Jonesville — When the waters finally receded from Catahoula Parish, the cleanup from Hurricane Gustav and the floods that followed began in earnest.

As electricity was restored, people began to go to grocery stores to restock on lost supplies and others headed outside to clear their property of debris.

For Roger Nobles, that meant getting a backhoe and using it to right his camping trailer, which wind gusts had toppled onto its side, breaking the glass and throwing the furniture haphazardly around the interior.

By Friday morning, he had the trailer up and hooked to his truck, ready to move out.

James Guiotte, who was helping Nobles with the cleanup, said someone who lived nearby told him that they had actually seen the trailer lift off the ground at one point during the storm.

“He said the wind picked it up high enough he could have walked under it,” Guiotte said.

Noble’s neighbors at the camper village, located on Louisiana 124, were not quite so lucky.

One of them had been turned on its side on the slab where it was parked, and the other one had been tossed away from its slab and was laying on its side on the grass several feet away.

“They were damaged pretty extensively,” Nobles said.

Before getting to his own trailer, Nobles had to help with moving those. All totaled, they moved four.

The trailer Nobles indicated was not readily recognizable as such. Instead, it was a mass of tangled boards, wires, pieces of metal and furniture springs.

“The storm just kind of flattened it,” he said.

The total damage to Nobles’ trailer was probably between four and five thousand dollars, he said.

“I’m lucky that that’s all that was damaged,” Nobles said.