GRAND ISLE, La. — Ida was not yet a hurricane when high school coaches across southern Louisiana began preparing for what had become all too familiar, even inevitable.
Coach Denny Wright of tiny Grand Isle School texted his cross-country runners and basketball players about the mandatory evacuation on Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island: “No school. No practice. I’ll let you know when.”
Lyle Fitte, the football coach at South Plaquemines High School in Buras, La., evacuated on what became an eight-hour trip to Houston. Buras is 50 miles southeast of New Orleans on a thin, vulnerable peninsula where the Mississippi runs to the Gulf.