LAROSE, La. (KLFY) —Trying to get life back to normal after a hurricane always takes time. Residents in Larose are trying to start over but there’s an added challenge, thick mud is making the clean up process almost impossible.

“ It was so thick, you can barely walk through it. The smell is horrendous,” explains Draven Eymard. The Eymard family rode out Hurricane Ida in their home in Larose off Chester Lee Street. It’s something Melissa said she will never forget. “The wind never stopped. We never really got a break. It just continued to blow, the only time we had a break was when the direction of the storm changed. As soon as it switch directions we had half an hour and then the water started rising. That was the scariest part, having the water come up and not knowing how high it was going to come up. We were watching it constantly creep up the steps. Within 45 minutes from the ground it was from the ground up to floor level in our place.”

The floodwaters that followed Hurricane Ida were unlike anything Travis Eymard has ever seen. He says, “I’ve seen the street flood, but it never made it up the driveway or anywhere close to the house. We were listening all night long, you could hear the waves splashing under the house. We were just worried that it would come in.”

The family says they’re thankful to have survived the storm. Now they’re dealing with clean up, and don’t know where to start. Melissa said local officials have told them vacuum trucks are working seven days a week to clean for other neighborhoods that are worse off than theirs.

“I think we need more than two vacuum trucks,” says Melissa, “We need help to scrape it out of our yards, we need help to be told where to put it, we need help to have it tested to be sure that it’s actually even safe to be back here. We have to think if we want to rebuild lives back here. Electricity would not even make the situation better. Today was the first day the garbageman passed back here. No one wants to come back here. It kind of feels like the neighborhood that was forgotten.”