San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
DELTA BRINGS FLOODS, DESTRUCTION TO BATTERED LA.
Towns still reeling from Hurricane Laura hit hard by 2nd storm in 6 weeks
Hurricane Delta tore across Louisiana late Friday, leaving a trail of destruction as it turned roadways into rapids and uprooted trees that crashed onto roofs. It also dealt a demoralizing blow to a state still staggering its way back from one of the most powerful storms it had ever endured.
Delta made landfall in Cameron Parish, less than 20 miles to the east from where Hurricane Laura, with its 150 mph winds, devastated communities in late August. And it cut a similar path across a wide swath of the state, hurling debris still piled up from the last storm and toppling utility poles and power lines that crews had just put back up.
“The town's a mess,” Roberta Palermo said of Lake Arthur, La., a small community in Jefferson
Davis Parish, which borders Cameron Parish, where she rode out Delta in the hotel she owns. “There's debris everywhere and trash that didn't get picked up from the first storm.”
Cameron Parish, a sprawling and sparsely populated area in the southwest corner of the state, was swamped yet again by storm surge. And in nearby Lake Charles, where fierce winds had pulverized much of the area during Laura, Delta unleashed f looding.
It quickly became evident that Delta, which hit the coast as a Category 2 storm, lacked the physical force of Laura, a Category 4 hurricane. Still, Delta seemed almost like a testament to nature's capacity for cruelty, swooping in at the tail end of a brutal, record-breaking hurricane season and pounding beleaguered communities where the lives of residents had already been upended.
“People are feeling a little despondent,” Nic Hunter, mayor of Lake Charles, said in an interview Saturday morning. “To go through what we went through six weeks ago, and have another punch in the gut like we received last night, is just unimaginable.”
Delta, the 10th named storm to make landfall in the United States this year, arrived in the final weeks of an Atlantic hurricane season so busy that forecasters ran through an alphabet of names and moved on to calling storms by Greek letters.
The storm made landfall Friday at about 6 p.m. local time in Cameron Parish, and pushed through the state overnight into Saturday, weakening into a tropical depression. Still, meteorologists warned of the continued threat of flash floods and tornadoes as the storm brought heavy rain and lashing winds across a span reaching from the East Texas coast to as far east as Baton Rouge.
“We're going to work as hard as we can, as fast as we can to get everybody's lives right side up again,” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said at a briefing Saturday. “As if Hurricane Laura wasn't enough, we had to have Delta come through last night.”
The storm swept through Creole, an unincorporated area of Cameron Parish that had been virtually wiped out by Laura. The intersection that had constituted downtown, with a gas station, restaurant and grocery store, had been reduced to scattered rubble.
The parish, the largest in Louisiana in terms of land mass yet also one of the least populated, had seen an exodus after previous epic hurricanes, Rita in 2005 and Ike in 2008. Now the residents who remained, weary after Laura and dreading the storms likely to come in the future, are contemplating leaving.
“People aren't hanging around anymore,” said Richard Zuschlag, the chief executive and chairman of Acadian Ambulance, which is based in Lafayette and serves much of the Gulf Coast region.
In Lake Charles, aerial photographs before Delta barreled through captured blotches of blue — the tarpaulins covering homes and businesses whose roofs had been shaved off by Laura's winds. Many of those were ripped off, exposing homes to the elements once again.
The response to Delta was further complicated as Laura had uprooted thousands of families, many of whom were still living this past week in hotels that had been transformed into makeshift shelters. As of Saturday morning, there were 9,441 Louisiana residents in shelters, of which 935 were Delta evacuees.
Favorable dry weather over the next few days will allow the state to get “a pretty good start” on the recovery, the governor said.
Forecasters warned that heavy rain, storm surges and flash floods continued to pose dangers in areas from Texas to Mississippi. Large swells and rip currents closed beaches down to the Mexican border. Remnants of the storm also could spawn tornadoes in the Tennessee Valley into today, and flash f loods could hit the southern Appalachians, the National Weather Service said.