CHAUVIN — The signs of exodus are everywhere along Little Caillou Road as it winds for miles past bait shops and sugar cane fields, following the curves of the bayou.
Empty homes with remnant strips of blue roof tarp fluttering in the wind, ivy climbing the siding. Shuttered banks and storefronts. A razed school that’s now a vacant lot.
Hurricane Ida devastated this stretch, but the bayou communities have bounced back before. Now, there’s another force hollowing them out.
“It’s not going to be hurricanes that run people out of here,” Dirk Guidry said. “It’s going to be the insurance rates.”
Guidry, 68, a former shrimper and Terrebonne Parish council member, owns Pizza Express, one of Chauvin’s few remaining businesses. It still shows scars from past storms. In a corner of the dining room, a dark strip of discolored wood 18 inches high marks the waterline of earlier flooding. Guidry, …