The fierce winds of Hurricane Laura caused more damage than the typhoon surge that hit parts of Louisiana. The typhoon killed six other people in Louisiana, adding at least four of the trees.
Laura came ashore in the form of a category four typhoon on Thursday morning near the Texas border, ripping off the roofs while cutting off the power to thousands of people.
Laura, then downgraded to tropical storm, about 35 miles south of Little Rock, Arkansas, with sustained winds of 40 mph at 7 p.m. CT on Thursday. But it landed around 1 a.m. with sustained winds of 150 mph, ravaging communities in southern Louisiana for miles.
Although there have been reports of wind damage, some communities have also been affected by the tidal surge of a typhoon. A U.S. Coast Guard aerial video showed flooding in Cameron along the coast.
“There’s a lot of damage. People will love it here a lot,” Paul Heard told CNN, who survived the terrible Lake Charles experience.
He heard he left his house when the typhoon ripped a component from the roof around 1 a.m., taking refuge in his car, he said. As I looked at a distance of 25 feet, “I could see my roof rang several inches.”
Wind gusts of more than 120 mph combed intermittently for an hour overnight, according to CNN meteorologists.
“Now we seem to have more structural damage from the wind” than a typhoon tidal wave, said Governor John Bel Edwards.
The communities, Lake Charles, about 56 km from the coast, are full of rubble. Throughout the city, the roofs and walls are damaged, the trees are broken, crooked and broken; The steel posts and street lamps are bent; traffic symptoms are taking off from the ground.
Laura has de-released much of the water service in Lake Charles. “Some factories are open, but it’s not enough to cater to the whole city. Tension is minimal,” said city manager John Cardone.
More than 843,000 consumers in Texas and Louisiana came into effect Thursday night, according to PowerOutages.us.
“We’ve suffered enormous damage,” Edwards said, though it’s not “the absolute catastrophic damage we even think is likely.”
As Laura heads northeast, “torrential rains and tropical winds” have fallen on parts of Arkansas, the National Hurricane Center said Thursday afternoon, and Gov. Asa Hutchinson called on citizens to “stay on the weather.”
“The danger will come in the next 24 hours,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Nearly 55,000 government consumers had energy.
Arkansas has deployed search and rescue groups, as well as members of its National Guard, the governor said. “They’re in southern Arkansas and able to go,” Hutchinson said at a news conference.
“We’re going to have flash floods, we’re going to have winds, we’re already experiencing,” he said.
“So be careful, be careful and make sure that if you arrive at a barricade, turn around and look to get around it, as there may be a flooded road that could cause death.
Lake Charles also confronts what the governor said: a chemical chimney on a plant in the area, with giant columns of smoke popping up into the sky early Thursday morning.
Police and firefighters were at a BioLab facility, the Environmental Protection Agency said. Factory managers were looking to involve a chlorine leak, according to state police. Details of what the fireplace were not available.
KIK Custom Products, owner of the facility, said it sent a team of specialists to the site, which had been evacuated before the typhoon hit, “after following the closing protocols.”
“All workers are shown safely right now,” the company said in a statement.
“We’re doing everything we can for this situation,” Edwards said.
The chimney burned later Thursday, CNN associate KPLC reported.
An on-site shelter order is in position less than a mile from the site, according to the EPA.
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More than 1,500 search and rescue people, including 400 boats and offshore vehicles, were heading to the hardest-hit areas, Edwards said earlier.
In east Texas, rescues were carried out in the Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange areas, Gov. Greg Abbott said, noting that primary evacuations “undoubtedly stored lives.” Further north, tornadoes remained a threat.
Orange is the hardest coup in Texas, Abbott said at a press conference.
“You saw more roofs ripped off, you saw more shingles, saw more felled trees, saw giant metal frame pieces wrapped around some trees, saw roads that were still flooded, water, impassable at the time,” Abbott said.
However, the typhoon “could have been much worse” in Texas, Abbott said.
“When you know the extent of the damage that may have occurred here, we dodged a bullet,” Abbott said at a press conference.
