Progress shown in decade since Rita’s landfall

It was a decade ago this week that Hurricane Rita roared through the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall near the Louisiana/Texas border.

She wasn’t a direct hit on local soil, but she was close enough to do millions in damage to our area.

Because the Houma-Thibodaux area was on the eastern edge of the storm’s eye, we didn’t get the worst of her rain and winds, but we got hammered by her water.

Estimates show that nearly 10,000 homes in Terrebonne Parish experienced flooding because of a seven-foot storm surge that hammered the parish’s then-underfunded levee system.

The storm was the last body blow of the 2005 season – one that was deadly throughout Louisiana. Rita passed just weeks after Hurricane Katrina during a time when thousands of Louisianans still weren’t back home in the aftermath of the storm.

Rita and Katrina taught us valuable lessons about the powers of Mother Nature. They also showed us just how vulnerable our area has become because of coastal erosion taking our marsh away from us – a once natural buffer that deflected storm surge in the storms of the past.

They are lessons that were learned the hard way, but were still learned nonetheless.

Flash forward to the present, and we’re proud to report that the Houma-Thibodaux area is a safer place than its ever been during Hurricane Season.

In Lafourche Parish, work continues to be done on the parish’s ring levee system, which is somewhat of a gold standard for hurricane protection structures around the world. The Lafourche levee sits at 16-feet high in some areas, and is being built both taller and wider every day.

South Lafourche Levee District General Manager Windell Curole stops short of calling the levee he maintains invincible. He knows just how sharp Mother Nature’s teeth can be. But with every shovel of dirt that is applied on top of the dirt already in place, we become better able to withstand her wrath in the future.

And with tax money already committed to fund that parish’s levee efforts in the future, the Lafourche levee will continue to get bigger and better – regardless of whether folks in Washington DC or even Baton Rouge step up and support the project in the future.

In Terrebonne Parish, the past decade has also been great, and lawmakers were able to pass a similar tax as the one that Lafourche has in place already.

With its passage, the parish will be able to continue working on its levee system, which has become greatly improved since the deadly 2005 storm season.

With those dollars, the folks in the southern portion of the parish are now safer than they’ve ever been – no longer in the direct line of fire when a tropical storm or hurricane knocks on our doorstep.

We’re still not perfect and a lot of work needs to be done. But if we can push to complete as much of the Morganza to the Gulf Project as possible, while continuing to fatten our parish levees, we will be headed in the right direction.

But the danger is not over yet.

Experts say that the peak of hurricane season is still ongoing, which means that we are not free from the dangers that might take place when nature is at her worst.

Summer may be over, and with each day that we inch closer to October, the risk of a major storm reaching landfall lessens, but we are not out of the woods.

Remember, all it takes is one storm for a hurricane season to be memorable.

So don’t let your guard down just yet and pay close attention to the news in the coming weeks to make sure that everything in the tropics remains clear.

But for now, it’s worth noting just how far we’ve come since Rita banged on our doors 10 years ago and showed us just how vulnerable we really were.

The word ‘were’ is the key one in that phrase.

Because it’s past tense and shows us exactly how far we’ve come in the 10 years that have passed.

Hurricane Rita wasn’t a direct hit on local soil, but she was close…