Feature: People in Louisiana flood affected area suffering from loss, damage

Gene Herman keeps tearing wood board from walls for days in his four-bedroom house in Baton Rouge, one of the flood affected areas in Louisiana, and over 90 percent of his furniture was ruined in the catastrophic flood which started a week ago.

At 4:30 a.m on Aug. 14, Herman woke his wife Liz up, grabbed his two cats and fled his house by driving a car, after he noticed the heavy rainfall had turned into flood water and the water level kept rising.

When he came back home two days later, he found that the flood water level reached five feet (about 1.5 meters) deep in his house and all things below that height were damaged. He lost not only tables, coaches, sofas and cabinets, but also his collections, photo albums and some memories in this house where he and his wife have lived for 11 years.

But Herman was lucky in a way. As a realtor, he bought flood insurance for his house though it is not in the so called flood zone. The insurance may help him rebuild the house, but it will not cover the household items damaged by the flood.

And he got 12 people of his company to help him clean up the mess.

"It continues to rain, making the cleaning up work very difficult. I have booked a hotel for a month," he told Xinhua reporter.

In Baton Rouge area, almost all hotel rooms and rental cars are fully booked.

The catastrophic flood which devastated Louisiana is now the worst natural disaster to strike the United States since Hurricane Sandy four years ago, the Red Cross said.

At least 13 people have died across five parishes in Louisiana and thousands of local residents were forced to evacuate during the flood. More than 7,000 people are still living in emergency shelters. And with more rain forecast, the destruction could mount.

"It might have been prevented had the army core engineers come up with the diversion canal to take flood water away from the area. They talked about it, but they don't do it," Gene said.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said at least 40,000 homes have suffered at least some damage. It's not clear how many are uninhabitable.

Local, state and U.S. federal governments show up their weakness on rescue in huge disasters.

"We haven't got anything from them (the government) yet. There have been some private organizations come around, bring food by daily. I don't see anything the government are really offering," said Latham Brunson.

Brunson evacuated from his home with his wife and their three-week-old baby around 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 14. When he came back three days later, it's just stuff everywhere.

"It's muddy, and it stinks. You can't smell anywhere, in the house, it just smells horribly for so long," he said, "it's gonna be nine months to a year to be back to normal."

"I don't really rely on the government, and I don't trust the government," Michelle Landry told Xinhua, her house was soaked in 20 inches (around 51 cm) depth of flood water for days.

Amid the historic devastation in Louisiana, the state's largest daily newspaper is calling on President Barack Obama to cut his Martha's Vineyard getaway short to view flood-ravaged areas of the state.

"A disaster this big begs for the personal presence of the President at ground zero," The Advocate said last Thursday. "In coming here, the President can decisively demonstrate that Louisiana's recovery is a priority for his administration -- and the United States of America."

"The President's presence is already late to this crisis, but it's better later than never," noted the newspaper.

Obama had directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to "utilize all resources available to assist in the response and recovery," according to the White House.

Homeowners with damage from the floods in those parishes reportedly are eligible for up to only 33,000 U.S. dollars in federal disaster aid from FEMA to help them recover.

"That's not even going to cover repairs to the structure, not to mention the entire contents of the house stacked up by the street soaking wet," said local resident Broussard who works for an insulation company.

"The government bails out a company or another country, and you've got a good section of the state of Louisiana in total loss, and you're going to offer us 33,000 dollars to fix up our home and replace everything?"

"What's more important is that various administrations involve to help people... We don't need bureaucracy right now, we need help," Herman said.

Jenny Fu and her boyfriend Brian Small try to remove soaked wood floor for days. "The water is about 12 inches (about 31 cm) high in my house, so it messed up all the furniture, cabinets, carpets and wood floors, so we have to take out everything", she said. "I lost at least 100,000 dollars."

"We have already registered for FEMA, but we haven't heard anything yet, nobody contacted me yet," Fu said, "We can't wait for anybody to come help us, so we have to help ourselves first. Some friends, families come to help us and we are also learning from Facebook about what to do."

Sitting on the watery front lawn, 78-year-old Ruth McNease and her 82-year-old husband Mac looked at the abandoned belongings piled up on the curb.

"We kept working all time, and just sat down," Ruth said.

They got some people from local church, college and neighborhood to help. They lost some over 150-year-old furniture handed down from their mother and father and their great grandmother and grandfather.

"We will never come back to where we were before, we've lost everything," Ruth sighed. Endit