Here’s what you need to know:
Hurricane Laura sweeps ashore as one of most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S.
After making landfall as one of the strongest storms to hit Louisiana on record, Hurricane Laura steamrolled up through the state on Thursday, leaving a trail of far-flung damage in its wake.
The storm, which came ashore near Cameron, La., after midnight as a Category 4 hurricane, brought 150-mile-an-hour winds and a major storm surge out of the Gulf, ripping the facades off brick buildings in Lake Charles, La., and swatting telephone poles to the ground. Laura weakened as it moved inland, but remained destructive, with strong winds and heavy rain, and the potential to spawn deadly tornadoes.
The first confirmed U.S. death from the storm was that of a 14-year-old girl in Leesville, La., a small city about 100 miles inland. According to the Louisiana governor’s office, the girl was killed when a tree fell on her family’s home.
transcript
Hurricane Laura Sweeps Through Gulf Coast
Hurricane Laura ripped through the coasts of Louisiana and Texas as it made landfall as a Category 4 storm early Thursday morning.
-
“Get back! Get back!”
At noon Central time, the storm had passed through Leesville and was centered west of Grambling, La., about 50 miles east of Shreveport, according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm was trudging north-northeast at 15 miles an hour, with maximum sustained winds of 70 miles an hour — just below the Category 1 hurricane range — and it was expected to diminish to a tropical depression Thursday night.
People on the ground in southwestern Louisiana described catastrophic damage to buildings and vehicles, apparently more from the storm’s punishing winds than from its much-feared storm surge. In Lake Charles, La., a regional hub known for its petrochemical plants and crowded casinos, commercial buildings were peeled apart, exposing insulation and wood frames. Billboards were punched out and trees snapped in half. A fire was burning somewhere within the sprawl of petrochemical plants just outside downtown, filling the air with a brown haze and an acrid smell.
Gusts had blown out dozens of windows in high-rise office buildings, ripped the top off a sky bridge and tipped an R.V. on its side. The whistling winds mimicked the alarm-like sounds that could be heard inside buildings, according to videos on social media.
Landfall came after officials in both Louisiana and Texas issued the gravest of warnings about the storm, which was among the strongest ever to hit the United States and tied for the strongest ever to hit Louisiana, according to data compiled by Philip Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University who studies hurricanes. At the peak, more than 1.5 million people in the coastal regions of Texas and Louisiana were under some form of evacuation orders.
Flooding in Lake Charles, La.
Credit...William Widmer for The New York Times-
Slide 1 of 7Flooding in Lake Charles, La.
Credit...William Widmer for The New York Times
Utility companies reported that about 404,000 customers in Louisiana and another 104,000 in Texas were without power Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us.
The full extent of damage will not be known until the winds die down, the storm surge recedes and residents and officials can survey the wreckage.
Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said Thursday morning that his state had been hit with “extensive” damage to structures, particularly in the Lake Charles area. Search and rescue teams were on their way, he said, and by midmorning, pickup trucks hauling aluminum boats were driving through the streets of the otherwise empty city.
“We believe we got a break on the storm surge,” at least so far, the governor said on CNN, noting that the surge had not appeared to reach the extreme heights that forecasters said were possible. But there was still considerable flooding.
Governor Edwards said the state was taking Covid-19 precautions at shelters and in its rescue efforts; many of those who were evacuated on state-run shuttles were brought to hotels in Baton Rouge and elsewhere rather than large congregate shelters like gymnasiums. If such steps were not taken, the governor said, Louisiana could “pay the price” in a couple of weeks with a surge in coronavirus cases.
Thick smoke is spreading from a fire at a chemical plant in the storm’s wake.
Fire broke out Thursday morning at a chemical plant in Westlake, La., local authorities said, sending thick smoke over a wide area and prompting shelter-in-place directives for residents in the communities of Westlake, Moss Bluff and Sulphur.
Mayor Robert Hardey of Westlake said the fire was burning at a plant operated by BioLab, a subsidiary of Kik Custom Products, which makes cleaners, antifreeze and other chemical products.
