This man saved his town from deadly floodwaters. So why did the US government try to stop him?

On 29 August 2021, as Hurricane Ida made landfall on Louisiana ’s Gulf coast, 69-year-old Windell Curole sought refuge with others at the three-story Lady of the Sea hospital in Galliano, located 90 minutes south-west of New Orleans.

As Curole looked out the window, watching Ida’s rain hammer the grass, a question tormented him: would the levees that encircled his community be tall enough to hold back the water that was surging toward them?

To Curole, a lifelong resident of the area, the question was personal. Since he was primarily responsible for the levees’ existence, it was political, too. If I can see green out there tomorrow morning, he thought to himself, we’re good.

Across the surrounding bayou communities, home to several hundred thousand, Ida’s gale-force winds blew out windows and ripped apart buildings. Outside the hospital window, sheets of black tar paper began to whip across the sky. “Get back!” a nurse yelled from behind him. Running into the hallway, Curole realized that the airborne material was the hospital’s roof, a portion of which had peeled away in the storm.

Communication went out around the region. Curole slept on a hospital bed on the second floor. It would take 24 hours for him and his wife to inform one another that they were alive, and another month before their power came back on.

They have rules coming in from Washington, but they’ve never had marsh between their toes

Windell Curole

This is what “land loss” – an abstract concept to many Americans – looks like. Southern Louisiana is among the fastest-disappearing land masses in the world, with an area about the size of Manhattan vanishing every year. Sometimes the erasure happens gradually, as our warming planet melts ice caps, and the geologically young soil of the Gulf of Mexico compresses under its own weight and sinks into the sea. Other times it happens cataclysmically, as it did that day in 2021, when Ida tore out an estimated 106 sq miles (275 sq km) of land, devouring in an afternoon what a rising sea would have taken years to dissolve.

It wasn’t that long ago that southern Louisiana held a quarter of the world’s wetlands, whose rich soils and teeming grassy waters not only fueled the area’s booming fishing industry, but also functioned as natural hurricane protection that could absorb storm surges like a sponge. But small towns and villages are the new frontlines of weather disaster. Everything from muddy swamps to Main Streets are subsumed by the water .

• People fish at the end of the old LA 1 highway near Leeville in Lafourche parish, Louisiana, in August. The former highway and bridge, which frequently flooded and was sinking due to coastal erosion and ground subsidence, was demolished to make way for an elevated expressway.

But in the immediate aftermath of Ida, Curole was perversely jubilant: the next morning, he could still see green grass. The levees – levees that the federal government had tried to stop him from building – had worked. While nearby areas saw devastating flooding and dozens of deaths, not one building in his jurisdiction was inundated with floodwaters, and no lives were lost.

Levees are, in essence, strategically placed hills. River levees, like those alongside the nearby Mississippi, force a river to stay inside of its channel. Hurricane levees, like those overseen by Curole, are intended to keep out the seawater that nearly surrounds his home of south Lafourche parish.

“Windell’s levee”, as residents call it, is a snaking mound of dirt constructed in the shape of an oval, like an upside-down moat enclosing an area roughly the size of Washington DC, with a fraction of the people.

To build such fortifications, the federal government’s army corps of engineers typically works with local levee districts, providing funds and issuing specs on how levees should be constructed – how high, the angle of the slope, with what materials – while local people do the work.

• Left: Local crews work in August to strengthen the levee by building a higher berm, or sediment barrier, at its edge. Right: A flood wall is visible through the levee to accommodate a high-pressure gas line.

Nearly two decades ago, the federal government, via the army corps, changed those specs, redefining what qualifies as a safe levee system.

The federal guidelines are complex, but if Curole had built to them, his levee would have reached only 13ft tall. Instead, Curole built taller – which, using the same pool of raw materials, also meant he built steeper, leading to an inherently less sturdy levee. In the eyes of the corps, Windell’s levee is too tall and skinny to be stable.

He ignored formal censures as his levee climbed to 18ft. Ida brought floodwaters soaring to 17ft. The unauthorized, DIY levee was the only thing keeping the area from being subsumed by the water. If he had obeyed the corps, Curole says, “we wouldn’t have a community”.

Curole recently retired after over four decades with the South Lafourche levee district (SLLD). For much of his working life, he’s heard the same sentiment from government officials: that his lifesaving work isn’t tested, isn’t foolproof. “You think that’s gonna hold back the water?” he’s been asked too many times to count. “I don’t know,” he’s replied, “but I know it has a better chance than air.”

