The sidewalks are covered with metal roofs that have been removed from buildings. Red bricks left behind by a fallen building mix with large pieces of broken glass at a corner.
A man is cleaning up the damage and throws a piece roofing from Mardi Gras Hall. It lands with a thud. One block away, the broken limbs of giant oaks make walking across once-shady areas nearly impossible.
“It’s almost like a bomb went off, and just blew off houses roofs, flattened tree, snapped them like matchsticks,” Michael Cobb said, watching the destruction from his front porch, a few blocks away.
Cobb’s home, made from cypress 120-years ago and painted with purple trim, survived with just a single water leak. He was still sad to see Main Street in such ruins.
He said, “It was such an idyllic place.”
Houma, a town of 33,000 people is located on the Intracoastal waterway at Bayou Terrebonne. It is a working-class community that largely lives off the Gulf of Mexico. Many fish, shrimp, and oysters are caught by many. Others work in support of the oil industry, building and repairing ships and barges.
Houma was founded in 1832. It has seen its fair share of hurricanes. The flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina left the bayou flooded and littered with debris in 2005, exactly 16 years before Ida struck land.
Ida’s eyewall ripped through Houma with fierce winds that reached 150 mph (240 km/h), when the Category 4 storm pounded the Louisiana coast on Sunday.
The corner of the Hancock Whitney Bank building, which was flatiron-shaped, was swept away by the hurricane. Three walls and the roof of a small restaurant collapsed across the street.
Cobb’s mother in law, Elizabeth Courteaux has lived in the region her entire life. She grew up speaking Cajun French. She described the storm as terrifying and the aftermath as worrying. She said that power could be out for up to a month and that every tree near her house is down.
“You can’t even pass,” said Courteaux, 66.
On Tuesday night, utility poles and power lines hung precariously above streets littered in shingles and lumber from homes that had been damaged.
Near Houma, Raceland, a number of tanker trucks carrying drinking water were parked in front of Ochsner Saint. Anne, the small hospital. All around roofs were without shingles and wooden fences around homes were laid flat on soggy soil.
Although power crews are starting to repair the power grid in Houma, it is not expected that they will be able to complete the job quickly. Cobb stated that people in these areas are used to weathering hurricanes and Ida will be no different.
He said, “We’ll survive.” We’ll persevere. We will rebuild. We do it because it’s what we do.”