A chlorine leak from the BioLab facility appeared to have started the fire. A Louisiana State Police emergency unit is responding to a “hazardous material incident” at the site, according to Robert Fontenot, a police official. He urged local residents to refrain from “unnecessary travel” in the plant’s vicinity.
Data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows that the BioLab site uses large amounts of chlorine, which poses a fire and explosion risk. BioLab specializes in making pool and spa cleaning products, according to Kik’s website.
Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana urged residents in the area to keep their windows and doors closed, and to turn off their air-conditioners to keep them from sucking in tainted air. “There is a chemical fire,” he said in a post on Twitter. “Stay inside and wait for additional direction from local officials.”
BioLab and Kik Custom Products officials were not immediately available for comment.
Heavy industry, environmental hazards and vulnerable communities lie in the storm’s path.
Hurricane Laura’s punishing storm surge and winds swept through some of the most industrialized parts of the southern United States: a broad stretch of coast studded with plants that produce fuels, petrochemicals and other products, and that can release toxic chemicals into the air, water and soil when damaged by storms.
The people living closest to these concentrations of industries are typically the poorest, and tend to be communities of color: places like the Westside neighborhood of Port Arthur, Texas, and Mossville, La., near Lake Charles.
“The fence-line community is the one that’s bearing the burden of pollution and industrial encroachment,” said Robert D. Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University and co-chair of the Black Environmental Justice Network, an advocacy group devoted to addressing harm caused by systemic racism.
Hurricane Laura’s path bisected a region packed with large refineries and chemical plants. Port Arthur has the Motiva oil refinery, North America’s largest. Beaumont has a major Exxon Mobil refinery, and refineries along its ship channel manufacture a majority of the nation’s military jet fuel. Farther east, the city of Orange has dozens of chemical plants. The Lake Charles area is home to a number of major chemical plants, including the Sasol Chemicals complex, owned by a South African company, and the BioLab plant that caught fire Thursday.
While some of the facilities were designed to withstand storms, the amplification that climate change appears to be giving to many of today’s storms could render the old defenses inadequate. The Port Arthur refinery has a 14-foot levee, but the storm surge forecast for Laura ranged as high as 20 feet for parts of the nearby Louisiana coast.
Many of those plants sit right next to vulnerable communities, like Mossville, a historic Black community founded by an ex-slave.
“Hurricane Laura’s path is through environmental justice communities,” said Monique Harden, assistant director of law and policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans.
The Lake Charles area, with little protection from the storm, is pounded by wind and rain.
The city of Lake Charles, La., was pummeled early Thursday, lashed by punishing rains and winds as Hurricane Laura swept overhead.
The National Hurricane Center said that the city’s airport was reporting gusts of 132 miles per hour at 3 a.m. local time. For over an hour, there were reports of wind gusts over 120 m.p.h., and social media quickly filled with images of destruction.
The city lies about 30 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, but that is no protection from the severe flash flooding that forecasters expected to accompany the storm as it pushes inland over Louisiana and Arkansas.
“Anybody watching in these areas along the Louisiana coast, I mean, it is too dangerous to be outside,” the director of the National Hurricane Center, Ken Graham, said in a video posted to Twitter late Wednesday. “I hope you’re not there. I hope you evacuated.”
The Lake Charles area is particularly vulnerable to flooding. Much of the land between the city and the coast is treeless marshland that is bisected by shipping channels that lead directly in from the Gulf. With a storm surge predicted to be as high as 20 feet, these channels “provide conduits like a hose going in,” said Paul Kemp, a professor of coastal sciences at Louisiana State University.
Once a freshwater lake, its namesake is now, because of saltwater influx from the Gulf, essentially a brackish inlet of the ocean. Petrochemical refineries, the main driver of the region’s economy, are within sight of downtown.
The city of 80,000 sits along Interstate 10, the primary route between south Louisiana and southeastern Texas. But that is not much help when big storms hit. During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Interstate 10 disappeared under a choppy ocean and was closed for days.
Hours before the storm made landfall, the state’s transportation department said that part Interstate 10 stretching more than 100 miles from the Texas border, including a portion that runs through Lake Charles, had been closed.
Floodwaters may be “held in place” for hours as the storm sweeps through Louisiana.
