10 YEARS CARRYING ON THE SPIRIT OF CHARITY
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M A N N ING M A DE ,
AP FiLe PhoToS
ARCH AND ARCHIE The story of the Mannings’ bond 1C
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S u n d ay, au g u S t 24, 2025
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“In 10 years, you’re not going to recognize Richland Parish.”
AI BOOMTOWN
The massive Meta data center emerging in northeast Louisiana is igniting a gold rush of opportunity. It’s also changing a rural way of life.
Landry’s port plan has early success Panel works deal for supplying Hyundai Steel plant
BY ANTHONY MCAULEY Staff writer
STAFF PHOTOS By SOPHIA GERMER
The Meta project site in Holly Ridge will cover 2,250 acres, require 5,000 construction jobs and create up to 500 permanent ones. BY STEPHANIE RIEGEL Staff writer
RICHLAND PARISH — The S Mart in Bee Bayou has always done a brisk business. It’s the only convenience store for miles amid the corn and soybean fields that line the old two-lane La. 80 in rural northeast Louisiana, and the only place to get heaping to-go plates of fried chicken gizzards with mac and cheese. But everything suddenly changed this year — ever since Facebook parent company Meta broke ground on a $10 billion artificial intelligence data center in the middle of a cornfield in nearby Holly
can’t hire enough workers to staff the store’s shifts. “We’re so busy we don’t get a break,” Watson said as she boxed personal pizzas fresh out of the oven and stacked them in a warming case. “They start lining up before 6 a.m.” The boom isn’t confined to the S Mart. Across Richland Parish, where the Meta site is located, land speculators are buying up property, paying 20 or 30 times more than they The S Mart in Bee Bayou has seen sales triple from food, ice would have a year ago. Recreational vehicle parks and gas since Meta broke ground in Richland Parish. and “man camps” are sproutRidge. for food, ice, cigarettes and ing up in small towns nearby Now the store is slammed. gas. Sales have more than tri- to accommodate the 5,000 Construction workers in neon pled. Store manager Ann Watsafety vests stream in nonstop son, 70, a Bee Bayou native, ä See BOOMTOWN, page 12A
The $5.8 billion Hyundai Steel plant that’s set to rise in Ascension Parish is a key project for Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration. And to make it work, Hyundai and state officials have long known they would need a new port facility to bring raw materials in and send finished goods out to the Korean automaker’s assembly plants. The answer to that logistics problem came last month, when the Port of South “What made Louisiana was tapped to build the deal and operate a between new $25.5 milPort of South lion deepwaLouisiana ter dock. The and Baton project, however, is on land Rouge that controlled by much easier the Port of to accomplish Baton Rouge, is that the which in years ports have past may have raised thorny been meeting questions of regularly since control and late 2023.” oversight that could’ve JOE TOOMy, turned into a Louisiana Ports political brawl. and Waterways But under Investment the newly esCommission tablished Louisiana Ports and Waterways Investment Commission, which has been tasked with directing public funds to important economic development projects, the ports hashed out an agreement. “What made the deal between Port of South Louisiana and Baton Rouge that much easier to accomplish is that the ports have been meeting regularly since late 2023,” said Joe Toomy, the shipping industry executive and former chair of the Port of New Orleans who has
ä See PORT, page 10A
Many displaced by Katrina have created new lives in different cities KATRINA
20 YEARS
WEATHER HIGH 94 LOW 77 PAGE 8B
BY JOHN SIMERMAN Staff writer
Cash Smith was thin on prospects and stranded inside the Astrodome when a voice wafted over the PA system, about an offer: Free seats on a flight to Denver, a place to live when you get there, help landing a
job. “You’re young, you can start over, you’ll be strong,” his grandmother prodded. Smith, then 24, boarded a plane with his two kids and other Hurricane Katrina evacuees, bound for the Rockies on a promise. The support was real. His pregnant wife, diverted by
bus to Dallas, would soon join them. A self-described “menace to society” back in New Orleans, Smith got a job at a Colorado university and earned his GED. Family came, moving onto the same Denver street. But the marriage soon frayed, he said. Relatives decamped for Texas, including
his wife and kids. In Colorado, something was missing. “They wanted that downSouth atmosphere back,” said Smith, who would soon follow his family to Houston in 2010. Smith was among the last to remain in Denver from dozens of Hurricane Katrina evacuees who had accepted the same in-
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vitation for a fresh start. All of them ultimately left, the Colorado organizers said, usually for warmer climes in Louisiana or nearby metro areas, a pattern familiar to those who have studied a diaspora that scattered some 450,000 New
ä See DISPLACED, page 8A
13TH yEAR, NO. 12