By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor
FLW Tour pro Gerald Spohrer's home in Gonzales, La. sits on ground that's too high to be reached by the floodwaters that have devastated the southern portion of his home state. Many of his fellow residents of Ascension Parish weren't so fortunate.
Since last weekend, Spohrer has focused his entire existence on helping those people. Initial efforts centered around getting them to safety via boat as the water continued to rise. Now that the levels have begun to recede, he's concentrating on helping the displaced return to their homes to obtain necessities (pets, clothes, medicine, etc.).
Most of the houses he's transporting people to and from either are or were completely inundated with water. Lives and livelihoods have been lost and the recovery process will be a monumental undertaking.
"It's worse than I can describe," he said on Monday. "Until you're in the mix, interacting with these people and seeing these homes, you really can't grasp it.
"As far as residential damage, it's more than Hurricane Katrina."
Devastation Widespread
News outlets reported Wednesday that the flooding, cause by more than 25 inches of rain over a 3-day period, has claimed at least 11 lives. Approximately 30,000 residents have been rescued from homes and vehicles and 20 of the state's 64 parishes (what other states call counties) are under a federal emergency disaster declaration.
The 34-year-old Spohrer estimated that he assisted with the rescue of at least 50 people on Monday. His Facebook page has been an invaluable resource, as his live streams of the operations have brought greater attention to the situation and the "Comments" section has become a conduit for people to relay him information on the whereabouts of people needing assistance.
FLW Tour pro Gerald Spohrer has made good use of modern technology to assist his fellow Ascension Parish residents.
"Every time I go live on Facebook or make a post I get a bunch of addresses," he said. "Instead of just cruising around looking for people on a porch, I have precise destinations to go to and the map on my iPhone shows me the location.
"To get to the places I was going, I've had to go through people's back yards, over fences, all kinds of crazy things. Every now and then you hit a high spot and I might have to go through several yards and through a pasture and cut back around to get back to the water."
He's employed a friend's alligator-hunting boat (a wide-bodied Carolina skiff) and another buddy's duck boat to perform the operations. He's one of a huge contingent of people who've rendered such aid (others include Greg Hackney, who swung into action immediately after returning from the Potomac River Bassmaster Elite Series, and fellow FLW pro Gene Eisenmann).
"When something like this happens in Louisiana, the one good thing is about 75 percent of the population owns a boat and people are very good at navigating and dealing with the situations. The amount of help is overwhelming."
Some Just Say No
Not everybody in the region has welcomed the assistance that Spohrer and other volunteers have offered. He said some have brandished guns in an effort to scare rescuers away and others have been furious that the boats have thrown waves into homes that had already been destroyed by the water.
"We've dealt with some psychopaths – people who were not in their right state of mind," he said. "It was really good once we got hooked up with the cops (he's served as an escort for boats carrying law enforcement personnel who weren't intimately familiar with the area) because they were confronting those people and shutting them down. They'd tell them, 'You can't be interfering with these people doing the rescues.'
"We've also been on a lot of wild goose chases and those are killing us. One lady messaged me to go pick up her sister-in-law because she had kids and needed help ASAP, so after I put forth a bunch of effort to get there she told me she wasn't leaving. I'm like, 'I just spent an hour trying to get to you.'"
Some of the sights have been horrific and they stemmed from situations he could do nothing to alleviate at the time. He's witnessed horses tied to bridges and floating caskets that had been washed out of a cemetery.
Nonetheless, he's undeterred.
"I know how valuable I can be on the water. The best place for me right now is to be out there doing what I can, even if it's just escorting the cops through areas they don't know.
"Once it all recedes, then we can focus on getting the people out of the shelters and rebuilding and things like that."
Notable
> Spohrer works a day job doing industrial sales and project management for Catalyst Handling Resources, his primary sponsor on the Tour. He doesn't know when he'll return to work as Catalyst's local office in St. Amant sits in the center of the devastation.
