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FINDING PEACE: Displaced by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago, Bradley Sylve creates new home at Alabama
FINDING PEACE: Displaced by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago, Bradley Sylve creates new home at Alabama
Posted on November 4, 2015 by bamablog | Leave a comment
Alabama defensive back Bradley Sylve stands during warmups before a game last season against Southern Miss at Bryant Denny Stadium (Gary Cosby/For the TimesDaily).
It’s been more than 10 years since Bradley Sylve had a home in Port Sulphur, Louisiana.
That home — a simple, two-story, three-bedroom house off Caroline Drive, an hour south of New Orleans on the southern Louisiana peninsula that makes up the mouth of the Mississippi River — is where most of his best childhood memories are rooted.
And, like most everything else in the community, it was washed off the map on Aug. 29, 2005: the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.
Sylve was 12 at the time, but memories of that quaint blue house still come to him in his dreams.
“You’d walk in and you had the living room, and you go a little further and you have the kitchen,” Sylve said, his distinct Cajun drawl trailing off.
“I still have dreams about that house almost every night, exactly how it looked. It’s kind of crazy because I don’t know why I’m dreaming about that but every time I dream I’m always in that same house.”
A look down an empty Caroline Drive off of Highway 23 in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, which was devastated by 20 feet of flood water when federal levees on either side of the small peninsula town broke when Hurricane Katrina hit 10 years ago in 2005.
Now, as he prepares to face his homestate LSU in another pivotal Top 10 matchup Saturday in Tuscaloosa, the Alabama senior defensive back still considers Port Sulphur his “hub,” even if there hasn’t been a place for him to call “home” there since that fateful day.
More than a decade later, there is still no house at 144 Caroline Drive, just an empty plot with small patches of foundation popping out from beneath the well-kept grass that since has covered the strip of land where several members of the Sylve family had lived side by side for years before Katrina.
John D. Sylve, Bradley’s 62-year-old uncle, still resides down the street, but is one of just a few that returned to the once-crowded neighborhood.
Only, John doesn’t have a house any more either.
“I wanted everybody to be home … (and) this is home,” John said, standing outside a tiny beige mobile home that he has lived in for the better part of the last decade. “But this house here, I don’t really care for it because I can’t do what I want to it. I used to repair my own house, fix my floors and everything else.”
That too was destroyed by the 20-foot swell that swept through their community when federal levees on either side of the town broke, flooding the area and moving many of the single-family homes as far as 100 feet off their foundation.
“We’re just living in a bowl,” John said. “To me that’s a bowl; you’ve got a levee on this side and a levee on that side. And once the water got in there, the houses started popping up and with the wind swirling around it moved everything around.”
Bradley and his mother, Micquella, fled to Atlanta the day before Katrina made landfall. They eventually ended up staying with family friends in Texas for several weeks before returning home to take stock of the devastation.
“When we did come back, they still had eight feet of water, we had to take the levee to get back to the house, and when we got back there our house was gone — it wasn’t nowhere on the map,” Bradley said.
Instead, it was lying against John’s house in the middle of Caroline Drive.
“When we left my grandmother and my mother just started crying, and I started crying with them,” Bradley said.
Standing inside what was once his house, Bradley could feel his feet start to sink into the mud that had overtaken what was once the floor. His mother didn’t need long to determine there was nothing worth salvaging.
“All I remember is me crying, man, and saying, ‘This is it, I’m not going to be able to come down Caroline Drive anymore,’ ” he said.
A picture of the plot of land where Bradley Sylve’s home used to stand more than 10 years ago in Port Sulphur, Louisiana. The patchy grass is where the edge of the house’s foundation used to be.
COMPLETE DEVASTATION
About 5 a.m. on Aug. 29, 2005, Cyril Crutchfield was startled awake in the Port Sulphur High cafeteria with about five other people when he began to feel water on his skin.
Looking out a nearby window, Crutchfield saw waves of seawater rushing in his direction, already beginning to flood the bottom level of the two-story school.
Wading through the rising waters, Crutchfield and the others made their way up to the gymnasium on the second floor. The water continued to flow, eventually reaching the second floor. It didn’t stop rising until the eye of the hurricane was overhead.
“We went into the gym, that’s where we kind of rode it out,” said Crutchfield, 49. “And it was kind of scary because water began to get into the gym and it kept rising.”
That experience was just the beginning for Crutchfield, who cemented his legacy in the area by helping the Port Sulphur community rebuild around a state championship-winning football team just two years after Katrina — aptly-named the South Plaquemine Hurricanes.
And a lot of that success revolved around Sylve, his future step-son.
It was in a cramped Atlanta hotel room Sylve watched in horror as Katrina made landfall where they had just come from, and where some family remained.
“My mom was watching it and she was like, ‘It doesn’t look too good,’ and they had reporters from New Orleans doing their thing and we could see how bad the storm was,” Bradley said. “August 29, that’s when it hit, that was a horrible devastation.”
Sylve’s uncle, John, and his 63-year-old cousin, Narry Sylve, had remained in Port Sulphur until the last possible minute, working through heavy rain to stabilize the levees.
“We were some of the last ones to go, me and Narry … we were the last ones to go and pull out of here, and it was raining and everything else,” John said. “We just said goodbye to our houses, and that was it.”
John D. Sylve, the 62-year-old uncle of Alabama defensive back Bradley Sylve, standing outside his mobile home that stands on the plot of land on Carolina Drive where his old house of 20-plus years stood prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
They returned home days later to help with the cleanup and were stunned by what was left. It took months before power and water were restored.
“It looked like somebody dropped an atomic bomb, it was devastating,” Narry recalled. “Ninety-nine percent of everybody’s homes was gone. It was a total loss. We were like a third world country here.”
Ten years later, the drive along Highway 23 into Port Sulphur is full of empty plots of land like unmarked graves sprinkled between strings of mobile homes, the lone remnants of a once close-knit community laid to waste by the storm of storms.
“You had houses around here, you didn’t have no trailers here at all,” John said of the pre-Katrina neighborhood. “But mostly in here, in this subdivision, was nothing but houses, old Freeport houses. That’s what it was.”
FRESH BEGINNINGS
Although Port Sulphur remained flooded days after the storm, Cyril Crutchfield could only think of football.
“My main concern was just wondering, man, this football (team that) we’d put all this time and energy in to was just all gone,” Crutchfield said. “And just trying to figure out how we can accomplish this and accomplish that, so that was my concern … that was the toughest part for me.”
It wasn’t until midway through the 2005 season when he returned to Port Sulphur that he saw the true impact of Katrina.
“I really didn’t understand it until a few weeks later we went back and it was like a bomb just blew up,” he said. “And I had players transferring all over the place, because they had to get in school.”
Before the start of the 2006-07 school year, Crutchfield — who was serving as the head football and track coach at the newly-consolidated South Plaquemines High, which used to be Port Sulphur High — made some calls to bring many of the former area athletes back to town.
The scoreboard at Bradley Sylve’s high school football field, home of the former South Plaquemines High in Port Sulphur, Louisiana. The team was named the Hurricanes after Hurricane Katrina.
One of his first calls was to Micquella, who was living with family in Houma, two hours west and an hour south of Baton Rouge.
“I remember Bradley because he was one of the best athletes in the town, and the fastest, and it was going to be his eighth-grade year,” Crutchfield said. “I knew if I was building toward the future he was one of the ones I wanted to reach out to, so I reached out to his mom.”
Once Bradley agreed to return, Crutchfield drove to pick him up and bring him back nine months after he’d left, in May 2006.
“I told him I’d do that because I knew I had a lot of friends that were coming back that were going to go back to the same school, and where I’m from,” Bradley said. “I didn’t mind doing that because that’s where my hub was at.”
Bradley’s mother joined him a few months later and a romance bloomed between herself and Crutchfield to the point where the three were living together in a cramped FEMA trailer.
“I always tell her she had her eyes on me when I came and got her son,” joked Crutchfield, who married Micquella in December 2007. “And she tells me, the only reason I got her son was to get (close to) her.”
With Bradley and others in tow, Crutchfield led the South Plaquemines Hurricanes to consecutive 1A football state championships in 2007 and 2008 and a third title game appearance in 2009. The team’s success was viewed as a reprieve for the still-recovering communities of Port Sulphur, Buras and Boothville.
“It was just living conditions, living in FEMA trailers, and you’re looking at the cards you’re dealt, and you don’t sometimes feel like it is fair,” Crutchfield said. “But … football was all they had, man, that really helped bring the community back. It was a process.”
South Plaquemines also won a 1A state track and field championship in 2009 by 52 points with five athletes, including Sylve, who won four gold medals — two as anchor on the 400- and 800-meter relay teams and in the 100- and 200-meter dashes.
“We did all this by practicing on the football field, on grass,” said Crutchfield, who went on to coach at L.B. Landry High and St. Augustine High, where he coached LSU running back Leonard Fournette. Crutchfield is now in his first season as head coach at West Jefferson High in south New Orleans. “Just the mindset of those kids was like, ‘We don’t have nothing else, we’ve got to do whatever we have to do,’ and they got it done.”
A look at the South Plaquemines High football field where Bradley Sylve used to play and practice while in high school in Port Sulphur, Louisiana.
NEW OPPORTUNITIES
The personal bio on Bradley’s Twitter account reads: “You know my name not my story. You’ve heard what I done not what I’ve been through!!”
“Most people don’t really know what I’ve been through, me and my fam, man, we’ve come a long way,” Bradley said. “I kinda feel, at the same time, being from there and making it to where I am now, that’s a blessing.”
A lot of that can actually be credited to what happened after Katrina hit, including Bradley’s decision to move on from his hometown when he signed to play football at Alabama over LSU.
“I’m kinda glad I moved out of Louisiana because I consider this place home now,” he said. “You can’t really get me to come back home now. This is my home, I feel a whole lot more comfortable being up here than at home. … Where I’m from, there’s nothing down there for you.”
And while his time at Alabama has been filled with more injuries than starts — even as a fifth-year senior he rarely sees the field outside of special teams or in mop-up duty — Bradley knows there’s a greater future for him.
This past Aug. 22, Bradley suffered a broken right hand three years to the day after he broke his left. Now there’s a matching two-inch scar across the back of each hand. But it was a high ankle sprain in the middle of the 2013 season that derailed his once-promising career after three starts at cornerback.
Of course, Bradley hasn’t let his setbacks define him.
“I’m not giving up on my dream; football — that’s my heart,” Bradley said. “So even though I’m not playing as much, at the same time, I know God has a plan for me and I’m going to keep my faith no matter what. … I’m going to have an opportunity.”
West Virginia wide receiver Kevin White moves away from Alabama defensive back Bradley Sylve after catching a pass during the second half of Alabama’s 33-23 win over West Virginia in the 2013 Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game in the Georgia Dome. (Gary Cosby Jr./Decatur Daily)
And while the last several years have been trying, experiencing something has traumatic as surviving a Level 5 hurricane make landfall over your hometown has a way of putting things into perspective.
“Everything I do, I do it for my family,” Bradley said.
“My mom raised me, she did a whole lot for me, everything, and I feel like I have to pay her back. I’m going to do what I’ve got to do to provide for my family.”
His family has grown by one. Bradley has a one-year-old son, Bradley Jr., who lives in Louisiana with his longtime girlfriend. He gets to see them both as often as he can, including a visit to Tuscaloosa for the Tennessee game.
“That’s my little man, I love that man to death,” Bradley said. “Every time I see him, he puts a smile on my face. Even when my day is going bad, if I see him or just be around him, he’s going to cheer me up no matter what.”
So, while Port Sulphur is no longer be “home,” the thought of all he lost to Katrina a decade ago serves as a continual reminder of everything he’s gained since.
“Katrina was kind of like a wakeup call, you never know when it’s going to be your last day or when a storm is going to come and wipe your town off the map,” Bradley said. “I really couldn’t imagine if Katrina didn’t hit. I don’t know where I would be.
“It was time for a fresh new start … but at the same time, it still hurts.”
Contact Alex Byington by email at alex.byington@TimesDaily.com or alex.byington@DecaturDaily.com. Follow him on Twitter at @abyingtonTD.
- See more at: FINDING PEACE: Displaced by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago, Bradley Sylve creates new home at Alabama
FINDING PEACE: Displaced by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago, Bradley Sylve creates new home at Alabama
Posted on November 4, 2015 by bamablog | Leave a comment
Alabama defensive back Bradley Sylve stands during warmups before a game last season against Southern Miss at Bryant Denny Stadium (Gary Cosby/For the TimesDaily).
It’s been more than 10 years since Bradley Sylve had a home in Port Sulphur, Louisiana.
That home — a simple, two-story, three-bedroom house off Caroline Drive, an hour south of New Orleans on the southern Louisiana peninsula that makes up the mouth of the Mississippi River — is where most of his best childhood memories are rooted.
And, like most everything else in the community, it was washed off the map on Aug. 29, 2005: the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.
Sylve was 12 at the time, but memories of that quaint blue house still come to him in his dreams.
“You’d walk in and you had the living room, and you go a little further and you have the kitchen,” Sylve said, his distinct Cajun drawl trailing off.
“I still have dreams about that house almost every night, exactly how it looked. It’s kind of crazy because I don’t know why I’m dreaming about that but every time I dream I’m always in that same house.”
A look down an empty Caroline Drive off of Highway 23 in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, which was devastated by 20 feet of flood water when federal levees on either side of the small peninsula town broke when Hurricane Katrina hit 10 years ago in 2005.
Now, as he prepares to face his homestate LSU in another pivotal Top 10 matchup Saturday in Tuscaloosa, the Alabama senior defensive back still considers Port Sulphur his “hub,” even if there hasn’t been a place for him to call “home” there since that fateful day.
More than a decade later, there is still no house at 144 Caroline Drive, just an empty plot with small patches of foundation popping out from beneath the well-kept grass that since has covered the strip of land where several members of the Sylve family had lived side by side for years before Katrina.
John D. Sylve, Bradley’s 62-year-old uncle, still resides down the street, but is one of just a few that returned to the once-crowded neighborhood.
Only, John doesn’t have a house any more either.
“I wanted everybody to be home … (and) this is home,” John said, standing outside a tiny beige mobile home that he has lived in for the better part of the last decade. “But this house here, I don’t really care for it because I can’t do what I want to it. I used to repair my own house, fix my floors and everything else.”
That too was destroyed by the 20-foot swell that swept through their community when federal levees on either side of the town broke, flooding the area and moving many of the single-family homes as far as 100 feet off their foundation.
“We’re just living in a bowl,” John said. “To me that’s a bowl; you’ve got a levee on this side and a levee on that side. And once the water got in there, the houses started popping up and with the wind swirling around it moved everything around.”
Bradley and his mother, Micquella, fled to Atlanta the day before Katrina made landfall. They eventually ended up staying with family friends in Texas for several weeks before returning home to take stock of the devastation.
“When we did come back, they still had eight feet of water, we had to take the levee to get back to the house, and when we got back there our house was gone — it wasn’t nowhere on the map,” Bradley said.
Instead, it was lying against John’s house in the middle of Caroline Drive.
“When we left my grandmother and my mother just started crying, and I started crying with them,” Bradley said.
Standing inside what was once his house, Bradley could feel his feet start to sink into the mud that had overtaken what was once the floor. His mother didn’t need long to determine there was nothing worth salvaging.
“All I remember is me crying, man, and saying, ‘This is it, I’m not going to be able to come down Caroline Drive anymore,’ ” he said.
A picture of the plot of land where Bradley Sylve’s home used to stand more than 10 years ago in Port Sulphur, Louisiana. The patchy grass is where the edge of the house’s foundation used to be.
COMPLETE DEVASTATION
About 5 a.m. on Aug. 29, 2005, Cyril Crutchfield was startled awake in the Port Sulphur High cafeteria with about five other people when he began to feel water on his skin.
Looking out a nearby window, Crutchfield saw waves of seawater rushing in his direction, already beginning to flood the bottom level of the two-story school.
Wading through the rising waters, Crutchfield and the others made their way up to the gymnasium on the second floor. The water continued to flow, eventually reaching the second floor. It didn’t stop rising until the eye of the hurricane was overhead.
“We went into the gym, that’s where we kind of rode it out,” said Crutchfield, 49. “And it was kind of scary because water began to get into the gym and it kept rising.”
That experience was just the beginning for Crutchfield, who cemented his legacy in the area by helping the Port Sulphur community rebuild around a state championship-winning football team just two years after Katrina — aptly-named the South Plaquemine Hurricanes.
And a lot of that success revolved around Sylve, his future step-son.
It was in a cramped Atlanta hotel room Sylve watched in horror as Katrina made landfall where they had just come from, and where some family remained.
“My mom was watching it and she was like, ‘It doesn’t look too good,’ and they had reporters from New Orleans doing their thing and we could see how bad the storm was,” Bradley said. “August 29, that’s when it hit, that was a horrible devastation.”
Sylve’s uncle, John, and his 63-year-old cousin, Narry Sylve, had remained in Port Sulphur until the last possible minute, working through heavy rain to stabilize the levees.
“We were some of the last ones to go, me and Narry … we were the last ones to go and pull out of here, and it was raining and everything else,” John said. “We just said goodbye to our houses, and that was it.”
John D. Sylve, the 62-year-old uncle of Alabama defensive back Bradley Sylve, standing outside his mobile home that stands on the plot of land on Carolina Drive where his old house of 20-plus years stood prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
They returned home days later to help with the cleanup and were stunned by what was left. It took months before power and water were restored.
“It looked like somebody dropped an atomic bomb, it was devastating,” Narry recalled. “Ninety-nine percent of everybody’s homes was gone. It was a total loss. We were like a third world country here.”
Ten years later, the drive along Highway 23 into Port Sulphur is full of empty plots of land like unmarked graves sprinkled between strings of mobile homes, the lone remnants of a once close-knit community laid to waste by the storm of storms.
“You had houses around here, you didn’t have no trailers here at all,” John said of the pre-Katrina neighborhood. “But mostly in here, in this subdivision, was nothing but houses, old Freeport houses. That’s what it was.”
FRESH BEGINNINGS
Although Port Sulphur remained flooded days after the storm, Cyril Crutchfield could only think of football.
“My main concern was just wondering, man, this football (team that) we’d put all this time and energy in to was just all gone,” Crutchfield said. “And just trying to figure out how we can accomplish this and accomplish that, so that was my concern … that was the toughest part for me.”
It wasn’t until midway through the 2005 season when he returned to Port Sulphur that he saw the true impact of Katrina.
“I really didn’t understand it until a few weeks later we went back and it was like a bomb just blew up,” he said. “And I had players transferring all over the place, because they had to get in school.”
Before the start of the 2006-07 school year, Crutchfield — who was serving as the head football and track coach at the newly-consolidated South Plaquemines High, which used to be Port Sulphur High — made some calls to bring many of the former area athletes back to town.
The scoreboard at Bradley Sylve’s high school football field, home of the former South Plaquemines High in Port Sulphur, Louisiana. The team was named the Hurricanes after Hurricane Katrina.
One of his first calls was to Micquella, who was living with family in Houma, two hours west and an hour south of Baton Rouge.
“I remember Bradley because he was one of the best athletes in the town, and the fastest, and it was going to be his eighth-grade year,” Crutchfield said. “I knew if I was building toward the future he was one of the ones I wanted to reach out to, so I reached out to his mom.”
Once Bradley agreed to return, Crutchfield drove to pick him up and bring him back nine months after he’d left, in May 2006.
“I told him I’d do that because I knew I had a lot of friends that were coming back that were going to go back to the same school, and where I’m from,” Bradley said. “I didn’t mind doing that because that’s where my hub was at.”
Bradley’s mother joined him a few months later and a romance bloomed between herself and Crutchfield to the point where the three were living together in a cramped FEMA trailer.
“I always tell her she had her eyes on me when I came and got her son,” joked Crutchfield, who married Micquella in December 2007. “And she tells me, the only reason I got her son was to get (close to) her.”
With Bradley and others in tow, Crutchfield led the South Plaquemines Hurricanes to consecutive 1A football state championships in 2007 and 2008 and a third title game appearance in 2009. The team’s success was viewed as a reprieve for the still-recovering communities of Port Sulphur, Buras and Boothville.
“It was just living conditions, living in FEMA trailers, and you’re looking at the cards you’re dealt, and you don’t sometimes feel like it is fair,” Crutchfield said. “But … football was all they had, man, that really helped bring the community back. It was a process.”
South Plaquemines also won a 1A state track and field championship in 2009 by 52 points with five athletes, including Sylve, who won four gold medals — two as anchor on the 400- and 800-meter relay teams and in the 100- and 200-meter dashes.
“We did all this by practicing on the football field, on grass,” said Crutchfield, who went on to coach at L.B. Landry High and St. Augustine High, where he coached LSU running back Leonard Fournette. Crutchfield is now in his first season as head coach at West Jefferson High in south New Orleans. “Just the mindset of those kids was like, ‘We don’t have nothing else, we’ve got to do whatever we have to do,’ and they got it done.”
A look at the South Plaquemines High football field where Bradley Sylve used to play and practice while in high school in Port Sulphur, Louisiana.
NEW OPPORTUNITIES
The personal bio on Bradley’s Twitter account reads: “You know my name not my story. You’ve heard what I done not what I’ve been through!!”
“Most people don’t really know what I’ve been through, me and my fam, man, we’ve come a long way,” Bradley said. “I kinda feel, at the same time, being from there and making it to where I am now, that’s a blessing.”
A lot of that can actually be credited to what happened after Katrina hit, including Bradley’s decision to move on from his hometown when he signed to play football at Alabama over LSU.
“I’m kinda glad I moved out of Louisiana because I consider this place home now,” he said. “You can’t really get me to come back home now. This is my home, I feel a whole lot more comfortable being up here than at home. … Where I’m from, there’s nothing down there for you.”
And while his time at Alabama has been filled with more injuries than starts — even as a fifth-year senior he rarely sees the field outside of special teams or in mop-up duty — Bradley knows there’s a greater future for him.
This past Aug. 22, Bradley suffered a broken right hand three years to the day after he broke his left. Now there’s a matching two-inch scar across the back of each hand. But it was a high ankle sprain in the middle of the 2013 season that derailed his once-promising career after three starts at cornerback.
Of course, Bradley hasn’t let his setbacks define him.
“I’m not giving up on my dream; football — that’s my heart,” Bradley said. “So even though I’m not playing as much, at the same time, I know God has a plan for me and I’m going to keep my faith no matter what. … I’m going to have an opportunity.”
West Virginia wide receiver Kevin White moves away from Alabama defensive back Bradley Sylve after catching a pass during the second half of Alabama’s 33-23 win over West Virginia in the 2013 Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game in the Georgia Dome. (Gary Cosby Jr./Decatur Daily)
And while the last several years have been trying, experiencing something has traumatic as surviving a Level 5 hurricane make landfall over your hometown has a way of putting things into perspective.
“Everything I do, I do it for my family,” Bradley said.
“My mom raised me, she did a whole lot for me, everything, and I feel like I have to pay her back. I’m going to do what I’ve got to do to provide for my family.”
His family has grown by one. Bradley has a one-year-old son, Bradley Jr., who lives in Louisiana with his longtime girlfriend. He gets to see them both as often as he can, including a visit to Tuscaloosa for the Tennessee game.
“That’s my little man, I love that man to death,” Bradley said. “Every time I see him, he puts a smile on my face. Even when my day is going bad, if I see him or just be around him, he’s going to cheer me up no matter what.”
So, while Port Sulphur is no longer be “home,” the thought of all he lost to Katrina a decade ago serves as a continual reminder of everything he’s gained since.
“Katrina was kind of like a wakeup call, you never know when it’s going to be your last day or when a storm is going to come and wipe your town off the map,” Bradley said. “I really couldn’t imagine if Katrina didn’t hit. I don’t know where I would be.
“It was time for a fresh new start … but at the same time, it still hurts.”
Contact Alex Byington by email at alex.byington@TimesDaily.com or alex.byington@DecaturDaily.com. Follow him on Twitter at @abyingtonTD.
- See more at: FINDING PEACE: Displaced by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago, Bradley Sylve creates new home at Alabama
