In the days after Hurricane Katrina leveled southeast Louisiana back in 2005 and flooded his lower St. Bernard Parish home, Scotty Weeks was so overcome with emotion that he had to take a walk alone.
The storm surge off Lake Borgne put at least 10 feet of water in his home and it sat for days. Everything that he and his family were not able to pack in their Toyota Corolla was in that house.
In Baton Rouge with relatives, he was overcome with anger, frustration and paranoia. So he took a walk.
And that’s when it hit him.
“I realized for the first time in my life I had no earthly commitments,” he recalls. “I had nothing to my name. We couldn’t get to our bank because all the banks were closed. Other than the generosity of others, at that moment in time, we had nothing.”
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It was a good time, he realized, for a restart. Weeks was a machinist, and after he and his family initially moved into an apartment on the West Bank in New Orleans, he inquired about a job in Lafayette in manufacturing.
He got the job, and he and his family moved to Lafayette in early 2006 and later built a home in Maurice. He and his wife, Hope, will mark their 36th anniversary this year. Their two children, Faith and Keith, are adults with successful careers.
Weeks is now an ordained deacon at Trinity Anglican Church in Lafayette.
“You just never know what’s going to get thrown at you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have moved to Lafayette on my own accord. But at the same time, I did a lot of things I wouldn’t have seen myself doing, including being in an Anglican church and getting ordained. I couldn’t have drawn this map.”
Weeks’ experience was similar to dozens — if not hundreds — of others who sought refuge from Hurricane Katrina in Lafayette. When Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans, Lafayette was not only on the safe side of the storm — the west side — but it was and remains today one of the highest points of elevation in southwest Louisiana.
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Evacuees filled the Cajundome or people's homes in Lafayette. Rock ‘N’ Bowl owner Johnny Blancher and his pregnant wife, not yet Lafayette residents, were crammed in a home with more than a dozen people.
Emergency crews, then-mayor Joey Durel recalled, were well-prepared to handle the crisis. Acadian Ambulance, he said, was the star of the state.
Local people, too, pitched in.
“It was pretty impressive to me to see how well everyone worked together,” Durel said. “And I think of people like my brother, who had 13 strangers in his house. We talk a lot about government and shelters, but who doesn’t get any kind of credit are the number of individuals who were housing strangers.”
Many of those evacuees stayed, causing the real estate market to turn white hot basically overnight. Two decades later, they vividly recall the generosity they received in Lafayette.
Some of them never left.
Jay Toups and his wife, Robin, are pictured with their youngest daughter, Catherine, 15, on Wednesday, August 20, 2025, at their home in Lafayette.
Escape to Lafayette
Kisharra Angelety was only 18 when she and four other relatives left New Orleans and went to Jackson, Mississippi, to escape the storm. When they returned and state troopers wouldn't let them in the city, she knew something was really wrong.
So they traveled west, first arriving in Denham Springs before landing at the Cajundome. There, they found others she knew from New Orleans.
It was then that the scope of the damage started to come into focus. First, she said, it was a chance meeting with a man in scrubs at a Walgreens who described the devastation. Then, once they arrived at the Cajundome and saw the footage on TV, reality set in.
“That was a real shock because nobody was homeless yesterday but, today, I guess we’re homeless,” she said. “When we looked at the TV, that was when the whole world came crashing down. My whole family was from New Orleans, and I didn’t know who was safe and who was not. That was probably the hardest part of it.”
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Angelety, like so many others, knew at that point their lives would be changed forever. More than 600 students from the New Orleans area enrolled in schools in Lafayette Parish, reports from that time indicated.
Angelety eventually landed in Houston and South Carolina before trying to move back to New Orleans. But she and her mom and aunt ended up back in Lafayette, and she’s been here since.
“People were very nice,” she said. “Even when we lived in the Cajundome, people were offering us a place to sleep at their house. It really was a lot of people offering us a lot of stuff. There wasn’t a hateful vibe here.”
Jay Toups and his family left their Metairie home ahead of Katrina and stayed a week at the Hampton Inn Suites on College Road. It was an easy move for him as he had visited Lafayette off and on for work for nearly 20 years.
There were so many people from New Orleans at that hotel, he said, it felt like a reunion. Yet once word came that their home was significantly damaged and their kids’ schools were underwater, their stay in Lafayette turned into a long one.
They went to St. Pius X Catholic Church and met with Monsignor Richard Mouton, who gave them a place to live and made sure they had food and clothes and their kids got into a school, Toups recalled.
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“We were incredibly blown away by the generosity of the Lafayette people,” he said. “People knocked on our door that we never knew that were bringing us stuff to help us out. It was phenomenal. They gave us beds, sofas, a television, a month’s worth of food and clothes for our kids.”
They stayed in that house for a year before buying a home in Lafayette. Toups later moved his business, a consulting firm, to an office in downtown Lafayette.
The housing issue
It’s hard to determine just how many people arrived in Lafayette as a result of Katrina, but census data and home sales are good barometers.
The population in Lafayette jumped by nearly 6,500 between 2005 and 2006, data shows. Home sales in the month after Katrina more than doubled the total from the previous September, a mark that remains the biggest spike on record, according to data from analyst Bill Bacque with Market Scope Consulting.
New listings that September shot up 150%.
“We sold every house that was available on the market,” said Jim Keaty with Keaty Real Estate. “We were at, I would say, a balanced market, and within two weeks, we had no inventory left. First, the rentals went, and then everybody started buying properties. It was a mad dash.”
It was so busy that Bacque and Chad Theriot with Van Eaton and Romero got to thinking. Bacque had just bought a car off eBay and got the idea to build a web platform to connect people in need of housing to those with housing.
The site went to the Louisiana Realtors Association, then to emergency agencies to help those in need, Bacque recalled. He was later honored as an Outstanding Realtor Hero by the association for his efforts.
“I wanted to find a place where people could go and get answers,” Bacque said. “It was really in response to the volume of people we were being inundated with. People were just calling, ‘I’m in a car with my family.’”
Now, 20 years later, those who found refuge in Lafayette are still trying to find ways to repay folks who offered help.
A dog boarding business in Lafayette took in the Toups’ family dog for six weeks at no charge. A church in Maryland sent Weeks and his family $2,000 in Walmart gift cards.
“How do you even begin to repay something like that?” Weeks said. “(The pastor) said just shut up, say thank you, and pay it forward. That’s what we’ve done the whole time. As blessings came in, blessings went out — whether it was (our) time, money or talent.”