2022 LSU Gumbo - Book - Page 85
“As you get a foot of rain, if you’ve paved over
thousands and thousands of square feet of land, that
rain is going to flood into people’s houses and roads
and overwhelm the drainage systems,” Snyder said. “It’s
not rocket science; we took a bunch of swamp and put
pavement over it. When we get a foot of rain, there’s going
to be flooding.”
Snyder said the amount of rainfall Louisiana
experiences is “not what happens anywhere else in the
country,” which is why the state experiences flooding more
often than other parts of the nation.
“It’s because the Gulf of Mexico sometimes just decides
to dump a huge amount of water on top of us,” Snyder said.
“We live in this already relatively wet area where we get 7080 inches of rain some years, and the way that’s distributed
is a lot of it falls at one time, often in the afternoons, often
in the summer, and it can lead to a lot of flash flooding.”
There are numerous possible solutions to Louisiana’s
flooding problems, but Snyder said a good first step would
be to put a moratorium on building for about a year until
those solutions are implemented, as the Ascension Parish
President suggested.
“If we continue to build, for sure [we can expect more
flooding],” Snyder said. “If you build another Walmart, and
another subdivision, there’s going to be an increased risk
of flooding. And on top of that you have climate change,
which throws in a big unknown.”
Snyder said one solution to decrease the risk of flooding
on LSU’s campus would be to implement permeable
parking lots, which are designed to allow water to seep
through them back into the soil below the surface, while
also filtering pollutants. Since parking lots take up a
large part of LSU’s campus, this could be one solution
to providing better drainage and reducing the chance of
flooding.
Millican said LSU Facility Services are considered
essential personnel, so custodial staff was present even
when campus was closed. She also said the university
has an emergency response vehicle with fans and water
extractors to remove water, and roofers are constantly
maintaining the roofs to prevent leakage.
“There are 539 buildings on campus, so the ability to
get all of them when something like this happens can be
difficult,” Millican said.
International studies sophomore Mary Jett McLarty,
who works at the UREC, said the flooding required the
UREC to completely shut down May 18. She also said
the following days the UREC couldn’t operate normally
and required a limited number of staff to cope with the
damage.
“I could not get my car out of the parking deck, and my
job shut down for the day,” McLarty said. “I lost about nine
hours of work because of the flooding.”
Phillips said when his family was hit by Hurricane
Laura, LSU didn’t reach out to check on him or his other
siblings at the university.
“No one really reaches out, you might see a tweet
here and there, you might get an emergency email, but it
doesn’t feel personal,” Phillips said. “After what we’ve been
through, an automated email means nothing to us. They
have plenty of call centers, maybe they could have people
call and check in to make sure everyone’s doing all right.”
Phillips said when his family lost their house after
Laura, many professors doubted him and were unwilling
to tailor the course to his needs. Phillips said LSU should
do more to inform professors of what students may be
going through and encourage them to be understanding.
“Some of these kids, they’ve lost everything,” Phillips
said. “They fix it with everything they have left and it
gets knocked down again. School’s the last thing they’re
worried about. These kids have seen it all at this point,
just give them a break. I don’t know how you can do that
academically and be fair, but that’s going to be something
they might have to discuss.”
Bryant said he believes LSU is doing the best they can
given the circumstances.
“I think that LSU doesn’t really have the resources to
fix the streets, and they’re going to have to have help from
the city and state and possibly federal dollars,” Bryant
said. “I think LSU is doing the best with what they can,
but it’s definitely something that should be addressed and
we should be working with the legislature working with
the metro council to make campus safer for students so
we don’t have to lose five vehicles every time there’s a
thunderstorm.”
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