Several Southwest Louisiana homeowners told Gov. John Bel Edwards on Friday about the difficulty in getting compensation from their insurance claims for the damages suffered during Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020.

Edwards joined local officials and state lawmakers at the Lake Charles Civic Center for the roundtable discussion. He also spoke of legislation that seeks to make sure residents get the benefit of their premium dollars and hold insurance companies accountable under their contracts with home and business owners.

Tara Parks said Hurricane Laura caused a tree to fall onto her Lake Charles home, damaging the roof structure. She and her four children spent nearly a year living in a rental home in Sulphur.

Parks posted a series of videos in January 2021 on the social media app TikTok that explained her insurance company’s refusal to acknowledge the extent of damages Hurricane Laura caused to her home. Parks has more than 100,000 followers on the app, and the videos went viral.

Parks said she was in the process of hiring a lawyer when her insurance company paid her what she was owed. She said she still had the option to take legal action because of how long it took for her to be compensated, but chose not to because she was too exhausted from the whole ordeal. Today, she described her home as “barely functional.”

“I don’t want to go through all that,” she said of filing suit. “I have enough money to get my house back in shape eventually. I feel sorry for people who have to hire a lawyer. Why do you have to hire a lawyer to get an insurance company to do what you need them to do?”

Sarah Linscomb’s home in Welsh suffered roof and structural damage from Hurricane Laura, but it was still livable. She said she went through at least five adjusters, with one refusing to go inside her home.

Linscomb said she repeatedly asked her insurance company for a structural engineer, but they refused. She eventually hired her own structural engineer, who told her the two-story home would not withstand another hurricane. She sent that information to her insurance company, who brought in their own engineer and said the structural damage was caused by the house settling.

A single mother with three children, Linscomb filed suit in December 2020 and settled roughly six weeks earlier.

Lasharn Guillory, who lives in the Brentwood area in Lake Charles, said she had the same adjuster, despite repeated requests for a new one. Guillory said her home was damaged, but livable. However, the rain that made its way into holes in the home eventually caused her to have respiratory infections. A doctor told her mold was likely in the home, something that was later confirmed through testing. Meanwhile, Guillory struggled to get her insurance company to take swift action.

“I wrote 200 emails to my insurance adjuster,” she said. “I called numerous times. I would be in tears just trying to get people on the phone. It did not matter. There was no sense of urgency whatsoever.”

Guillory said a public adjuster found $98,000 in damages because the home’s condition had deteriorated. She eventually sought legal help and after 19 months of fighting, received a settlement.

“I got it resolved three weeks ago,” she said. “During the (2021) winter storm, I had no heat. I was so cold.”

After the meeting, Edwards said he is hopeful Louisiana is at a point where enough residents and business owners are impacted by this issue that meaningful reforms can happen. The governor has held similar meetings with homeowners and business owners in Southeast Louisiana impacted by Hurricane Ida.

“Their stories are all the same, and this is so widespread,” he said. “The whole community struggles to come back.”

State Sens. Jeremy Stine, R-Lake Charles, and Mark Abraham, R-Lake Charles, also attended the discussion. Stine has authored several bills aimed at stopping delay tactics by insurance companies and that push for better enforcement. Because Hurricane Ida’s 2021 landfall impacted residents in Southeast Louisiana, he said there is a stronger statewide and bipartisan support for these types of reform measures.

Abraham added that there is a fine line related to reform legislation because making things too difficult for insurance companies could drive them out of state. The result could be the companies still left charging higher premiums.

“You get into a situation where how far do you push,” he said.