ST. MARTIN PARISH, La. — “It was this deep back here,” Henderson resident Karen Serrette said. “We was walking around in ankle-deep water.”
Karen and her husband Jackie Serrette live in a home her husband built in 1975.
This house was able to withstand heavy rainful until 10 years ago when it began to continously flood.
“It comes across the yard, and then it starts coming in the back door here on the porch, and then over here at the door you can watch it rise,” Serrette said.
“But it first started coming in in the middle of my hallway in the middle of my house. It’s bubbling up through the concrete.”
Karen said this keeps reoccurring because of culverts that run through the interstate.
“And it drains into my ditch,” Serrette said.
“These ditches weren’t meant to drain the area. It was meant to drain my fields. It’s not a deep ditch, If it's raining really hard the water don’t have nowhere to go, cause it’s not going out because the other side is full. It’s going in people’s yards.”
Karen said she’s spent a total of $30,000 on mold problems.
She now stacks her furniture and appliances on cinder blocks to keep them from getting wet.
“And that's what’s hard I guess,” Serrette said. “Because every time I lose everything in my house. You can’t plan on ‘okay I’m gonna buy this nice furniture and put it in my house’ and say ‘I’mma fix my house how I want,’ because you can’t.”
She said the water that comes into her home isn’t just rainwater.
“First water that comes in here is clear, 'cause that's the rainwater,” Serrette said.
“But then you have sewage. And you have worms. Yeah. This is all through my house. I’ve had snakes in my house. It’s a lot and it's a lot to go through repeatedly.”
Karen said this keeps reoccurring because of culverts that run through the interstate.
She said the size of a culvert that goes under the main road in front of her house was made smaller.
“And it drains into my ditch, these ditches weren’t meant to drain the area,” Serrette said.
“It was meant to drain my fields. It’s not a deep ditch. If it's raining really hard the water don’t have nowhere to go. Cause it's not going out because the other side is full. It’s going in people’s yards.”
Karen said she's reached out to parish and state officials voicing flooding problems, and there is one thing she’d like to see done.
“Getting some drainage, Serrette said.
“On the north side, they can dig a ditch, remove the tree, the trees not important. People’s lives are at stake here. “
According to the Henderson Police Department, as of Monday afternoon there were six reports of flooded homes.
