RAIN HERE COMES THE AGAIN
Will Lake Charles, Louisiana, become America’s latest climate sacrifice? By Mara Kardas-Nelson THE AGING CIVIC center sits just beyond a
string of waterfront mansions, lawns freshly mowed, and across from the bombedout Capital One Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with dozens of wooden boards instead of windows. On a hot and sunny June morning, Jennifer Cobian, the soft-spoken assistant director of the Division of Planning and
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Development for the county government, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, uses a big, echoey room on the center’s ground floor to host residents of Greinwich Terrace, a low-income, primarily African American neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Built in the 1950s for military families near the Chennault Air Force Base, the Terrace has been hemmed in by larger housing
developments, strip malls, and Interstate 210 in the decades since the base closed. As the city built up around it, the Terrace found itself at the bottom of an increasingly full bowl. Low-lying, it’s uniquely vulnerable to the city’s 62 inches of annual rainfall—nearly double the national average—as water tries and fails to snake its way around buildings and roads, no longer able to seep into
