents that didn’t have homes anymore in Vermilion Parish. Andrew Granger [a now-retired livestock agent] is an example, and he was out there helping people rescue their cattle. I mean, that’s the kind of commitment you had.”
Waits: “A lot of cattle got washed away, but a lot of them did survive. So, they found just high ground where they could, or some of them just were standing in belly-deep water in places.”
Granger worked to rescue and feed cattle, while Waits was tasked with supplying water to the stranded cattle around the parish, driving a truck with a 600-gallon water tank supplied by a sugarcane farmer to find livestock in need.
Waits: “I would go, and I’d fill up water troughs. A lot of troughs that I would fill up were places where they were bringing cattle. The cowboys would go out into the fields or sugar cane fields everywhere and they were gathering cattle and pushing them back to these pens or maybe it might just be a high spot in the in the road.”
LaHouse Research and Education Center, a model of sustainable, healthy home building practices from the LSU AgCenter, was in the middle of construction when Katrina struck.
The idea was conceived in 2000 to teach Louisianans about energy efficiency, storm proofing and other housing practices.
Claudette Reichel was then the director of LaHouse.
Reichel: “A third of our housing stock in the state had been damaged. I mean, it was massive.”
“When Katrina happened, we were at the phase of midconstruction, and at that time, every contractor and tradesman was needed to help people who had damaged homes. So, we just said, ‘OK, let’s shift gears. Let’s just leave it like this and showcase it in this midconstruction, because it really shows everything better.’”
Gould: “LaHouse was in the process of being finished, and they stopped everything. And the reason was because you could see the different kinds of building processes to make a house hurricane-resilient. So, what they did was they featured those building processes and left those as a window into how you build something to be more resilient for hurricanes.”
Reichel: “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. … I did 60 interviews about mold from reporters all over the country. After that, my coworkers started calling me the ‘Mold Queen.’”
Reichel became a prominent voice for resilient home building information and was interviewed by countless media outlets across the nation.
Reichel: “In July 2006, I was invited to speak by the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., at the National Building Museum about the aftermath of Katrina, and I didn’t speak about the construction stuff. 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.”
The people of Louisiana worked for years to recover from these storms.
After storm surge soaked sugarcane and rice fields and other farms in southern Louisiana, producers had few answers about the future. AgCenter researchers studied saltwater contamination in the area. The AgCenter also provided assistance to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Services Agency to use geographic information systems to map sugarcane farms affected by the storm to help distribute $40 million in aid.
The faculty and staff at the AgCenter learned from these hurricanes and became better prepared for future storms. AgCenter experts readily share their learnings whenever other states are in need.
Coreil: “I think it just expanded and magnified how important it is to have that connection to research-based information and that connection to a university, a land-grant and a Sea Grant university that has the expertise to help people deal with crisis.”
Gould: “We were looked at as the disaster communications experts, so we gave a lot of presentations and workshops about this, sharing a lot of that information ahead of time. We would share radio scripts. I’ve sent them all over the southern region. … When somebody was facing a similar situation, we helped them to adapt the text for their state or situation. I even sent them to California when they were having fires.”
Tarifa: “Katrina was a very confusing time. It’s hard to explain because everybody was reactive. For hurricanes following Katrina, we’ve been proactive. Extension has been part of prepping for the storm. Part of this is explaining, ‘This what you bring. This is what you do.’ How long stuff lasts in a refrigerator or generator safety. Everything is more proactive now when we see a storm coming in.”
Coreil: “Everything we learned helped drive programming over the next several years, knowing that these hurricanes are not going to end. We were going to deal with them again. And we have.”
Tyrone Nelson, who is deaf, found Heather Sartin to talk to through sign language. Both are from Chalmette, but they hadn’t met until evacuation from Hurricane Katrina brought them to Grant Walker 4-H Educational Center. AgCenter file photo
