Few can appreciate the scale of devastation and loss here quite like the tow truck driver.

Since before dawn, Terrance Carter was up, first getting a flooded Cadillac out of Zachary, a town where more than 2 feet of rain had fallen in 72 hours. Soon after, he was hooking up a pickup truck abandoned during the floods in North Baton Rouge.

On this tour of destruction, he pointed to neighborhoods that looked utterly wrecked, and to ruined houses of friends he was just now seeing. But he was quiet passing the Triple S convenience store. It was there, on July 5, that his uncle Alton Sterling was killed.

"It's very hard to pass by that store," said Carter, 28, a father of four who like thousands here is now homeless.

It had already been a long, painful summer in Baton Rouge. In July, it was hit with successive crises: protests over the police shooting of Sterling and the gunning down of three officers 12 days later. Then came the worst flooding in memory.

Carter had been asleep on July 5 when his mother called and told him that her brother, Sterling, had been shot by an officer. The days unfolded and exploded. Carter's employer saw him on television talking about the shooting and fired him, Carter said. A baby daughter was born a week later.

Then the rains came, destroying the house where he, his children, his mother and stepfather had been living. On Wednesday, he was back at work. "Somebody gave me the clothes I have on now," he said. "Nothing I have on is mine. Even the shoes."

After hours on the road, Carter listened to a news channel, which showed a police chief of a small flooded city talking of the coffins that had floated up from graveyards. "Even the dead can't rest," he said.

Carter watched. He had feared this possibility when he was in the shelter over the weekend, he said. So he had walked from the shelter to his uncle's grave. It had not been disturbed.