As Hurricane Francine raged off the Gulf Coast, Danielle Morris, a resident of the village of Dulac on Louisiana’s swampy coast, made a difficult decision.

“We’re crazy and we’re staying crazy,” she said, speaking on the phone before the hurricane hit, as she stocked up on gas for the family’s generator. Some might agree with her assessment of her own sanity — Morris lost her previous home in Hurricane Ida in 2021.

But as Francine moved inland and north, Morris—and hundreds of thousands like her—breathed a sigh of relief. The storm had battered Louisiana like so many others before it, but it had caused no major damage or loss of life.

But the storm still unsettled some in the Gulf. Before it struck, Francine was feeding off the unusually warm Gulf waters and quickly intensified into a Category 2 storm. It was a surprise — but one that’s becoming more common, scientists say, as global climate change causes ocean temperatures to rise. For many residents, their relief was also tinged with fear — Francine had hit harder than many had expected, and that could be a sign of things to come.

Francine’s winds reached 100 mph and tore through the same bays and cities that were battered by Hurricane Ida in 2021, displacing thousands of people along Louisiana’s fragile and rapidly disappearing coast.

Louisiana loses about a football field’s worth of land every hour. Lower Terrebonne Parish, where Dulac is located, is home to indigenous and tribal communities that have already experienced mass displacement due to climate-driven land loss. Morris himself is a member of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Tribe of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw.

Weathering the storm wasn’t easy. “It’s bad,” Morris texted the Guardian around 6 p.m., as the eyewall approached her home. “We’re seeing trees falling. The wind is super bad.”

No deaths or injuries were reported from the storm, although dozens of people had to be rescued from rising waters in Lafourche Parish, while in New Orleans, one man was pulled from his flooded vehicle in a dramatic rescue that was broadcast live on television. Hundreds of thousands of people were left without power.

Ursula Ward, of Morgan City, was also displaced by Hurricane Ida in 2021, forcing her to leave Houma. Hurricane Francine passed between the two cities last night.

She too was surprised by the force of the storm.

“This can’t be a Category 1 storm,” she wrote around 7 p.m., about two hours after landfall. By then, her street was flooded and winds were blowing water into her house. She hadn’t yet heard that Hurricane Francine had been upgraded to a Category 2.

Those living in mobile homes had no choice but to evacuate. So did many who lost their old homes in previous storms. Both Ward and Lertrelle Ray were displaced from the same low-income housing complex by Ida. Ray, who was pregnant at the time, was so stressed that she went into preterm labor and required an emergency C-section about two weeks after Ida hit.

Now she calls her youngest daughter a “Hurricane Ida baby.”

“Every year – like when she turns three – I think, ‘Oh Lord, it’s been three years since Ida was born.’”

Since Ida, Ray and her four children have been sharing a FEMA trailer north of Houma. Mobile home residents were ordered to evacuate for Hurricane Francine; Ray got a call Tuesday telling her to leave. So Ray packed up her car and drove to Mississippi, where she and her four children waited out Francine at a friend’s house.

Now she fears she has lost her Fema mobile home as well. She doesn’t expect to be able to return to check on her home until Friday.

“I felt a little bit like I was homeless until I got the trailer. And I still feel that way,” since she is not permanently housed. But she can’t move because “everyone has raised the rent” since Ida.

Home prices in Terrebonne skyrocketed after Ida, and there are few public or subsidized housing options for storm-displaced people in the area today. Ray says she pays about twice as much for her FEMA mobile home as she did for her old apartment. She worries that Francine will make her housing search even harder.

On Wednesday afternoon, people in Houma and Lower Terrebonne were busy clearing their yards of branches, aluminum siding and other debris. Utility trucks were making repairs and tending to power poles that had been knocked down by the high winds. Further up the bayou, some homes in the mandatory evacuation zone were flooded, with water still standing in yards and under elevated homes, and downed trees were scattered across some properties.

Despite widespread power outages, a taqueria truck south of Houma was still serving customers using a generator. In an adjacent store, where the lights were out and the refrigerators were silent, the cashier, Dulcinea, pointed up at the stained and missing ceiling tiles.

“It all got wet,” she said in Spanish. “It was a surprise. And it will be a problem for the owner. But this was not as strong as Ida.”

Morris started clearing debris and helped tape over her grandparents’ damaged roof.

“It was worse than we expected,” she confirmed. Although it “seems like it’s taking forever.”

Still, Francine wasn’t as bad as Ida, she added. And her new home is better prepared for severe weather, with hurricane bolts and a reinforced metal door that they closed when the winds got high.

Although the water reached the tires of the boat trailer in her yard, the water was gone by mid-morning.

The hurricane made landfall a day after the debate between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Although Harris has touted a more climate-friendly platform, neither party during the debate promised to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, which the scientific consensus says will be necessary to maintain a livable planet. Instead, both parties supported fracking and increased domestic oil production.

But back in Dulac, Morris focused on local solutions. She was grateful that Terrebonne’s new levees and locks had weathered the storm. She had worried beforehand, because the angle of Francine’s approach brought a storm surge several feet high. But the structures held up. “Without the locks, we would have been flooded,” she said.