Ten years have passed since the Great Flood of 2016.
In thinking of an opening for this editorial, I started and stopped several times, before realizing that those ten words carried more weight than anything clever I could draw up.
It’s been a decade since the worst natural disaster to strike Livingston Parish flowed through the area and, in doing so, wrecked homes, schools, businesses… lives. During that 10-year span, the days have been long, but the years have been short as the saying goes.
Being a newspaper publisher and editor at the time was a strange feeling. The Livingston Parish News, which has been in business since 1898, was not immune from the damages of the flood. Our office, at the time on Hatchell Lane in Denham Springs, took four feet of water after the waters dammed – and rose – against the elevated highway.
The picture alongside this story encapsulates a very specific feeling of being in the news industry during a natural disaster. The feeling, or the lesson, is that the work never stops.
On Friday, August 12, 2026 The News finished production of our Sunday, August 14 edition which was printed that evening. On the front, I had chosen the headline ‘Stunning, sudden floods’ with a picture of a flooded parking lot in the Town of Livingston.
In truth, the storm which would eventually drop nearly three feet of rain across the capital area had already begun. Some, although not many, probably knew what was coming over the next 24-48 hours but many simply looked back at 1977 and 1983 and said ‘well, we can manage this one, too.’
The flooding statistics from those two years were smashed in 2016 by all metrics.
Sadly, I don’t think a single one of those Sunday editions reached their final destination. By the time I was supposed to turn around and help my mother move her furniture upstairs the next morning at about 5 a.m., the water was already in her home off of River Road.
And this wasn’t flash flooding. This was the Amite River.
My personal experiences are well-documented, but by night’s end both my mother and I’s house had flooded, and the newspaper building suffered the same fate. Two days later, our family was finally able to get into the newspaper office and found archived editions soaked, computers destroyed, storage hard drives all but gone, roughly six months of newsprint ruined, and an old press that had finally seen it’s last press run.
A press run that said ‘Stunning, sudden floods.’
But, the work never stops, and neither did we. We were able to move into my wife’s office in the downtown Antique District. From there, we spent six months following the community’s reaction to the flood.
Grief. Sorrow. Loss.
The pillars of our community, and the pillars of this paper, were ground to a screeching halt. In the aftermath of the flood, school was postponed indefinitely, as were high school sports. Businesses were closed temporarily, or trying to find ways to make money in the interim until someone presented a long-term answer.
But from that came senses of community, resilience, strength – those were the long-term answers.
The News covered it all, sharing what we knew of school recovery, rebooting sports, tips on how to gut and dry your house, businesses that were open, groups that were still meeting – anything to show that the community was still there, it had just hit a rough bump in the road.
The News put everything we could on our website, removed the paywall, and got back to work. Apart from the Sunday, August 14 edition, the News never missed a paper. We found a printer in Mississippi who was willing to help us out, and eventually moved to Baton Rouge Press (who had, themselves, flooded).
All of this came on the heels of losing my father, Jeff David Sr., to cancer the October before as well as a man I considered an uncle and 30-year editor of the paper, Mike Dowty, that March to a stroke.
But The News understood the responsibility we were, and are, given daily to cover what happens in Livingston Parish. I am grateful to the staff then, and since, who have worked hard to meet that call.
And, yes, there is still work to be done. Major drainage projects are ongoing, including the Comite Diversion Canal, but progress is real – albeit slow. Ordinances have been passed to help curb unchecked development. New leadership has taken hold of drainage initiatives across the region, and has introduced new long-term development and drainage strategies for the capital area.
In thinking back on that August in 2016 to now, I can vividly remember sighing after cleaning out our office, and several other events, but some of the time also feels like a blur. It’s hard to believe The News has come this far, but we are still here, since 1898, wherein the days are long, but the years are short.
And whether it’s the next drainage project, or the next story, the work never stops.
