RUNNING FOR COVER
Southwestern part of state pounded by 2nd hurricane in 6 weeks
Danielle Fontenot runs to a relative’s home in the rain with her son Hunter ahead of Hurricane Delta, Friday in Lake Charles, La. Forecasters said Delta, “the 25th named storm of an unprecedented Atlantic hurricane season,” would likely crash ashore Friday evening somewhere on southwest Louisiana’s coast. Debris in the background is still piled up from the last storms to hit the area.
LAKECHARLES, La.—Hurricane Delta crashed onshore Friday in southwestern Louisiana as a Category 2 storm, compounding misery along a path of destruction left by Hurricane Laura only six weeks earlier.
The center of the hurricane made landfall about 6 p.m. near the town of Creole with top winds of 100 mph, pushing a storm surge that could reach up to 11 feet, the National Hurricane Center said.
Delta is forecast to produce as much as 15 inches of rain from southwest into south-central Louisiana through Saturday. Flash flooding from outer rain bands was already occurring beyond the storm’s immediate path, including the Baton Rouge area, which saw as much as 9 inches of rain in some places Thursday night.
As the 10th named storm to strike the continental U.S. this year, Delta’s arrival snapped a century-old record.
People in south Louisiana steeled themselves as Delta also delivered powerful winds and rising water to a part of the state still recovering from a deadly catastrophic hurricane in the final week of August. Power outages in Louisiana and Texas soared past 203,000 homes and businesses shortly after the storm came ashore, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.
In the city of Lake Charles, located about 30 miles inland from where Delta made landfall, rain pelted the tarp-covered roofs of buildings that Laura battered when it barreled through Louisi
ana in late August and killed at least 27 people in the state.
“We just went through a major catastrophe, and in our wildest dreams, no one would have thought that six weeks later we would be going through the same thing,” Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter said.
Winds picked up Friday evening in inland areas such as Lafayette, where occasionally strong gusts buffeted trees and sheets of rain were falling. Many parishes and towns implemented curfews Friday until Saturday morning to encourage people to stay off the roads during the worst of the storm.
Laura damaged about 95% of the homes and buildings in Lake Charles, while up to 8,000 resi
dents — 10% of the population — remain displaced, the mayor said. Piles of moldy mattresses, sawedup trees and other leftover debris lined the city’s largely vacant streets Friday.
“We just got lights back on like two weeks ago and then evacuating again? It’s extremely hard,” said Roslyn Kennedy. She was among a handful of evacuees at the Burton Coliseum in Lake Charles, waiting to be transported, again, to safer destinations.
Delta was the 25th named storm of an unprecedented Atlantic hurricane season and became the first Greek-alphabetnamed hurricane to hit the continental U.S. As the 10th named storm to hit the continental U.S.
this year, it surpassed a record set in 1916, according to Colorado State University researcher Phil Klotzbach.
As the fourth hurricane or tropical storm to hit Louisiana in a year, Delta also tied a 2002 record, Klotzbach said.
The storm triggered hurricane warnings from High Island, Texas, to Morgan City, Louisiana.
Earlier Friday, it had sustained winds of 115 mph, putting it at Category 3 strength. Though the storm weakened as it approached land, officials cautioned that it remained dangerous.
“The fact that it’s weakening should not cause anyone to lose focus or lose vigilance, because this is still a very strong storm,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said
during a news conference.
Some residents were staying put, despite the danger. Ernest Jack remained in his Lake Charles house, one of those with a blue-tarped roof. He had gathered food, plenty of water and had covered his windows to protect against flying debris during Delta.
“I just didn’t want to leave. I stayed during Hurricane Laura, too. I just put it in the Lord’s hands,” Jack said, pointing skyward.
Concern wasn’t limited to the Lake Charles and Cameron Parish areas, where Laura came ashore. Further east, in Acadiana region towns like New Iberia and Abbeville, people took the storm seriously.
“You can always get another house, another car, but not another life,” said Hilton Stroder as he and his wife, Terry, boarded up their Abbeville home Thursday night with plans to head to their son’s house further east.
In Lafayette, about 75 miles east of Lake Charles and ahead of Delta’s landfall, many were drawing comparisons to Laura, not just because of its path, but because they were also expecting the storm to be more of a “wind event,” with powerful gusts again creating most of the damage.
“The storm has been very unpredictable in its behavior,” MarkGarber, the Lafayette Parish sheriff, said Friday.
The eastern flank of the storm, which is often called the “dirty side” as it is typically the most destructive, was projected to scrape Lafayette.
New Orleans, further to the east, was expected to escape Delta’s worst impacts. But tropical storm-force winds were still likely in the city on Friday, and local officials said they were preparing for the possibility of tornadoes.
Laura demolished much of the southwestern part of the state and caused more than 30 deaths after making landfall on Aug. 27 as a Category 4 hurricane with top winds of 150 mph.
In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency, as did Edwards in Louisiana.
The hurricane was expected to weaken rapidly over land. Forecasters predicted Delta would be downgraded to a tropical storm late Friday. The storm’s projected path showed it moving into northern Mississippi on Saturday and then into the Tennessee Valley as a tropical depression.