LAKE CHARLES, La. – One of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit the U.S., Laura stormed Louisiana on Thursday, tearing down roofs and killing at least six people while cutting a destructive path hundreds of miles into the country.
A full assessment of the damage caused by the Category 4 system would likely take days, threatening the threat of additional damage when new tornado warnings were issued after dark in Arkansas and Mississippi, even then. ‘ t the storm weakened to a depression.
But despite a trail of demolished buildings, entire weeks left in ruins and nearly 900,000 homes and businesses without power, a sense of relief prevailed that Laura was not afraid of the devastating threat predictors.
“Clearly, we have not maintained and suffered the absolute, catastrophic damage we thought was likely to occur,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards. “But we sustained tremendous damage.”
He called Laura the most powerful hurricane to attack Louisiana, meaning he overcame Katrina, which was a Category 3 storm when it hit in 2005. The storm knocked down trees and damaged structures as far north as central Arkansas.
Laura’s top wind speed of 150 km / h put it on the strongest systems on the record in the US Only 11 hours after the attack, Laura finally lost hurricane status when the north plowed and Arkansas hit, and even Thursday night it remained a tropical storm with winds of 40 mph.
The storm made landfall in low-lying Louisiana and crippled Lake Charles, an industrial and casino town of 80,000 people. On Broad Street, many buildings had partially collapsed. Windows were blown out, awnings were torn away and trees split in horribly deformed ways. Police saw a drifting casino that did not dock and hit a bridge. At the local airport, planes were overturned, some on top of each other. Part of a transmission tower fell into KPLC-TV’s low-lying studios, whose staff evacuated hours before landfall to broadcast from other locations.
In front of the courthouse was a Confederate statue that local officials voted to hold just days earlier. After Laura, it was reversed.
“It simply came to our notice then that 1,000 tornadoes had passed through. It’s just destruction everywhere, ”said Brett Geymann, who weathered the storm with three family members in Moss Bluff, near Lake Charles. He described Laura running around his house with the roar of a jet engine around 2 p.m.
“There are houses that are completely gone. They were there yesterday, but now gone, ‘he said.
After Laura’s passage, a massive plume of smoke began to be visible for miles from a chemical plant. Police said the leak was at a facility run by Biolab, which produces chemicals used in household cleaners such as Comet bleach and chlorine powder for swimming pools.
Residents in the neighborhood were told to close their doors and windows and set climate rules, and the fire extinguished into the night. State and federal planes flew into the air over the coast to look for signs of any other industrial damage.
The dead included a 14-year-old girl and a 68-year-old man who died when trees fell on their homes in Louisiana, as well as a 24-year-old man who died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator during his stay. Another man drowned in a boat that sank in the storm, authorities said.
In Texas, no deaths were confirmed, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said would be “a miracle.”
Chevellce Dunn considered herself among the lucky ones after spending a night on a couch with her son, daughter and four nieces and nephews when winds shook her home in Orange, Texas. Left without power in sweltering heat, she did not know when electricity could be restored.
‘It will not be easy. As long as my children are well, I’ll be fine, ‘said Dunn.
President Donald Trump planned this weekend to visit the Gulf Coast to address the damage.
More than 580,000 coastal residents evacuated under the shadow of a coronavirus pandemic and are calling for masks and social distancing to combat their spread. It was the largest evacuation order since the pandemic began and many people followed it, filling hotels and sleeping in cars. Although not everyone fled the coast, officials credited those who left to minimize the loss of life.
Forecasters had warned that the storm surge of 15 to 20 feet would be “unsustainable” and could push 40 miles into the country. Edwards said the storm surge won in the range of 9 feet to 12 feet – still bad, but far from the worst forecast. He was hopeful that damaged houses could soon be made habitable.
The priority, Edwards said, was search and rescue, followed by attempts to find hotel or motel rooms for those who could not stay in their homes. Officials in Texas and Louisiana have both sought to prevent traditional massage parlors for evacuees over fears of spreading COVID-19, and Edwards feared the storm would inhibit coronavirus testing if schools and universities reopened.
Bucky Millet, 78, of Lake Arthur, Louisiana, considered evacuating but decided to end the storm with family because of concerns about the coronavirus. He said a small tornado blew the cover of his pickup’s bed and made him think the roof on his house was next door.
“You would hear a crack and a tree and shake everything,” he said.
The power of Laura’s winds blew from every window of the living room in the Lake Charles home where Bethany Agosto survived the storm with her sister and two others. They fled to a closet when the hurricane was at its worst.
‘It was like a puzzle in this closet. We were on top of each other, just holding each other and crying, ‘said Agosto.
The storm was so strong that it was able to regain strength after turning east and reaching the Atlantic Ocean, potentially threatening the densely populated Northeast.
Laura hit the US after killing nearly two dozen people on the island of Hispaniola, including 20 in Haiti and three in the Dominican Republic, where it knocked out power and caused intense flooding.
It was the seventh-named storm to hit the U.S. this year, setting a new record for U.S. landfall in late August. The old record was six in 1886 and 1916, according to hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University.
Laura was bound by five other storms for the fifth most powerful U.S. hurricane, behind the 1935s Labor Day storm, 1969s Camille, 1992s Andrew and 2004s Charley, Klotzbach said.
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