Couple won't leave; neighbors pitch in to save house Play Video

By CHRIS REDFORD credford@ktbs.com

Posted: Nov 3, 2009 4:39 PM
Updated: Nov 3, 2009 8:34 PM

Gene and Mary Stevens aren't budging from their flood-encircled home on Lake Bistineau.

 Their neighbors today were battling to keep the levee around their home from budging.

 A call went out today that the rising lake threatened to overtake the couple's home on White Perch Lane in Webster Parish. Neighbors, parish employees and jail inmates arrived with sandbags to reinforce the levee that Gene Stevens had built around his small, blue frame house to guard against flooding.

 Stevens, a 79-year-old retired bus driver from Shreveport, built the levee after his house flooded in 1991. The levee ranges in height from four to seven feet.

  The lake was threatening to overtop the levee on Tuesday -- and with the Stevenses refusing to leave, their neighbors pitched in.

  Within an hour they were bringing 1,000 sandbags in by boat to reinforce the homemade levee.

  Water surrounded the circular levee Tuesday afternoon but had not overwhelmed it and the sandbags.

  "This is your home. You fight for it," Mary Stevens said.

  The couple said that if it weren't for their neighbors, they would have lost their home.

  "They have fought for this," Randy Colvin said as he helped sandbag the levee.

  Other houses in the road are under several feet of water.

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