The aging civic center sits just beyond a string of waterfront mansions, lawns freshly mowed, and across from the bombed-out 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 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 bayous and fields. The Kayouche Coulee, a concrete-lined ravine abutting the neighborhood, regularly overfills in rainy weather. This came to a head this past year, as the city, which is just 15 feet above sea level and 30 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, faced four federally declared natural disasters.
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