Going rogue

I met Curole early last year, on his first day of retirement – but there was no one to replace him, so yes, he would still be on duty that day, and no, he didn’t mind showing me around. We’d been driving south in his truck for 20 minutes from the district’s temporary headquarters in the back rooms of a tugboat company (he, like many others, was still waiting for a roof after Ida) when water started to squeeze the road from both sides.

We continued down the old highway to the now nearly abandoned fishing village of Leeville, which had been founded by Curole’s Cajun great-grandfather. The highway dwindled from four lanes to two, and then disappeared under gently lapping water.

It was Curole’s first visit to Leeville since Hurricane Ida, 18 months prior, and he couldn’t find the site he’d set out to show me: a small, historic graveyard. The water had advanced too far. “That tells you everything you need to know,” he said. “You don’t bury people on land you think is going underwater.” Curole brought me here to make a point: this is what life in southern Louisiana looks like without protective levees. Leeville, the first town south of his levee, is a sacrifice zone.

• Top left: The graves of Windell’s own ancestors on the side of the road. At high tide, they, too, are inundated. Top right: Water from Bayou Lafourche has subsumed parts of Leeville, Lousiana, leaving them uninhabitable. Bottom: People fish just outside the southernmost part of the levee-protected district where remnants of hurricanes are frequently visible.

But just north of Leeville begins an oblong expanse that is depicted on maps as solid gray land. This impossibly stable swath of land is the South Lafourche levee district (the name of both the area protected by the levee and the public agency responsible for its protection), where several towns, industrial hubs, and farms are all protected by Windell’s levee. A rare remaining patch of terra firma, it hasn’t flooded in almost 40 years, despite ever more serious storm surges wreaking havoc in the surrounding areas.

Driving on the levee is illegal, as doing so compresses the levee’s dirt over time – but Curole makes the rules, and he scouts the ring weekly. When we found ourselves stuck in the mud, Curole called on decades battling south Louisiana’s incapacitating muck, careening us up the fortification’s unnaturally steep slope as I dug my nails into the passenger door and wondered if some made-for-TV detective would find my body in a rolled-over Chevy.

Standing atop the levee, Curole directed my eyes to the unprotected side. Amid the lacerated marsh that surrounds the district, my eyes adjusted to make out things that shouldn’t have been there: semi-truck trailers, 5,000-gallon cisterns, washing machines – all remnants from recent storms, sucked out from nearly abandoned towns, and deposited here when the water receded. But inside, I saw well-kept homes, mowed lawns, barking dogs, playing children and downtowns open for business. From atop the protective hill, Curole nodded first toward town, and then to the littered marsh: “The only thing keeping this from looking like this ,” he said, “is this ,” gesturing to the levee beneath us.

• Homes protected by the levee in Lafourche parish.

When Curole was growing up in south Lafourche parish in the 1950s, there were no hurricane levees surrounding his community. As a kid, he’d trap muskrats and watch cows roam on land that has long been lost to the water.

In his late teens, Curole enrolled at Nicholls State University in nearby Thibodaux. His poverty was sometimes impossible to hide. “It was a good thing we were in the hippy era, because I didn’t own more than a couple pants,” he told me.

He paid his way by working on a shrimp boat, where he noticed, over the years, that the shrimp – which thrive in a marshy mixture of the bayou’s freshwater and the gulf’s saline – were moving north as the shore shifted. He realized land loss was a desperate crisis; soon the life he loved in Louisiana could vanish entirely.

• Top left: Curole, 69, is a lifelong resident of Lafourche parish. Top right: Prize-winning fish in the kids’ division at a fishing rodeo in nearby Grand Isle, Louisiana. The fishing and seafood industries are integral to the area’s culture and economy. Bottom: Locally caught shrimp at Baudoin’s Seafood, a family-owned seafood market in Lafourche parish.

In 1980, after graduation, he traded his shrimping galoshes for brown leather loafers, taking a job at the still new SLLD, which back then was managing a patchwork of small, sporadic hurricane levees that ran for 12 disconnected miles and looked like little more than a speed bump in some places. In 1985, when Hurricane Juan thrust the raging waters of the gulf up into south Lafourche, the area was ravaged. But the leveed sections fared better. Over his 42 years with the SLLD, he and his team circled the area with 48 miles of tall, continuous levee. They built five pump houses that could quickly drain the area if the levees ever failed, or when torrential rainfall left standing water. When their turbines would get jammed, Curole would don scuba gear and clear the plumbing. Thanks to the SLLD, Hurricane Juan was the last storm surge to flood south Lafourche.

