Retired Grand Isle couple counts themselves among the lucky

Janet and Lenny Ray , parishioners of Our Lady of the Isle Church parish in Grand Isle, moved to the island in 1993, right after Lenny retired. Their house has been in the family since 1968. The couple also have a residence in Marrero, where they stayed during Hurricane Ida, but they call Grand Isle their home.

Janet says they spend one or two nights a month in Marrero, mostly when they have doctors’ appointments there.

Lenny, who retired from Schlumberger where he worked as an oilfield engineer, volunteers as a handyman for the church, always doing little projects there; and Janet heads up the Catechism classes. They have two children, one boy and one girl, and six grandchildren.
Upon returning to the island after the hurricane, Lenny says, “It was quite a shock. It looked like someone set off a bomb on the island.”

Ruth says they started seeing pictures of the island about three or four days after the storm. “The first picture we saw of this house was taken at angle and showed some roof damage, but it didn’t look that bad, however the picture was shadowy. Then we started seeing more and more pictures of the island, and we felt like if we had anything left at all, we’d be lucky; but it was still a big shock seeing it for the first time.”

They had no significant damage to their house in Marrero. “We could hear things hitting the roof during the storm,” says Janet, “but luckily it was nothing big enough to cause damage.”

When they drove up to their Grand Isle home for the first time after Hurricane Ida, they found that the screened-in porch at the front of the house along with its roof was completely gone, but the deck was still there. They also found that there was about two feet of the house’s main roof where the wood was missing; the wall above the front door was gone and the glass on the front door had broken. There was a lot of water damage mostly to the living room in the front of the house which was left wide open to the rain. Their brand new whole house Generac generator was smashed and the air conditioning unit flipped over. There was no flooding at their house, which is raised eight feet off of the ground, from storm surge, but there was a few feet of sand under the house, which was the case for most of the island. Their house was built very well using metal rods and all plywood – no sheetrock – by Humble Oil Co. in the late 1940s or early 1950s, says Lenny, who adds that you don’t put sheetrock in a house in Grand Isle.

The Rays say Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux has been doing a wonderful job on the island. They set up an area underneath the school and have been giving away all kinds of supplies … water, ice, canned goods, diapers, baby goods, paper towels, cleaning products, gloves, gas and much more. They brought two big laundry trailers in front of the church where you could do your laundry, and there is even a place where people can go to get Wi-Fi services.

Ruth says some of their fellow parishioners who didn’t have much damage went to Lowes and purchased several trailer loads of wheelbarrows, air conditioners, rakes, shovels and cleaning equipment to help others who did have damages.

Lenny says they’ve never seen anything like the damage from Hurricane Ida. “In 1947, my grandpa had a little camp in Clermont Harbor, MS, on four-foot cement pilings that got knocked down. And for (Hurricane) Betsy in ‘65, my grandmother’s camp on the beach here was completely destroyed. But from ’65 until now, we’ve been lucky … a little roof damage here and there, but that’s about all.”

“Our damages are an inconvenience … we’ll give the house a good cleaning and put the roof back on; the screened porch will come later. We were very fortunate; we can smile and laugh about it now. We have no plans to sell this place. I choose to live here because I enjoy the lifestyle and we’ll leave this place to our children to do what they will with it,” says Lenny.