The Grist, November 2025
Jennifer and Dean Bye were just getting by before Hurricane Ida slammed into southern Louisiana in 2021. The couple own a house in a comfortable subdivision in Paulina, a town about an hour west of New Orleans, that they share with their three kids. They had their challenges before the storm — Jennifer had recently been diagnosed with uterine cancer around the same time that one of their children was diagnosed with nonverbal autism — but the Byes were making it work. Then Ida turned everything upside down.
“The living room fell in and everything had to be gutted,” Jennifer, a nursing assistant, said. “We lost everything we owned.”
After pummeling the Caribbean, Hurricane Ida made its U.S. landfall on August 29. The storm had evolved from a Category 1 into a Category 4 in the span of just 24 hours, a rapid intensification powered in part by unusually hot seawater in the Gulf of Mexico. It dumped a foot of rain on Louisiana and meandered north, blowing through 17 states before it reentered the Atlantic Ocean north of Maine. The storm, one of the strongest to hit Louisiana on record, left a trail of devastation in its wake: More than 100 people died and economic losses totalled $75 billion.