Of the deaths in Louisiana, 4 died after falling trees: a 14-year-old woguy from Vernon Parish; a 51-year-old man from Jackson Parish; a 60-year-old man from Acadia Parish; and a 64-year-old man in Allen Parish, the government said.
Two died in the parish of Calcasieu: a 24-year-old boy and a boy whose age has not been revealed through the State Health Department.
President Donald Trump said he would go to Texas and Louisiana and “maybe make an extra stop” this weekend to examine the damage.
Laura is linked to a hurricane more than 160 years ago by the most powerful typhoon that hit Louisiana. The 18.56 hurricane also had 1,500 mph winds when it made landfall, CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller said. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was a category five while in the Gulf of Mexico, was downgraded to Category 3 when it made landfall.
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Details of the pain extension gave the impression as the day progressed. Large numbers of Crystal Beach, Texas, near Galveston were flooded. Water flowing in fields and roads, showed a video of CNN affiliate KTRK.
Water hit buildings in Sabine Pass, Texas, showing images of Getty Images.
In Lake Charles, Louisiana, Tolor White Jr. had fallen asleep while doing a crossword puzzle, a makeshift “barricade” made from a table and a mattress. He woke up around 1:15 a.m. with a loud noise, he said.
Part of the roof had been ripped off. The water flowed into one of his rooms and the wind had blown into some of his windows.
“I slept most of the time,” he says.
Brandon Clement, a typhoon tracker, in a parking lot in Lake Charles when he saw a trailer overturn.
“You can hear (the storm) comingArray … You may see her running down the parking lot towards me … and the trailer is gone,” he said.
Later, on Thursday morning, Clement drove south towards Cameron, the nearby coastal network where Laura landed.
“The further south I get, the more damage I see,” homes, businesses and farm buildings destroyed or without roofs told CNN.
“It’s very much like tornado damage,” he said.
In the town of Vinton, Louisiana, near the Texas border, Keisha Freeman said she and her neighbors had taken refuge in a hangar designed to cope with the conditions of a hurricane.
When they got here, they saw that most of the roofs and cladding of the houses were gone, he said.
“Almost every home has incredible damage,” Freeman said.
Just west of Lake Charles, in the city of Sulphur, John Burch’s space lost strength shortly after 1:30 a.m.
“There’s a tree in the person’s garden, ” said Burch.
Mat Mcgee near the eye wall of Hurricane Laura when he saw the steel construction in front of his barge tearing in micocoulier, Louisiana, told CNN.
The wind ripped the roof, the door and knocked down the tower at the site.
More than 10,000 people in Texas and Louisiana have taken refuge in emergency locations such as official shelters and hotels, the American Red Cross said.
The plight of inland citizens remained a major fear for retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who coordinated the army’s 2005 joint reaction to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and then, weeks later, helped in the reaction to Hurricane Rita, which struck around the same blows as Laura.
“We’ve had a pause in the projected (Laura’s) increase, but I suspect that much of Cameron (a parish along the coast) is pretty shattered, especially all the reconstruction that has occurred since Hurricane Rita,” Honore told CNN. Baton Rouge.
Honore feared that many of those who lived far from the coast would choose to take Laura home, he said.
“In Lake Charles, many others may simply be injured, and going further north to Beauregard Parish and Fort Polk, many others live there in cell homes, and I only worry, knowing that Cameron was completely evacuated, a great effort in Calcasieu (parish) and Lake Charles to evacuate others. I hope the same thing will be done in the north, as it can be very devastating. Array, where other people don’t live in heavily forged houses,” he told me. “That’s my biggest concern.”
Laura can still cause damaging wind gusts in parts of northern Louisiana and Arkansas on Thursday night, the National Hurricane Center said.
Laura was expected to drop another four to 8 inches of rain on parts of Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi. 18-inch insulated uprights are imaginable in Louisiana, the NHC said.
FEMA administrator Peter Gaynor said waves of typhoons probably wouldn’t be as high as feared a day earlier. The NHC said the waters near the coast were high but would be relieved Thursday afternoon.
Laura is the seventh named typhoon to make landfall in the United States, making this year a record for the high before the end of August. There were 4 tropical typhoons and 3 hurricanes.