For much of his career, Curole worked closely with the army corps of engineers, which funded 70% of the south Lafourche levee’s initial construction. But in 2005, things changed. After flood control infrastructure failed catastrophically in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the corps declared new construction parameters for everyone in the area. Windell’s levee had been a success – but, according to the corps, he needed to make it wider at the base to increase stability. An army corps colonel gave Curole a polite heads up that he and his neighbors wouldn’t be receiving any aid from Congress to make the costly changes. “We’re fucked,” Curole recalled one of his fellow leveemen saying to him.

• Lafourche residents and visitors gather at a fishing rodeo in nearby Grand Isle.

In the aftermath of the storm, Curole and his team felt they had only two options: they could obey the corps and rebuild the levees to a lower height, which would put them at far greater risk of flooding, and, Curole felt, would be tantamount to abandoning the area’s centuries of history to the sea. Or they could go rogue.

Curole took to libraries, town halls and local television to tell residents why he and his engineers felt the corps’ new specs didn’t make sense for their area, and why their levee needed to be taller – even if it meant the federal government considered it less stable. Curole made the dull technicalities of government regulation personal, emphasizing that the outcomes were life and death. “Subtleties make the difference between success and failure,” he told residents. “They have these rules coming in from Washington, but they’ve never had marsh between their toes.”

The next year, he got a proposal on the local ballot to add a one-cent levee tax on every dollar spent in the area. The parish president thought he was crazy, saying voters in this largely conservative, tax-skeptical area would never go for it. But it passed with 82% approval.

Curole and his team were doing the unthinkable: largely self-funding a massive flood control effort. The army corps, fearful that the comparatively skinny fortification would collapse under the weight of a storm surge, wrote formal letters telling Curole and his team to stop building. In 2011, the corps dropped south Lafourche from its rehabilitation and inspection program, a vital project that provides federal funds for levee cleanup and repairs after storms. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) officially decertified the levee, removing the body’s stamp of approval and leaving the SLLD to fund its own repairs should anything go wrong. In 2016, the corps sent Curole a cease and desist. A few local residents were furious, too; one man erected a billboard on a busy highway that read: “Thanks Windell … for screwing the people and the levee.”

Forcing a river to defy its nature

Five thousand years ago, this area was the Gulf of Mexico. But in the intervening millennia, the Mississippi River was a tumultuous and mammoth earth builder. Collecting mud, silt and sand from 31 future states, it acted as a geological Robin Hood, robbing elevation from the mountains and hills near its headwaters and redistributing its sedimentary spoils through colossal floods. At the very bottom of the river, the Mississippi deposited the muck it had gathered along the way, building roughly 1 square mile of new land each year as its waters continued to the sea.

Up until the 19th century, the volatility of the river rendered much of the lower Mississippi almost uninhabitable. Flooding from the north would regularly send the river’s roiling water soaring up and over its banks, engulfing places that had recently been declared territories with borrowed names like Arkansas and Mississippi. That rich delta land would have been perfect for farming, were it not for the devastating flooding. Landowners forced enslaved people to do the backbreaking and sometimes deadly labor of building localized levees on the banks of the Mississippi, opening up more southern land to cotton farming and the abuses of slavery. Soon, a mishmash of private levees increasingly held the giant river in place.

During the civil war, Union armies attacked levees. Those that remained often crumbled as landowners could no longer exploit unpaid slave labor. But after the war, the reconstituted US government saw that taming the country’s most powerful river could change the trajectory of the fractured nation: shipping via boat cost a fraction of overland shipping. Farmers and industrialists in cities as distant as St Louis, St Paul, Denver and Pittsburgh, whose famed three rivers eventually drain to the Mississippi, could readily access European markets if the river could be controlled.

The river, though, was not eager to cooperate. For millennia it had been seeking the most gravity-resistant path to the gulf, forging new passes and cutting off its own corners, leaving bayous and elbow-shaped lakes miles from the main channel; it did this one morning in late April 1876, when the river found a shortcut to itself and deserted Vicksburg, Mississippi. The change stranded large paddlewheel boats in the mud of the emptied route and it took 27 years to force the river to flow through Vicksburg once again.

