As Hurricane Ida ripped through the small bayou city of Chauvin, Louisiana on August 26, 2021, Category 4 winds pulled at trees, tossed around a haze of water, and shifted loose items on the ground. In one sudden moment amid the storm, a large piece of debris—a roof from a nearby shed—went flying across the backyard of one of the city’s fire stations and into the top right corner of the building, ripping the station’s roof off.
“It hit the door on the whole back of the building and it just—BOOM!” said Marty Thibodeaux, the then-chief of Chauvin’s Little Caillou Volunteer Fire Department. “It was like a train ran into the station.”
Thibodeaux, now retired, said that overall, Ida’s wrath caused about $100,000 worth of damage to the headquarters station located on Highway 56. Repairs to the station have been completed. But other stations that were fully destroyed during Ida have yet to be repaired, and the Chauvin community—like the rest of Terrebonne Parish—remains a different world than it was before Ida.
