Julie Dermansky

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season had a record-breaking 30 named storms, so many that the National Hurricane Center ran through the standard list of names and moved on to the Greek alphabet with over two months of the season left. In all, 12 storms made landfall in the continental United States, with five hitting the Gulf Coast. I photographed the aftermath — the destroyed homes, damaged oil and gas sites, and contaminated wetlands — from four of those Gulf Coast storms, including Hurricanes Laura, Sally, Delta, and Zeta. 

This selection of photos shows the devastating impact hurricanes have had primarily in Louisiana but also in Alabama and Florida, in an already difficult year beset by a pandemic and subsequent economic downturn. 

Environmental and community groups in Louisiana are elated after what they see as two back-to-back wins in their fight to protect fenceline communities from additional petrochemical industry pollution. This week, a key federal permit for a $9.4 billion petrochemical complex under construction in St. James Parish, near largely Black and poor communities, is on pause, and Louisiana voters rejected an amendment that could have let petrochemical companies off the hook for paying property taxes in the state forever.  

Hurricane Delta made landfall in Creole, Louisiana, on October 9 — 13 miles east of where Hurricane Laura struck 43 days before. It touched down in an area packed with oil and gas wells, pipelines, and rigs.

An assessment of how much oil was spilled after Laura had not been made when Hurricane Delta created a new round of destruction along a similar track, from Port Arthur, Texas, to Baton Rouge. 

Three weeks after a shipping container full of tiny plastic pellets fell into the Mississippi River near New Orleans, cleanup hired by the vessel that lost its cargo stopped shortly after it started as a pair of major storms approached the Gulf Coast. But huge numbers of the pellets, which were made by Dow Chemical and are melted down to manufacture plastic products, still line the river banks in New Orleans and further afield. 

After visiting a couple locations along the river banks affected by the spill, Mark Benfield, an oceanographer and plastic pollution expert at Louisiana State University, estimated that nearly 750 million of these lentil-sized plastic pellets, also known as nurdles, could have been lost in the river.