During one flood last year, the river raged so fast that it pushed the Police Department's powerboats backward , said Capt. Orrie DuBois, Wayne's emergency management coordinator. DuBois worries about grove residents who refuse to leave during floods, thinking they're safe in the homes they raised high on cinder blocks. After a flood, residents often have to throw out everything. They tear the walls down to studs, the floors to plywood, and try to summon the heart and the money to rebuild.
Many homes here seem perpetually in the process of being rebuilt or torn apart.
Some, lately, have just been left to ruin. Residents wear the floods they've weathered like badges of honor. Lepelletier loves telling how he moved here 11 years ago and lost everything in a flood three days later. Nobody had told him it was a flood zone. Tropical Storm Floyd was his 20th flood.