The storm surge in southern Louisiana and the Lake Charles area may last for another day, while hurricane-force winds reach north to the border of Louisiana and Arkansas, the director of the National Hurricane Center, Ken Graham, said early Thursday.
Speaking on CNN a few hours after Hurricane Laura made landfall, Mr. Graham said there was storm surge of up to 11 feet in some areas, and that some it may be “held in place” for hours if not longer.
“It may take another day before some of that water gets out of there,” he said. The flooding would cause “all sorts of damage” along the coastline, he said, warning that the continuing rainfall could cause flash floods.
With reports of homes having their roofs blown off, offices with their windows shattered and extensive damage to infrastructure, including communications towers, he said that residents were probably waking up to find widespread wreckage.
“You can’t put 150-mile-an-hour winds anywhere without seeing structural damage,” he said.
Mr. Graham said that Hurricane Laura was projected to remain strong even as it moved far inland. “We expect Hurricane Laura still to be a hurricane right up to when you get to Shreveport, at the Arkansas border,” he said.
The hurricane center had warned that the storm surge might exceed 15 feet in some places and reach up to 40 miles inland. It was not clear on Thursday whether any populated areas had been hit that hard.
Clyde Cain, a leader of the Cajun Navy, the volunteer armada that deploys in storm zones for water rescues and other work, said early on Thursday that he and his fellow boaters were starting to get requests to check on people whose homes or apartments were damaged by the wind. But, he said, they had gotten no calls yet for any boat rescues.
“They were saying ‘unsurvivable surge,’” said Mr. Cain, who was gathered with other boat operators in Crowley, La., a small Cajun city about an hour east of Lake Charles. “We’re not really sure yet, but we haven’t really heard reports that it was a big as Katrina, or anything like that.”
Texas officials say the state has suffered less destruction than they had dreaded.
With Hurricane Laura marching north through Louisiana on Thursday after landing just east of the Texas line overnight, local officials in East Texas said that damage on their side of the border appeared to be far less severe than feared.
In Jefferson County — home to two cities, Beaumont and Port Arthur, that were devastated by Hurricane Harvey — the top elected official said he was thrilled.
“We dodged the bullet,” said the official, County Judge Jeff Branick, in a text message. “Widespread power outages, but not the property damage, carnage and flooding we’ve seen in past storms.”
Mr. Branick said that other than the electricity problems, the reports were good so far in Port Arthur, where officials had worried about a hard hit from wind damage and storm surge. The county is lifting its mandatory evacuation order, clearing the way for residents to return home.
Gov. Greg Abbott said on CNN Thursday morning that the state had not yet had any reports of fatalities from the storm, which he attributed to residents heeding warnings to evacuate early.
“The storm surge and the powerful winds could have led to catastrophic deaths,” Mr. Abbott said. “We no doubt saved lives because of those evacuations.”
He said search and rescue teams were in the Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange County areas looking for people who needed help, and that the storm still posed a threat as it moved inland. “People in northeast Texas still need to remain very vigilant right now,” he said.
About an hour’s drive down the Texas coast from Port Arthur, on the Bolivar Peninsula, Wilford Raney, 56, was beginning to take stock of his property on Thursday morning. He was unable to secure a trailer in time to evacuate his livestock, so he decided to stay put and make sure his 25 cows were protected.
“You could hear everything going crazy,” he said, noting that a tree on his property was ripped apart by the wind. “I can’t tell you how many times we just prayed.”
Mr. Raney said he believed nearly everyone else in Gilchrist, his town, had evacuated, in part because Gilchrist has no sea wall and little protection from storm surges. “That’s something that scares everybody the most,” he said.
But he knew he couldn’t leave his livestock alone, he said, and when the winds died down in the morning, he was relieved to find that his animals were secure.
“I do everything I can to have my animals safe,” Mr. Raney said.
Louisiana, the state in the storm’s way, has also been ravaged by the coronavirus.
Hurricane Laura has descended on a state that has been among the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. With more than 145,000 confirmed cases, Louisiana has a higher rate of infections per capita than any other state in the nation.
