Last week, one city in southwest Louisiana was bracing for Hurricane Francine: Lake Charles, about four hours west of New Orleans and two hours east of Houston.
Lake Charles has had some very bad luck in the lottery of hurricane paths over the past 20 years, but Francine’s impact on the city was relatively small, more like the summer storm locals are accustomed to.
But had the hurricane traveled a little further west, it could have struck a place still recovering from the last storm, literally sorting through the rubble of a town symbolizing its oil-and-gas economy.
The city’s only skyscraper, Capital One Tower, symbolizes Lake Charles’ unfortunate fate as a city that has embraced Louisiana’s oil and gas industry even as the climate crisis takes an increasingly toll on the city.
Since it opened in 1983, the 310-foot-tall metal and glass structure has been Lake Charles’ most recognizable building and a picture-postcard image of Lake Charles’ power in the oil and gas industry, dwarfing everything else in town.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Louisiana currently supplies 10% of natural gas production sold domestically and 61% of U.S. natural gas exports. Lake Charles is the largest contributor to these figures, with a disproportionate number of refineries and facilities located around the city.
Through oil busts and booms, the tower stood like a beacon of the city’s energy success, a bulwark against climate-change doomsayers as the weather warmed and hurricanes grew more powerful from the Gulf of Mexico.
In the 1980s, the members-only City Club was a posh restaurant where energy executives sipped martinis and sliced filet mignon at lunchtime. Rhonda Cleckley, owner of the popular city spot Accessory Zone, recalls enjoying lavish dinners there with her husband, who worked at the Tower. “For many years, it was the place to go,” she says.
It was, in fact, a Lake Charles version of Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of New York’s World Trade Center, except that instead of a view across the rooftops of Manhattan, the City Club’s windows overlooked an endless horizon of oil refineries and petrochemical smokestacks.
Through the booms and busts of energy markets, the tower has stood strong, its blue-hued “hurricane-resistant” glass reflecting the water for which the town is named.
More recently, questions have been raised about the building’s hurricane resistance, something that developers once touted: Lake Charles was hit by Hurricane Rita in 2005, and the tower suffered severe flooding and was closed for nearly two years.
But during the pandemic lull, two massive hurricanes struck, six weeks apart, and locals began to feel like weather targets.
On August 27, 2020, Hurricane Laura, the 10th most powerful hurricane in US history, made landfall near Lake Charles. The Category 4 storm’s 150 mph (240 kph) winds smashed through hurricane-resistant glass, leaving scars on every side of the building. For weeks afterward, hollowed-out windows were sealed off with plywood.
As the city struggled to recover from Laura, a new storm formed in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and wary residents watched as forecasters again predicted its path straight into the heart of Lake Charles.
Hurricane Delta (so named because there were so many storms that season that the entire English alphabet was blown away, and the Greek alphabet was put into use) made landfall again just south of Lake Charles on October 9. Delta’s 100-mile-per-hour winds were strong enough to blow away the plywood protecting the Tower offices from the elements, leaving the building with a post-apocalyptic checkerboard look, with broken pieces strewn between the blue-glass window frames.
But now the tower is gone.
At 8 a.m. on September 7, after years of legal battles over what to do with the dilapidated building, the tower was blown up. Within seconds, Lake Charles was blanketed in a cloud of dust, turning into more of a town than a city.
“All we wanted was for this building to be renovated,” Lake Charles Mayor Nick Hunter told local news, adding that the city had met with numerous developers to explore “all possibilities for redevelopment” of the building. In the end, private funds were deducted from insurance settlements with the building’s owners to cover the costs of the demolition.
“If I could go back in time and ask an architect to design this building with as many windows as possible, I would. If I could go back in time and never had Hurricane Laura hit Lake Charles, I would. But we live in the world we live in now,” Hunter said.
It seems like a world where increasingly powerful hurricanes make the rules.
Louisiana is on the front lines of climate change, and Lake Charles’s mayhem is a canary in the coal mine of what American cities may soon see, as one storm after another reminds us of the shortsightedness of past designers and soberly reminds residents of their responsibility for their city’s climate.
“There’s a lot of history there and it needed to be demolished,” store owner Cleckley said of the tower’s destruction.
Cleckley is one example of a small business owner determined to weather the storms that have hit Lake Charles. She has seen her store completely destroyed twice by hurricanes: Rita in 2005 and Laura in 2020. “The hurricane literally came through the front door and blew everything away,” she said. She lost most of her inventory both times.
But this week she says she feels calm: “A category one or two is nothing compared to what we’ve been through so I wasn’t worried about Francine at all.”
But many Lake Charles residents have been forced to evacuate: Since Laura, the city has experienced one of the highest rates of climate-related migration in the United States, as residents give up and move to higher ground outside the hurricane’s path.
Today, there is the impression that the town has given up on the dreams of progress upon which the tower was built, and has been forced to focus instead on hunkering down and defending.
Cleanup after the blast is expected to take 90 days, city officials said.When Francine washed up on the eastern shore, piles of debris that could become flying glass and steel and outer bands of weathering danced over the tower’s graveyard, a somber reminder of who will win in the battle between industry and the climate.
