Inside the Life of a Displaced Baton Rouge Family in the Months After Devastating Flooding

— -- It's been three months since deadly flooding swept through southeastern Louisiana, damaging or destroying more than 60,000 homes. But for many of the displaced Baton Rouge area families, the chaos hasn't subsided because the water has -- the journey is ongoing and at times unpredictable.

One of those families shocked to find themselves unexpectedly evacuating that terrifying weekend in August was Regina Cates, 40, her husband Tremayne Cates, 44, and their eight children.

"It happened so quickly," Tremayne said.

The Cates' had eight children to keep track of as they evacuated: oldest child, Chloe, goes to Louisiana State University. Next is Lena, a high school junior, and Naomi, a high school freshman. Peter is in the seventh grade, Marie is in fourth grade, Sam is in first, and Joey and George are in preschool.

When the family finally returned home, they found devastation.

"We just lost everything in our house," Regina said.

The Cates' took ABC News along for their unpredictable journey in the past three months:

The Evacuation

Tremayne Cates said the flooding, which hit Friday, Aug. 12, took a horrifying turn on the morning of Aug. 13.

"You think, 'Oh, there's going to be some flooding.' You don't think your house is going to go underwater like that," he said.

Their ninth-grade daughter, Naomi, said when her dad tried to wake her up, she initially refused. Once he said they were evacuating, "I jumped out of bed, got all my stuff together," Naomi said. She said she took just the essentials -- her favorite clothes, a pillow, her phone, computer and backpack for school.

Regina described it as "grabbing the few things we need, throwing them into luggage ... and leaving as fast as we could."

The family of ten left the house. The interstate was shut down, so bystanders directed the family along back roads.

It was "pretty dramatic," Tremayne said.

But Naomi said she "was really relaxed."

"I wasn't scared or anything. I thought everybody was making a big deal about it," Naomi said. "Once we got to our friend's house, I kept seeing on the news people having to get out on boats and stuff, and I realized it was a bigger deal."

A neighbor who evacuated by boat took this photo of the Cates' house on Aug. 14.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards called the flooding, which killed at least 13 people, "unprecedented" and "historic." Edwards declared a major disaster for the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency was called in to provide resources and funding to help with recovery efforts. Officials said over 100,000 people registered for federal assistance.

Returning to Loss

When the Cates family was able to return and start the recovery process, neighborhood yards were unrecognizable, piled high with what once belonged inside houses, like drywall and cabinetry.

Inside the home was "all gone," Regina said. The family had been in their Baton Rouge home for four years.

One of the most sentimental losses was 14-year-old Naomi's dairies of the past seven years.

"[She's] an awesome writer. And she's had diaries since she was about 7 years old. She kept all of them. They're hilarious and wonderful," Regina said. "She's always writing something. ... Her personality really comes through in her writing."

"We lost all of them," Regina said. "When we got back home ... they were just covered in slime, you couldn’t even read what was on the pages anymore. Everyone was sad about that because it was a chronicling of her life since she was 7."

"I was really sad," Naomi added. "I had filled them all up."

Regina said she feels grateful they didn't lose any family photos, as they were up on a high shelf. Tremayne said they stored the kids' instruments -- which are important to the family -- high up away from the water.

"Mainly it was shoes, clothes, all our furniture, all our beds, all our dressers," Regina said. "But that's all stuff that can be replaced."

"I'm not a materialistic person to begin with," Tremayne said. "My concern is Regina and the kids. I'm looking at this and wondering how are they doing, how are they handling this."

The Cates' had left their home on Aug. 13 in a hurry, and when they first came back to start the daunting clean-up, Regina said support from the community was essential -- any neighbors who weren't gutting their own houses came over to help.

"We just needed bodies to drag hundreds and hundreds of bags of carpeting and drywall and pieces of flooring out," Regina said, noting that some volunteers who came over noticed that lower dresser drawers were filled with muddy water and clothes. The volunteers put the clothes through several rounds in the washing machine and ended up saving a lot of them.

Tremayne said when they were working on their house, they had people in the house helping out, including some people they didn't know.

"There'd be a car pulling up in the driveway every two hours," he said, with items like food, trash bags and cleaning supplies.

"I was really impressed with the way our friends and the city handled this, the people that were helping out immediately after and during," Tremayne said. "Even after the water went down, the entire community, if you weren't directly affected by the flood, you were helping, either family members, friends or strangers."

The Moves

But during this initial clean-up stage, the Cates' house was uninhabitable. In the month following the flooding, the family of ten stayed in six different homes, moving roughly every five days.

Stop #1: First they stayed with friends in Covington, Louisiana -- about 70 miles east of Baton Rouge.

Stop #2: Then, Baton Rouge friends gave up their own home for about six days and moved to stay with family an hour away, so the Cates family could move in.

Stop #3: The Cates' then stayed at friend's Baton Rouge home for three days while the friends went on vacation.

Stop #4: The next leg of the journey was moving to a convent in Covington, Louisiana, for one week.

"The sweet Teresian Sisters reached out to our family and offered an apartment on their convent grounds to us," Regina told ABC News, "for as long as we need it! Amazing, sweet ladies."

The family arrived at the convent on Aug. 28, though their three older girls weren't with them -- Chloe was at LSU already, and the two high schoolers, Naomi and Lena, stayed with a family in Baton Rouge to be close to school.

"They're looking forward to being in one place for a while," Regina said at the time. "I'm sad they're not with us, though."

Naomi said she missed the younger kids, but was glad to be with her sister.

"We saw each other every weekend," Naomi said. "[It] wasn't too, too bad."

