LIKE WE’VE ‘BEEN BOMBED’
Killer mega ' cane slams La., Text.
Hurricane Laura bashed the Gulf Coast with roaring winds and towering walls of seawater as it made landfall in Louisiana on the Texas border early Thursday, killing at least four people and leaving a wide swath of wreckage in its wake.
With top wind speeds of 150 mph and surges as high as 12 feet, the massive storm was among the strongest to ever hit the United States — and the most ferocious to strike Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, officials said.
The four fatalities known by Thursday evening all died when winds toppled trees onto their residences, officials said.
They included a 14-year-old girl and a 68-year-old man. Local news reports said the death toll in Louisiana was as high as six.
By nightfall, no deaths were confirmed in Texas, something Gov. Greg Abbott tentatively termed “a miracle.”
Speaking of his own state’s damage on Fox News, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said: “I’m not going to bubble-wrap it. We took it full in the face. We still are.”
“It looks like you’ve been bombed and people are in shock — but your first concern can’t be property, it has to be life,” he said.
The hurricane hit the coast near the border of Texas at 1 a.m. and maintained its deadly force as it howled north through both states for hundreds of miles inland.
Entire neighborhoods were left in ruins.
“It looks like 1,000 tornadoes went through here. It’s just destruction everywhere,” said Brett Geymann, who rode out the storm with three family members in Moss Bluff, La., near Lake Charles and some 50 miles north of the coast.
He described Laura passing over his house with the roar of a jet engine at around 2 a.m.
“There are houses that are totally gone,” he said.
“They were there yesterday, but now gone.”
The casino town of Lake Charles, home to 80,000 people, was especially hard hit.
Homes there were reduced to soaked piles of kindling, and row
upon row of windows were ripped out of office buildings.
A chlorine-manufacturing plant in Lake Charles caught fire, sending up billowing, black plumes of smoke that could be seen for miles.
Nearby residents were warned to stay indoors and keep their doors and windows closed.
More than 580,000 Gulf Coast residents remained evacuated, and power was out to some 875,000 homes in Louisiana and Texas.
In an important nod to the coronavirus pandemic, officials in both states worked to find hotel and motel rooms for those displaced by the storm in hopes of avoiding the crowding that comes with traditional shelters.
First responders, meanwhile, worked through the day to search for those who did not evacuate.
Emergency workers came from as far away as Salt Lake City, Utah — including firefighters who helped after Katrina struck 15 years ago.
In Lake Charles, Bethany Agosto rode out the storm with her sister and two others by crowding into a closet as the fearsome winds blew out every window of her living room.
“It was like a jigsaw puzzle in this closet,” she said. “We were on top of each other, just holding each other and crying.”
The storm, which landed ashore as a Category 4, quickly dropped to a Category 1 but was expected to maintain hurricane-force winds all the way to the Arkansas border.
In fact, the hurricane is so strong that forecasters say it could regain strength as it turns east, making a beeline for the Atlantic and potentially threatening the Northeast.
Before Laura, forecasters had warned that a storm surge of up to 20 feet would be “unsurvivable” for Texas and Louisiana — although Laura fell short of that prediction, with surges limited to a still-devastating nine to 12 feet.
“It is clear that we did not sustain and suffer the absolute, catastrophic damage that we thought was likely,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said.
“But we have sustained a tremendous amount of damage,” he said.