Drake Nevis (92) of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers during the game against the Calgary Stampeders at McMahon Stadium in Calgary, AB, Friday Nov. 3, 2017. (Photo: Johany Jutras)
The calendar year 2020 has been brutal.
For those living in Louisiana, things have been exacerbated by a record number of hurricanes. Five named storms – three hurricanes and two tropical storms – have targeted the Pelican State this year; Cristobal, Laura, Marco, Delta and Zeta.
The Atlantic Ocean also set a record with 29 named storms so far and counting. The hurricane season mercifully ends on November 30th, but that doesn’t mean storms can’t form after that.
Three members of the Toronto Argonauts have been forced to deal with the intense weather, as trying to stay high and dry in the New Orleans area has been the norm over the last four months.
The latest unwanted visitor arrived October 28, setting a record in the process. Hurricane Zeta brought with it the highest sustained wind speed (160 kmh) of any hurricane to ever pass directly over the city.
High winds, floods, storm surges, major power outages and substantial property damage have affected many in the state, including John Murphy, the Argos Vice President of Player Personnel.
“The hurricane (Zeta) hit us around 6:00 that Wednesday night,” said Murphy in a phone interview from his home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. “It was easily before 8:00 that the lights had already gone out and they didn’t return until that Sunday morning. There was enough (floodwater) where it would have covered your feet. If you didn’t put towels down, it would have been a decent amount through the front door.”
There was a minimal flooding in his garage, but substantial wind damage in his neighbourhood, including several big trees being knocked down.
A NOLA (New Orleans, LA) resident for roughly two decades, Murphy has lived through hurricanes before, most notably Katrina in 2005, A storm that killed over 1,800 people and caused $125 billion in damage.
Murphy left town the day before Katrina hit and it was a good thing. A major levee breach happened just up the road from the Metairie apartment that he called home, severely flooding the area. He was forced to move to the Baton Rouge area, then Houston, and didn’t return to The Crescent City for roughly two years.
Needless to say, when there’s mention of a Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane headed in your direction, those who have lived through one tend to flinch, but they handle it as best they can.
“People down here, they’re never praying for it to go someplace else,” said Murphy. “They never wake up wishing it would hit Florida or Texas or Alabama. If it misses you, you’re thankful for that, but you do know it went somewhere else and is affecting someone to the left or right of you.”
Drake Nevis is one of the Argos prized free agent signings of 2020. The defensive tackle was a key component of Winnipeg’s Grey Cup championship season and brings to Toronto a personality as big as his talent level.
The 31-year-old grew up across the Mississippi River from New Orleans in the suburb of Marrero. For the last four years he and his wife have lived in the neighbouring city of Gretna.
He too vividly remembers the time of Katrina.
“I was a junior in high school,” Nevis recalled for Argonauts.ca. “I just remember relocating twice and then coming home after about six weeks. We stayed in Louisiana, in Opelousas (a small town located a couple of hours northwest of NOLA).”
The Nevises decided to stick it out through this summer’s bouts of bad weather, remaining in Gretna through each system. The storm in late October was the one that got their attention.
“This one that passed through this time (Zeta) was the one where the wind picked up quite a bit. We were blessed. We had the power go out for no more than two days and had some shingles come off the roof.”
Nevis is a religious man and turns to someone he considers a higher source than a meteorologist when deciding on whether to stay put or evacuate.
“My faith is my life. I definitely pray for favourable weather and ask for guidance concerning what needs to be done. I pray for others safety. I look at it differently then I did back then.”
Kent Shelby will make his Argo debut in 2021. The wide receiver played a couple of seasons of arena football after being signed as an undrafted free agent by the Chargers in 2018. He signed with the Argos in January and has recently been playing in the spring league with McLeod Bethel-Thompson as his quarterback.
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The personable receiver grew up in Algiers, across the river from the French Quarter section of New Orleans. Earlier this year he had been staying in Lake Charles, LA, a city of 78,000 located about a three-hour drive west of NOLA, near the Texas border. It was hit by two hurricanes in the span of six weeks that battered the city each time.
He left town the day before Hurricane Laura – the first of the two storms – hit Lake Charles in late August. He had been staying in a house that “got messed up pretty bad.”
“I did go back,” Shelby told Argonauts.ca in an interview over Zoom. “It was really like a war zone. There were a lot of military people there making sure there was no looting going on. It was like a dead city.”
It wasn’t his first experience with a hurricane. Now 24-years-old, he was just a kid when Katrina hit. He had to evacuate for that storm too, living in Houston with family for about four months.
“We had a lot of windows messed up,” he recalled. “There was flooding in our home, there was a lot of mould. Nothing too, too serious.”
That sentence alone tells you what people considered getting off easy in that storm.
The impact of Katrina was felt by the entire family, which led to his aunt, Germaine Jackson, writing a dissertation about surviving a major natural disaster that is available in book form.
“It explains the Hurricane Katrina process,” explained a proud nephew. “Reading her book helped me cope with going through those two hurricanes that happened in Lake Charles. It’s about staying calm. When things like that happen, we tend to get frustrated and get angry. When you stay calm you cope with everything a little bit better.”
That’s Shelby’s mindset. For this interview he was wearing a tee-shirt he designed with the slogan FINAO written across the front. It stands for “Failure Is Not An Option.”
For residents of Louisiana this year, neither is surrendering to adversity.