Eleven months after Hurricane Laura’s landfall near Lake Charles, community leaders launched the Help Southwest Louisiana Now campaign. It’s an effort to convince the feds to provide the area with federal disaster relief funding.
Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter said this type of funding is usually awarded in a much shorter time period.
“We don’t have the same response that came ten days after hurricane Katrina, 34 days after Andrew, and 98 days after superstorm Sandy,” Hunter said.
Hunter said this grassroots effort called Help Southwest Louisiana is a way for the region to come together to communicate with Congress and President Biden about the dire need for disaster relief dollars.
“We don’t have the bandwidth here in Southwest Louisiana. We don’t have the numbers and we got to appeal to the rest of this state and we’ve got to appeal to the rest of this country to realize the pain that we’re going through,” Hunter said.
Hunter says the total unmet housing need for the state exceeds $900 million as a result of last year’s hurricanes. He says the president is aware of the situation in southwest Louisiana, but the Lake Charles mayor said it is time for action.
“Still think his administration cares but I plead for an official request for community development block grant disaster recovery for this community,” Hunter said.