Raising Homes: A Creative Solution to Protecting Against Severe Weather in Louisiana

Wednesday - April 17 2024, 02:10 UTC - 7 months ago

As Louisiana's low-lying coastline faces increasing risk for severe weather and flooding, homeowners are turning to innovative solutions such as raising their homes on hydraulic jacks. This process can take up to 90 days and requires residents to relocate temporarily, but it provides a more secure foundation for their homes. After experiencing multiple climate-related disasters, many residents in Lake Charles, Louisiana are choosing to invest in these solutions for a more flood-resistant future.

There is more than one way to raise a house. Many of the mobile homes, Creole cottages, and other dwellings that have been flagged for flood risk along Louisiana’s low-lying coastline can be separated from their foundations and slowly raised into the sky on hydraulic jacks. While a home is held aloft by temporary support beams, a new, elevated floor is built underneath or the foundation extended upward—think of the pilings you might see supporting a beach house .

But for homes like Christa and Alex Bell’s, which consists of two stories and a two-car garage sitting on a concrete slab, the house-jacking process is more complex. Slab homes depend on the concrete foundation underneath for flooring and for most, if not all, of their structural support. It’s ideal, though difficult, to raise the house and the slab together and build a new foundation underneath; the other option is to separate the two and build a new, elevated floor .

From there, homeowners could extend the foundation walls up and construct a new bottom space they could use for storage or parking. Or they could remove the roof, raise the exterior walls up an entire story, replace the roof, and write off the house’s bottom floor as storage space. No matter the approach, residents usually need to relocate for 60 to 90 days, after which their homes stand several feet higher in the air .

None of these details were on the Bells’ minds a decade ago when they moved from Alabama to Lake Charles, an oil refinery and casino town of 81,000 near the Gulf Coast and Texas border. But in May 2021, more than a foot of rain came down on the region in just 24 hours, causing flash floods. Even as Christa Bell watched Bayou Contraband—one of the region’s many small, slow-­moving rivers—rise until it spilled over and into their backyard, she wasn’t concerned her house might flood .

Only a single corner of the 1,900-square-foot home was in a floodplain, according to federal flood maps when they bought the house in 2017. Yet that day, the bayou kept rising, and by evening, floodwaters stood shin deep in the living room. "Everything in the garage was just floating," she says. Every home on the block required at least partial gutting. Weeks passed; couches, mattresses, carpet, and other flood debris collected in heaps near the street, mildewed and rotting .

It was a scene mirrored across much of southwest Louisiana, and not for the first time. In a 10-month span in 2020–2021, the area saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes and the impacts of a tropical storm’s outer bands. More storms are coming, and many areas are not prepared: a 2021 study from First Street Foundation, a nonprofit focused on climate risk data, estimates that nearly 40% of Lake Charles residential properties and more than half the city’s infrastructure are at risk of future flooding .

Some people aren’t waiting around to experience that uncertain future. In the months after the 2020 hurricanes, Christa Bell says, she noticed more friends making home improvements before placing their houses on the market. "We had five disasters in a row. That hastened the departure for a lot of people," she says. But for the Bells, the decision to raise their home was not just a way to protect their investment .

It was a way to invest in their community and help build a more flood-resistant future.