When Hurricane Ida slammed into Grand Isle as a Category 4 storm, with 150 mph winds and towering storm surge, a group of six people rode it out in a local motel.
“I thought we were going to blow away,” Kelly Smith, one of the six, said of the near-death experience. “That building was shaking like I can’t even tell you. We could see debris from buildings floating everywhere. There were whole buildings floating by.”
Smith and the rest of the group piled out of a Coast Guard helicopter in the parking lot of the Barry P. Bonvillain Civic Center in Houma Sunday afternoon with wild hair, dirty clothes and all their belongings stuffed in a few duffle bags.
Smith experienced the full force of the storm at her home, the Tropical Motel, with a group that also lives at the motel, including her sister Katie Lingo. The building is now practically destroyed, but the group escaped unscathed.
“It’s not gone. It didn’t blow away, but the roof did,” Lingo said. “Every room is leaking, all the tiles are falling in. The cook shed blew away. There was a house in the back — it blew away.”
The decision to stay behind and face Ida at her strongest point was an accident, Smith said. They misunderstood when the island would be sealed — so they were left packed and ready to leave but had nowhere to go.
Hours after realizing their error, the storm swept ashore.
From then, “it never stopped,” motel owner Steven Schevalier said.
“When it came in, we were just far enough from the eye that it was able to continuously beat on us before it stopped,” Schevalier said. He estimated that it was nearly sundown before the worst of the winds subsided.
The group was then left to spend the night in a building and a town that looked nothing like it had before while they awaited rescue.
“Normally, people on the island wait through a hurricane and run the generator, but this time the poles were broken off, the lines were down, rooms were torn off, buildings were blown away. It’s total destruction,” Schevalier said.
Despite a mandatory evacuation order ahead of the storm, those at the motel weren’t the only people on the island who chose to stay.
Two miles east from the motel at the Grand Isle Community Center, a few dozen people, including some firefighters, sheltered from the storm.
Six feet of standing water — with wind-whipped whitecaps — on the lone state highway leading to Grand Isle prevented rescuers from reaching those on the island Sunday evening, Jefferson Parish Council member Scott Walker said.
But, as weather conditions improved Monday, boat crews began conducting search-and-rescue operations in the lower parts of Jefferson, including Lafitte, to the north of Grand Isle, where there was also a high storm surge.
When rescue came Monday afternoon in the form of a Coast Guard helicopter, the group at the motel got its best view of the destruction on the island from the air.
“It’s destroyed,” said Adam Niski, a Coast Guard flight mechanic on the crew that rescued the Tropical Motel group and two other people. “There’s some structures, but it’s going to take a while to rebuild.”
As the group shuffled into the Houma civic center, now a temporary shelter for hurricane victims, Hilda Green was quiet, mostly tending to her two cats that accompanied the group throughout the storm.
“I’m exhausted,” Hilda Green said. “The day before, I prayed all day and night. From yesterday morning until yesterday evening, I prayed, prayed, prayed until I fell asleep.”