Laura carves destructive path through Louisiana
ONE OF the strongest hurricanes ever to strike the US pounded the Gulf Coast on Thursday, shearing off roofs and killing a least four people, as Laura barrelled across Louisiana and maintained ferocious strength, while carving a destructive path hundreds of miles inland.
A full assessment of the damage wrought by the Category 4 system was likely to take days. But initial reports offered hope that Laura, despite leaving entire neighbourhoods in ruins and more than 875,000 people without power, was not the annihilating menace that forecasters had feared.
“It is clear that we did not sustain and suffer the absolute, catastrophic damage that we thought was likely,” Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said. “But we have sustained a tremendous amount of damage,” he said.
He called it the most powerful hurricane to strike Louisiana, meaning it surpassed even Katrina, which was a Category 3 storm when it hit in 2005.
The hurricane’s top wind speed of 150mph (241kph) put it among the most powerful systems on record in the US. Not until 11 hours after landfall did Laura finally weaken into a tropical storm as it plowed north and thrashed Arkansas with powerful winds and heavy rain.
The storm came ashore in low-lying Louisiana and clobbered Lake Charles, an industrial and casino city of 80,000 people. On Broad Street, many buildings had partially collapsed, and those that didn’t were missing chunks. Windows were blown out, awnings ripped away, and trees split in half in eerily misshapen ways. Police spotted a floating casino that came unmoored and hit a bridge.