Deadly storm barrels across Southeast U.S.
Zeta sped across the Southeast on Thursday, leaving a trail of damage and more than 2.6 million homes and businesses without power in Atlanta and beyond after pounding New Orleans with winds and water that splintered homes and were blamed for at least three deaths.
A Category 2 hurricane when it hit the southeastern Louisiana coast Wednesday, Zeta was still a tropical storm late Thursday morning with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph, about 100 miles northeast of Asheville, N.C., unusual even in the region accustomed to hurricanes and their aftermath.
Some voting places were affected and hundreds of schools canceled classes or planned to open late from the Gulf Coast to the Carolinas. Widespread power outages occurred across seven states from Louisiana to the south Atlantic seaboard. Some places could be in the dark for days.
The latest punch from the record hurricane season left people shaken. Will Arute said it sounded like a bomb went off when part of a large oak snapped outside his home in New Orleans, and crashed into his car and a corner of his home.
“I did not anticipate this to happen. It was pretty intense along the eye wall when it went through here,” he said.
Mackenzie Umanzor didn’t make many preparations because the last hurricane to threaten her home in D’Iberville, Miss., a few weeks ago did little damage. Zeta blew open doors she had tried to barricade, leaving her with a cut hand, and the top of her shed came loose.
“You could hear the tin roof waving in the wind. ... And there was a couple of snaps, lots of cracks of branches and trees falling,” she said. “It was pretty scary.”
Officials said life-threatening conditions would last into the day, with Zeta crossing the mid-Atlantic states as a tropical storm before moving offshore around Delaware and southern New Jersey.
‘Catastrophic damage’
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said the most severe destruction, what he described as “catastrophic damage,” appeared to be on the barrier island of Grand Isle in Jefferson Parish, where Zeta punched three breaches in the levee, the only levee failure from the storm in the state. Edwards says he ordered the Louisiana National Guard to fly in soldiers to assist with search-and-rescue efforts, including door-to-door checks on property.
The governor also urged people to be cautious during the recovery.
“Oddly enough, it isn’t the storms that typically produce the most injuries and the fatalities. It’s the cleanup efforts. It’s the use of generators. It’s the carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s the electrocution that comes from power lines. So, now is the time to be very, very cautious out there,” Edwards said Thursday.
Leslie Richardson, 58, drowned when he was trapped in rising seawater in Biloxi, Miss., after taking video of the raging storm, Harrison County Coroner Brian Switzer said. Richardson and another man exited a floating car and clung to a tree before his strength “just gave out,” Switzer said.
A 55-year-old man was electrocuted by a downed power line in New Orleans, a Louisiana coroner said. In Georgia, authorities said a man was killed when winds knocked a tree onto a mobile home in Cherokee County.
Morning rush-hour commuters in Atlanta had to dodge downed trees and navigate their way past signals with no power. Trees blocked lanes on two interstates, the Georgia Department of Transportation said.
Northwest of Atlanta in Marietta, many traffic lights were out and police directed traffic at a busy intersection. One residential street was covered by a mix of campaign signs, leaves and limbs tossed by the storm. A few streets away, Billy Murdock was out picking up branches in his yard.
“It’s the worst storm I’ve been through in Atlanta,” he said.
The storm raged onshore Wednesday afternoon in the small village of Cocodrie, La., and then moved swiftly across the New Orleans area.
Trees cause woes
Damage from Zeta extended far inland. More than 80 miles north of the coast, Mayor Sheldon Day of Thomasville, Ala., said hundreds of fallen trees blocked roads and crashed into houses, with canopies at some gas stations blown over.
“At one point, every major thoroughfare was blocked by trees,” Day said. Hundreds of miles away in North Carolina, a highway was blocked by a toppled tree in Winston-Salem, and Wake Forest University canceled classes for the day.
Zeta was the 27th named storm of the historically busy Atlantic hurricane season with more than a month left to go. It set a record as the 11th named storm to make landfall in the continental U.S. in a single season, well beyond the nine storms that hit in 1916.
The extraordinarily busy season has focused attention on climate change, which scientists say is causing wetter, stronger and more destructive storms. And forecasters said disturbed air off the northern coast of South America could become a tropical depression headed toward Nicaragua by early next week
Zeta gained strength over the Gulf of Mexico along a path slightly to the east of Hurricane Laura, which was blamed for at least 27 deaths in Louisiana in August, and Hurricane Delta, which exacerbated Laura’s damage in the same area weeks later.