St. Tammany flooded again

At least 316 homes in St. Tammany Parish were flooded during last week’s storm surge from Hurricane Ike, but even those numbers are incomplete, say parish and municipal officials.

Even though Ike skirted the Louisiana coast, the powerful storm pushed water into St. Tammany Parish and left houses and streets flooded for about three days, mostly along the parish’s coastline with Lake Pontchartrain.

Parish spokesperson Suzanne Parsons Stymiest said the parish has received data that 174 homes in the unincorporated part of the parish took water from the floods. Many of those flooded homes were in and around Lacombe. Houses south of Slidell on Lakeview Drive and Carr Drive also took on water.

Madisonville, which had to be shut down to traffic for several days because of heavy street flooding, had 31 homes damaged by flood waters, according to Stymiest.

Alex Carolo with the Slidell Public Affairs Office said 56 homes were flooded in the city. Most of those houses were in the Palm Lake subdivision and along Camellia Drive, where some houses took about 2 feet of water. This was not as many homes as were flooded a week earlier by Hurricane Gustav, which flooded 88 homes in the same area.

The number of houses damaged by flood waters from Ike is probably higher, because Stymiest had not gotten damage figures from Mandeville and Covington. Mandeville’s Lakeshore Drive took on several feet of water, and a rising Tchefuncte River had threatened homes and businesses in Covington. Stymiest said Mandeville officials estimated the number of flooded houses would be the same as in Hurricane Gustav which was 55. She said Mandeville is still gathering data.

“Expect the number parish-wide to go up,” Stymiest said.