The younger children commuted to school from Covington, which Regina called "very stressful. ... We wish we could stay long term with them [the nuns in Covington], but the commute to [Baton Rouge] is over an hour."

Stop #5: After the convent, the family headed back to Baton Rouge on Sept. 5, to a one-bedroom apartment.

They didn't have any furniture there, so the family "basically made it into a camping experience," Regina said, with everyone sleeping on blowup mattresses.

"I had one pot to make pasta and everyone just sat on the ground in a big circle and ate on the floor," she said.

Stop #6: The final move was Sept. 10, to a two-bedroom condo in Baton Rouge, where the family is now and plans to stay for about another month.

Now reunited with their two high schoolers, who were previously staying with another family, it's a nine-person household in the two-bedroom condo. Regina turned the living room into her and her husband's bedroom. They put a queen-sized mattress on the floor at night then pushed it up against the wall in the morning; a love seat was donated to them, so it turns into a living room during the day.

Since they don't have their dressers, Regina said she gave each child a large bin. "It's helping everyone organize themselves so they can find what they need each day," she said.

The family is settled into the condo, but there is still a lot of work left to be done to repair their home. Regina and Tremayne go to their flooded house many evenings after work, where they meet with the contractor. Life is "very scattered," Regina said days after the final move to the condo.

Adjusting to a New Life

While Regina described the whole first month was "up and down," she added, "We've been pretty adaptable."

She said she was struck by the fact that the family could adapt to their basic needs, like "just having what you need for the next few days, and where you are going to sleep for the next few days."

"We haven't had any breakdowns," she added, "but we're tired."

Regina noticed that, despite the close quarters during all these moves, the stress of the displacement has taken away precious family time.

"I always read to them every day. We love our time just being able to sit together and read," she said. "But now I'm always on the phone, contractors, ordering things like sinks and counter tops and cabinetry and flooring."

For seventh-grader Peter, "It has not been that bad," he said. "Except whenever we're staying somewhere away from the school, getting up early in the morning, stuff like that."

Peter said he just brought his clothes and shoes with him when he evacuated, but he left most of his belongings on top of his dresser, so it was high enough to be not be ruined.

However, he does miss his house. "We don't have that much space because we're in a little apartment," he said. "I don't like sleeping on the air mattress that much. I miss my bed."

Most of his friends aren't displaced from their homes, but a few are.

"It's not too hard," he said. "Sometimes it can be stressful because I play football," he said, which made it hard to get to practice from certain temporary homes. Peter said the displacement is probably harder for his older sisters "because they're in high school they have to get to school earlier."

"Our teenagers think it's been really chaotic," Regina said, adding that it's probably hardest on them. Lena, a junior, is preparing for the ACTs. Regina said most of the girls at their school didn't have flooded homes and "teachers definitely were not lightening up on school work."

Naomi said, "We had been at school for two days and then it flooded. But ... it wasn't that bad because everyone at my school and just in the community was so supportive. Everything we needed, basically, people just helped us. It felt like we weren't alone."

She said the evacuation wasn't difficult, but "after we started moving a bunch, I got really stressed out. I've been having to do homework, but I can't do it, because we have to move."

Tremayne noted that "life goes on even in this crazy situation" -- like when they moved their oldest daughter into her dorm at LSU about two weeks after the flood.

It was "kind of sad," he said, "but two weeks after a flood you're still dealing with gutting your house, all that immediate stuff," so they just "took a few hours on a Saturday morning, packed up her stuff moved her in."

"Wasn't your standard send-off that you'd want," he said, calling it "bittersweet."

Now, they're focusing on working with insurance and their "great contractor" to "get the house back together."

"We're trying to make life as normal as we can, even though it's not going to be perfectly normal until we get back into our own home. Now, it's just kind of getting things settled down, getting the kids situated and back into a routine," Tremayne said. "Especially when you have a family as large as ours, routine becomes important."

Insurance is a major factor in the family's recovery, an issue Regina described as stalled and cumbersome.

Besides insurance, she said "lining supplies and people up to do the job" is time-consuming, "because so many people are in the same boat. So usually once you order flooring or cabinetry, for instance, it's going to be many weeks before it comes in and then it could be many more weeks before you get someone to install it."

"And insurance, they are absolutely swamped," she added. "It's hard on everybody."

While Regina called the FEMA paperwork process frustrating, she said, "This flood, for us it won't financially devastate us because we have flood insurance. ... But it is bankrupting other people."

She said one of her friends is "financially ruined" by the flood. "A lot of people are in that category."

"For us, it's more a massive headache," she said. "The moving and squishing into houses and having to re-do plans. ... We've all just had to be patient."

By the end of October, Regina said, "Living in our little condo ... is definitely getting old -- being squished and having our mattress in the living room."

"The neighborhood we live in isn't great and Marie's bike was stolen last night," Regina said. The family usually rides bikes every day.

"Now I'm thinking the other bikes will be next. We don't have a spot to put them or lock them up, so I'll probably take them back to our house and we won't be able to ride bikes until Christmastime," she said.

Looking forward, Regina said the family hopes to move home by Christmas. For Thanksgiving, they plan to drive to Nashville to spend the holiday with Regina's brother's family. By late October, Regina said "the house now has new windows installed and drywall will be put in today, so things are starting to pick up."

Tremayne said he and Regina try to "show the kids ... there are people still in tents. People far worse off than we are." They remind the kids that "none of us were hurt, we at least have insurance. So our house is going to be rebuilt."

"I just try to tell them, show them, there are people out there that are really, truly, struggling," he said. "We should be thankful for the position we're in. ... Yes, we've moved around, but we've always had a roof over our head and always will."

ABC News' Lindsey Jacobson contributed to this report.