State and local governments worked with the army corps of engineers to levee and dam the river, forcing it to defy its nature and stick to a prescribed path. Congress then hired an engineer to force the river’s flow into just a few navigable exits. When the construction began, merchants in St Louis shipped less than 7,000 tons of goods annually through New Orleans to Europe; five years later that number soared to nearly half a million tons.

But forcing the Mississippi into a narrow channel changed everything. Where the river used to unravel, leaving behind layers of muck that gravity would eventually compact into solid new land, it now shot hopelessly through to the sea, where its land-building muck could do no good. By the 1930s, Louisiana had stopped growing. Soon, it would begin disappearing. Without new land, sea level rise and the tug of gravity on the uncompressed, young earth had no counterbalance. By the 1970s, the state was losing up to 70 sq miles a year. The army corps, Curole says, “stopped the system that built south Louisiana”.

Over time, the losses have been compounded by oil and gas companies, who have dredged navigation and pipeline canals through the area’s swampland. According to the Department of the Interior, these oil and gas canals may account for over half of the state’s land loss. And now, after centuries of burning such fuels, our changing climate batters the area with rising seas and increasingly violent, destructive storms.

• Wade Rodriguez oversees the Leon Theriot Lock, a gate that regulates commercial boat traffic while preventing flooding. Initially a floodgate, built by the army corps of engineers, it was converted into a lock by the South Lafourche levee district.

This wasn’t unexpected: engineers in the late 19th century predicted the rapid sinking. But, as one corps-adjacent engineer argued in an 1897 National Geographic article, the benefits of putting the river in its place were so great that the “people of the whole United States can well afford, when the time comes, to build a protective levee against the Gulf”. Simply put, there was always going to be a Windell Curole.

‘My home insurance was going to be as much as my house’

When Curole’s agency went against the feds in 2005, it kicked off a cascade of bureaucratic censures that have had costly impacts on residents. When the levee system was officially decertified by Fema, insurance costs soared.

Lanor Curole, a 52-year-old distant relative of Windell’s, is a citizen and former tribal administrator of the United Houma Nation, whose 19,000 citizens live primarily across six south Louisiana parishes, including Lafourche.

• Lanor Curole, 52, was priced out of south Lafourche.

She was priced out of south Lafourche years ago. “My home insurance was going to be as much as my house,” she says, so she moved far from her family to north Lafourche, where the shorter levees were backed by the federal government and the flood insurance was cheaper. But when Ida hit in 2021, north Lafourche flooded. South Lafourche was, temporarily, an island. For many, the conviction that government can only be trusted when it’s hyperlocal was reaffirmed.

In southern Louisiana, suspicion of the state has been brewing for generations. Nearly a century ago, Governor Oramel Simpson used 39 tons of dynamite to blow up a river levee south of New Orleans. Water rushed into Plaquemines parish, displacing thousands of poor residents; the selected explosion site ensured that Black Americans bore the brunt of the damage.

In the early 20th century, oil and gas companies used racist state laws – such as those limiting inheritance rights for children of interracial marriages – to take land and wreak havoc on the coast. State and local laws enforced a tripartite system of segregation for Black, white, and Indigenous residents. Lanor Curole was the first person in her family who had a chance to finish high school.

For his part, Windell says he never would have defied the federal government just to be contrarian, but adds, with the thinly concealed smirk of a man who knows his reputation: “And I never stick my thumb in their eye when I’m right.”

But while levees are a local solution, they are also a short-term solution. As hurricanes get worse, storm surges grow higher, risking overtopping or failure. To protect the area long-term, Louisiana needs new land and major federal action that could buffer cities and towns from hurricanes while rebuilding the marshy habitat that has long fueled the area’s industry.

The master plan

It turns out, the state and federal governments have been trying to do just that, with an effort called the coastal master plan – a to-do list implemented by the state’s coastal protection and restoration authority (CPRA), with help from the corps. Last year, the CPRA broke ground on the most ambitious land-generating project ever undertaken in the US: a multibillion-dollar canal into which some of the Mississippi’s muddy flow will be redirected, allowing its muck to once again build land. It has been praised by environmentalists and bipartisan elected officials alike, passing unanimously through Louisiana’s legislature.

• Newly created marsh, a result of various restoration projects in the area, amid the broken marsh in Lafourche parish.

