Arabi battles insurance woes, trauma to battle back from March tornado

Jennifer Meserole's Arabi home looks much like it did on March 22, right before a tornado roared out of the still, green sky and smashed it down to the studs, sucking the contents of her daughter's room down the living room stairs as the family cowered in a utility closet.

Her two-story colonial on Rose Street looks newer, of course, but has the same footprint and layout, right down to the back deck. Some of her favorite pieces even survived, her antique French dining table looking none the worse to any visitor who doesn't know better.

But Meserole does. For months, she picked the tiny grains of shattered glass out of the furniture she saved.

"If you run your hands over things, there's pockmarks in every inch of it," she said.

Her home, she said, "feels like a completely different house."

"It's hard (for someone) to look at my house and my life and think that this was devastating for me," she said. "But this has been absolutely devastating to us."

Meserole is one of hundreds of Arabi residents recovering emotionally, personally and financially from the tornado that barreled its way up through the St. Bernard Parish community one evening last spring.

An F3-level twister with winds between 158 and 206 mph touched down just inside the Mississippi River in Old Arabi, sliced its way up Friscoville Avenue, crossing St. Claude Avenue and West Judge Perez Drive and continued through the neighborhoods to the north before crossing the 40 Arpent Canal and disappearing into marshlands below New Orleans East.

Left behind was a patchwork of destruction — broken windows, roofs and porches ripped off homes, houses cut in half or completely obliterated. Homes were lifted off their foundations, cars were thrown into neighbors' yards.

About 70 houses were destroyed, another 90 had significant damage. Hundreds more were affected; two people were killed.

Debris removal was finished over a month ago, but the state's collapsing insurance market is preventing many from going back to the way things were. About a dozen empty lots on the northern end of the path, where the tornado was at its most fierce, have 'For Sale' signs in front of them, with houses in various stages of construction rising out of others.

Many survivors now feel a rush of anxiety when the weather turns.

Residents and local officials, however, say the response has left the community stronger.

"People were everywhere, helping," said Billy McGoey, a state district judge and Rose Street resident resident who lost his house. "It was amazing the amount of people that came out."

Picking up

Parish President Guy McInnis said the response by local and state government agencies could be a model for post-disaster debris pick-up, and many residents say they've been impressed by how quickly the path was cleared.

"If you drive through there now, it is nothing like it was even two months ago," McInnis said.

The damage wasn't widespread enough to trigger a presidential declaration and the FEMA response that follows, but in some ways, that helped because the parish's arrangement with the state was more flexible.

McInnis said the parish knew from its experience with hurricanes that getting debris to the street for pick-up can be a painstakingly slow and uneven process.

The administration got to work quickly with the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness to come up with a right-of-entry form that would allow residents to give parish workers permission to go onto their property and pull debris to the curb where the private contractor could haul it away.

"Our Road Department did the lion's share of the work and I credit them for, one getting it done, and for us being able to do it within a reasonable budget."

The state was also nimble with funding and has already closed out the roughly $768,000 in reimbursements to the parish.

Another asset to the recovery has been the outpouring of support from within the parish and beyond. Local volunteers and charity groups sprang into action, and about $375,000 in donations was distributed through the Greater New Orleans Foundation to residents based on the damaged suffered.

McGoey, who had draft plans for an addition to his home on the dining room table when the tornado smashed it to pieces, said that even though he and his wife have faired relatively well during the recovery, the $2,000 grant was a great help.

"I don't know anybody who has enough insurance to cover all their losses," he said. "It really means something to a lot of people."

Shaking out

Another factor complicating recovery has been the unraveling of the private insurance market, which has seen many companies pull out of the state or become insolvent. Some tornado victims found they were underinsured, or had their insurance company fail on them.

"I can think of maybe one person that is moving that is not insurance related," said Gillis McCloskey, the St. Bernard Parish Council member who represents Arabi.

Many of the houses on the northern end of the path were only built within the last half a dozen years, and McCloskey noted that even then inflation and supply chain issues have increased replacement costs by at least a third.

Lynda Catalanotto, who owns Old Arabi Marketplace on St. Claude Avenue, lost about half her building when the tornado sped up Friscoville Avenue. She said she suffered about $160,000 in inventory and property damage, and was underinsured, so she was hit with a 20% penalty.

After paying out, the insurer dropped her, only to resign her at twice the premium, another $3,000 a year.

"It's been rough," Catalanotto said.

Meserole was dropped by her homeowners insurance company, and had two others decline coverage before finding coverage for about 25% more than she paid before.

Moving on

Many of those who scurried for their lives that day say they are still traumatized.

"You're scared," Catalanotto said. "You're uncertain of what's going to happen and what you're going to do when it does."

Surveying the neighborhood after breaking out of the closet, Meserole recalls, "All I could think of was, 'My neighbors are dead.' I mean, that's what I thought."

"To this day, we're very sensitive to wind blowing, rainstorms," Meserole and said of herself and her 11-year-old daughter, Adeline.

"I don't ever really sleep well at night because it was so unexpected," she said.

And it was not just the storm itself, but the six months of uncertainty, bouncing between hotel rooms, short-term rentals and friends.

In the months that followed the tornado, before work on her new house even started, Meserole would come sit on the front steps for hours.

"I don't really know how to explain that," she said, "but it was just feeling a sense of being at home."

The tornado's lingering effects are felt in more subtle ways. Catalanotto said the home of one of her closest friends, who died since the storm, had to be demolished.

"It's a bizarre feeling," she said. "It's like she's been erased from the world. … There's nothing there."

Meserole said the tornado put a spotlight on what matters.

"It really changes your perspective on material things," she said. "They don't matter. A sense of home matters, but the things we collect, or work so hard to attain, really become meaningless when you go through a trauma like this. In the end, you realize that what's really important is your sense of family, community and friendships."