Losing Louisiana: Shocking Images Of Life After A 1000-Year Flood

Floods ravaged the state of Louisiana, leaving at least 11 people dead and 30,000 more forced to flee rising waters after days of catastrophic rainstorms. Bloomberg’s Brendan Smialowski captured these images of the aftermath…

A boy rides his bike inside the flood-damaged Life Tabernacle Church…

John Booth (left) sits with Angela Latiolais’s (second from left) family while helping them save belongings after flooding…

A dump truck stranded in a flooded construction site…

A boat full of dogs makes its way through a flooded neighborhood…

Volunteers move cages at a temporary animal shelter inside the Lamar Dixon Expo Center near a flood victims’ shelter after flooding…

A family of deer makes its way through flood waters…

People carry computer parts from a boat after flooding…

A car partially submerged in flood waters…

The Gold-N-Guns pawn shop seen in flood waters…

Rubble burns after flooding…

Of course, on the bright side, now economists have an excuse for weak Q3 GDP data.

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And finally – after all that devastation- there is this… The Aqua Dam…

The Aqua Dam sounds truly nuts. A giant inner-tube around your house to protect you from floods? And it costs more than $8,000? That’s some serious prepper stuff, and surely crazy. Well, this one worked magnificently during the Louisiana and Texas floods. Private enterprise comes through again!

This is exactly the kind of thing that can only emerge in a free society where people can experiment and try out all kinds of different ways of solving problems. It’s something that clearly a lot of people would think is ridiculous or too expensive, not practical, etc., yet it’s the very thing that saved Randy Wagner’s house.

If we were all forced to leave it up to a one-size-fits-all state enforced solution to flooding, you know what would have happened: Wagner would have been forcibly evacuated from his home and would have had to watch as it got destroyed.

But in a world where entrepreneurs can offer a variety of different products, and where buyers are free to take a chance on things they may not know for sure are going to work out, a family home survived a flood.