But many near the coast are skeptical. Some fear that the CPRA’s funding – some of which comes from extractive industries, including BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill reparations fund – hamstrings its ambitions. Some have been burned by the CPRA before; in 2012, the agency built new levees on a stretch of coastal land, but failed to extend protection to a small island community of Native Americans from multiple tribes. Lanor says residents were told that protecting the area would be cost-prohibitive. “What do you mean – your cost-benefit analysis means we’re not worth saving?” she recalls asking.

Still, there are signs that large government entities may be heeding local expertise. The CPRA recently made a change that Lanor and others asked for years ago: when calculating the value of protecting a high-risk location, it no longer considers an area’s property values, but only the number of structures. And in Curole’s district, the CPRA has provided critical if sporadic money for improvements. While the federal government has yet to recertify the levee as one of its own, Curole, now officially retired, is glad the state recognized that his rebellion was working.

For Nicholas Matherne, Windell Curole’s hand-picked replacement as general manager of the SLLD, working with the federal government – even against the backdrop of a checkered past – is essential to this place’s continued survival. He spends much of his time trying to extend an olive branch to the corps. He wants the chance to prove on paper what’s already been demonstrated in reality: that the work of Windell and his engineers – many of whom studied at top-ranked engineering schools – was solid, and “not just the ‘Cajun ingenuity’ of throwing up dirt”, he says.

What do you mean – your cost-benefit analysis means we’re not worth saving?

Lanor Curole

Getting back in the feds’ good graces, Matherne hopes, will allow South Lafourche’s levees to be welcomed back into the program that funds levee clean up and repairs, and to bring federal flood insurance costs back down. And the corps is willing to give them a chance. Having taller levees, says Ricky Boyett, the army corps’ public affairs chief, won’t be an automatic dealbreaker; the problem, he says, is that Curole “didn’t have the permission necessary to do it”. Now the corps is assessing the system, retroactively, to see if it’s up to snuff.

But south Louisiana cannot survive on levees indefinitely. Ida’s surge came within a foot of overtopping the levee. and its powerful winds tore off roofs, soaked walls, and rendered many buildings losses. Levees can allow life to go on in the short term – but they are only a sort of harm reduction while the colossal work of slowing climate change and reducing land loss, hopefully, catches up.

A necessary Band-Aid

A few weeks before Christmas, I found myself in Golden Meadow, the southernmost town within Windell’s levee. Shrimp boats lined the bayou, and a captain was blowing his horn in the setting sun. The annual Christmas boat parade, a longstanding Golden Meadow tradition, was back for the first time since Ida.

Related: ‘Everything out the faucet is salt’: Louisianans struggle as drinking water crisis persists

Captains adorned their tall masts and winches in colorful lights. One boat sported a blow-up Santa for a masthead, while another blasted Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls as scores of family and friends sat with legs dangling off bait boxes, drinking beer from sweating bottles as the smell of diesel and bug spray hung in the air. I walked as the parade moved up the bayou, passing the Louisiana Dried Shrimp Company, a hardware store, and a house-sized junkyard shrine to the Virgin Mary. All around us, but out of sight, was Windell’s levee, the unassuming enabler of such revelry.

Just before the parade, I walked through the graveyard of a bayou-side Catholic church, where a flag-adorned stone caught my eye. It belonged to Leon Theriot, who started the south Lafourche levee system in the 1970s, and for whom Curole’s office, now with a roof, is named. Other graves bore the last names of people I had been speaking with all year. I recalled the reading I’d just heard in Advent mass – “Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low.” The Mississippi, it struck me, had been doing this for millennia, eroding the hills of the north and bringing them, speck by speck, down the continent to create this land.

• Left: The Holy Mary Shrine in the levee-protected area of Golden Meadow in Lafourche parish. Right: Debris from Hurricane Ida is visible in the damaged marsh outside the levee, in the foreground.

In the graveyard, a group of three adults, all around my age, in their early 30s, walked with four children who craned their arms up in their sockets to hold their parents’ hands. The adults were chattering about the latest family drama when they were interrupted by an exhilarated yell. One of the boys, not more than seven, had broken away from the group. “Mom!” he exclaimed, studying a grave along the path. Mumbling the 19th-century birth year of the deceased, he conducted the mental pirouettes of elementary math. “More than 100 years old!” he nearly screamed in astonishment.

One town down in Leeville, on the other side of the levee, Curole’s ancestors don’t have the luxury of having their names read by future generations. The letters have been wiped off the stones; soon their graves will be washed out to sea, just like those Curole failed to find on our first day together. But here, inside the protection of the levees, there is a promise, or at least a potential, of continuation.

• The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation . The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent.