This story is part of The Disaster Economy, a Grist series exploring the often chaotic, lucrative world of disaster response and recovery. It was produced by Grist and co-published with Verite News, and is published with support from the CO2 Foundation.
Jennifer and Dean Bye were just getting by before Hurricane Ida slammed into southern Louisiana in 2021. The couple own a house in a comfortable subdivision in Paulina, a town about an hour west of New Orleans, that they share with their three kids. They had their challenges before the storm — Jennifer had recently been diagnosed with uterine cancer around the same time that one of their children was diagnosed with nonverbal autism — but the…