Hurricane Francine sets back Ida recovery for Nicholls State

Nicholls softball player Lilianna Robledo tosses branches into a pile as the team helps to clean up campus at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024. (Photo by Matthew Perschall)

THIBODAUX – “Harvard on the Bayou” has seen better days.

Nicholls State University, a small university nestled along Bayou Lafourche, has also seen worse storms.

The worst of Hurricane Francine, which made landfall southeast of Morgan City as a Category 2 hurricane, passed directly over the small campus late Wednesday afternoon, ripping the roof off of Gouaux Hall and flooding nearly half of the buildings on campus.

As of Friday morning, the power had not yet been restored to the campus, where a bit over 200 students still remained. Nearly 400 students had opted to ride out the storm on campus. University spokesman Jerad David said they are mostly international and out-of-state students, though also some come from the bayou communities even further south than Thibodaux.

The damage to Gouaux Hall was unfortunate timing. Its roof had been recently repaired following intense damage from Hurricane Ida in 2021. The building, opened in 1981, also has continued to settle into the soft ground it sat on. Stabilizing its foundation would be something Nicholls prioritizes for future capital outlay requests to the Legislature, David said.

Much of the flooding was the result of intense rainfall that couldn’t drain quick enough from the streets. At its peak, the water was about knee deep and stretched unbroken for about a half mile, David said.

Ida took largely the same path as Francine but struck Louisiana as a Category 4 storm. Anything worse than a Category 3 triggers a mandatory evacuation from the Nicholls campus, David said. Students with no place else to go get bussed to Louisiana Tech in Ruston for sheltering.

Ida shut down Nicholls’ power for weeks, though university President Jay Clune prioritized getting generators for most buildings so students and their families could take advantage of campus air conditioning and WiFi.

Clune was hopeful the power would be restored to Nicholls in time to reopen for classes Monday.

Water and roof damage to some buildings could force some classes to be relocated. David wasn’t exactly sure yet what that would look like — the small school has few extra buildings.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a gymnasium had been sectioned off to allow for socially distanced classes. David speculated something like that could be arranged again.

After Francine, a small handful of buildings were running on generator power. One was Nicholls’ nursing building.

As David guided a reporter and photographer through the notably damp building to check out the damage, its generator shut off.

That was bad news.

Nicholls offers its nursing building to the state to take in patients evacuated from hospitals during serious hurricanes. It last did so after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The generator power is supposed to ensure those patients have the equipment needed to keep them well. If Francine had been a worse storm, a generator outage could have gotten bad, quickly.

But just simulated patients were in the building Friday, wrapped up in trash bags to keep their electrical parts ready for nursing students to practice on when the campus reopened.

The Nicholls community is known for its resilience. Any school on the bayou would have to be to withstand countless storms since it was founded in 1948.

About two-thirds of Nicholls students are first-generation college students. Many who remained behind on campus were out clearing up storm damage. Red and black clad students from the team’s softball, baseball and soccer teams were out collecting downed limbs and foliage, piling them for parish workers to truck away.

There was one bit of good news from Francine, David said.

The antenna for Nicholls student radio station, KNSU, was bent over during Hurricane Ida. Francine bent it back into its upright position.

Tory Trahan, a volunteer DJ and reporter for KNSU-TV, laughed when a reporter pointed that out.

A sophomore, Trahan is usually a sports reporter. He was on the field at Tiger Stadium last Saturday for the Nicholls-LSU game, when the Colonels ran up an unexpected 21 points on the Tigers. But just like his professional counterparts, the storm suddenly turned him into a weather reporter, too.

“As a journalist, it feels great because you get to keep the campus and the town and the city of Thibodaux updated,” Trahan said.

KNSU TV’s Facebook page posted real-time updates from Trahan and his colleagues who covered breaking news as the storm raged.

This was the first storm Trahan rode out in Thibodaux. But as a Lafayette native, it was far from his first hurricane. With storm prediction models wobbling back and forth ahead of Francine’s landfall, it was a coin toss as to whether the storm would be worse on campus or back home. Ultimately, his drive to report kept him at Nicholls.

Complicating his reporting was the loss of power, which left Trahan unable to recharge the scooter he usually uses to get around. Trahan has a disability that affects his mobility and had subbed in a low-tech walker.

Checking in on students, including Trahan and the student athletes cleaning up, was a big part of Clune’s job for the day.

On a usual Friday, he would be with the Colonels football team en route to their next game. On Saturday, that will be Sacramento State, which like Nicholls is a ranked and winless team in the Football Championship Subdivision.

But Friday, Clune and his dog Boots, Nicholls’ unofficial mascot, were riding around campus in a red and black golf cart checking on the repairs.

Boots, a 12-year-old Beagle mix, beamed at recovery workers as Clune chauffeured him around campus. Though he did not respond to interview questions from a reporter, Boots did snuffle and lick any hand that stretched out to scratch him.

Keeping people’s spirits up seemed to be Boots’ only job in life.

“It’s about all he’s good for,” David joked.

Keeping spirits raised will be a necessary task for the campus. Though Clune and the rest of campus was grateful Francine was no Ida, dealing with the damage won’t be easy.

Recovery will require cash, of which there’s never enough for a small school. And making the infrastructure more resilient for future storms will require still more at a time when higher education is preparing to go through significant state budget cuts.

Those concerns were not at the top of David’s mind Friday. For him, that was getting back home and fixing the generator that went out Friday morning. For Clune and Boots, it was distributing thank you gifts — enamel pins bearing Boots’ likeness — to volunteers. For the students, it was enjoying the illicit beers they had stashed away in their dorms to celebrate.

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