Early on, the virus was particularly brutal in New Orleans, where Mardi Gras celebrations helped fuel an eruption in cases. But it has also more recently been spreading rapidly in other parts of the state, including Baton Rouge and the Shreveport area, which are in the storm’s path.
Though daily case counts have fallen a bit in the state since reaching a peak in July, the virus was still lurking when the storm arrived. In the area around Lake Charles, which was being pounded by the storm on Thursday morning, about 9 percent of tests have been coming back positive lately, well above the 3 to 5 percent rate that experts say would indicate the virus was being brought under control.
The convergence of two crises threatened to deepen. them both. Virus testing sites were closed in parts of Louisiana this week in anticipation of the storm. Fleeing families piled onto evacuation buses — this time wearing masks. And Gov. John Bel Edwards turned to a message that has now become familiar: Stay home.
“It’s 2020, right?” said Rebecca C. Christofferson, who studies emerging viruses and transmission at Louisiana State University and spent part of Wednesday hunkered down in the bathroom as strong thunderstorms raged outside her home in Baton Rouge. By Thursday morning, she was watching the hurricane’s torrential rains pour down in her neighborhood.
“People have family everywhere,” she said, “and what do you do when you evacuate? You go to family’s house.” But during a pandemic, she said, that precaution can also become a risk. “You are inheriting the network of the people coming to you, they are inheriting your network,” she said. “At some point, something is going to converge.”
For those who stayed in the hurricane’s path, “know that it’s just you and God,” a mayor says.
People who did not flee a vast stretch of the Gulf Coast spanning from west of Galveston, Texas, to near Lafayette, La., hunkered down as the storm tore through the dark of night. Officials have said the police and emergency workers would not be able to reach anyone until the storm had passed.
“Know that it’s just you and God,” Mayor Thurman Bartie of Port Arthur, Texas, warned residents who stayed behind.
In Vermilion Parish, southwest of Lafayette on the Louisiana coast, the sheriff’s office had a grim request for residents who did not leave: “If you choose to stay and we can’t get to you, write your name, address, social security number and next of kin and put it a zip-lock bag in your pocket. Praying that it does not come to this!”
The storm was preceded by tough decisions about fleeing and an urgent push to get people out of harm’s way.
As the first bands of the expansive hurricane approached Lake Charles, John O’Donnell hit a nearly empty Interstate 10, heading east for Lafayette or Baton Rouge. He felt uneasy.
“This just doesn’t feel right,” Mr. O’Donnell, 33, said. “It doesn’t feel right leaving my city like this.”
A frequent city volunteer, Mr. O’Donnell said he had spent the last two or three days urging his fellow Lake Charles residents to evacuate. Privately, he sent his dog off with his ex-wife. Publicly, he posted on social media and drove 25 or 30 people to sites where buses carted them to safer areas outside the city.
Among those Mr. O’Donnell found himself convincing were people too young to remember the impact of Hurricane Rita in 2005, as well as longtime residents who argued that if their homes didn’t flood during that storm, they could make it through this one.
As Mr. O’Donnell sped toward Lafayette on Wednesday afternoon under steely skies, he wondered if he had done enough.
“Those are the ones that haunt me because we didn’t get them all,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “And there’s a lot of people left back there.”
Still, his efforts were clear in one way: Mr. O’Donnell was alone on the drive, having urged his loved ones to flee before the storm.
“It’s me and a bottle of bourbon and a cowboy hat in the passenger seat,” he said. “The bourbon isn’t open, but it will be as soon as I stop.”
Reporting was contributed by Alan Blinder, Chelsea Brasted, Maria Cramer, Manny Fernandez, Mike Ives, Sarah Mervosh, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Campbell Robertson, Rick Rojas, Marc Santora, Anna Schaverien, John Schwartz, Hiroko Tabuchi, Lucy Tompkins, Will Widmer and Will Wright.
August 27, 2020 at 11:23PM
https://ift.tt/2FShYD9
Hurricane Laura Live Updates: Storm Plows Through Louisiana - The New York Times
https://ift.tt/3bWFHgJ
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Hurricane Laura Live Updates: Storm Plows Through Louisiana - The New York Times"
Post a Comment