Thursday, August 27, 2020

Hurricane Laura batters the Louisiana coastline with an intensity the region has not seen in over a century

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https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/27/weather/laura-gulf-coast-weather-forecast-thursday/index.html

Hurricane Laura batters the Louisiana coastline with an intensity the region has not seen in over a century

By Jason Hanna and Madeline Holcombe, CNN

Updated 11:33 AM ET, Thu August 27, 2020

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(CNN)An extremely powerful Hurricane Laura is ripping apart portions of Louisiana and far-eastern Texas, roaring ashore initially as a Category 4 storm, killing at least one person and tearing up roofs while knocking out power for hundreds of thousands.

Here's what it looks like in Louisiana and Texas after Hurricane Laura hit

Laura -- the region's strongest storm in over a century -- made landfall at about 1 a.m. CT with sustained winds of 150 mph. By 10 a.m. CT, the storm still was raging more than 100 miles inland over Louisiana at Category 1 strength, with sustained winds of 75 mph.

Communities including Louisiana's Lake Charles city, some 35 miles inland, are littered with widespread wind destruction. Across the city, roofs and walls are damaged, trees are snapped, twisted and broken; steel poles and lampposts are bent; street signs are torn from the ground.

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Wind gusts of more than 120 mph raked that area intermittently for an hour overnight, CNN's meteorologists say.

"The damage is extensive," Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards told CNN. "It appears now we have more structural damage from the wind" than storm surge.

James Sonya surveys what is left of his uncle's barber shop Thursday in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

More than 1,500 search and rescue personnel, plus 400 boats and high-water vehicles were headed Thursday morning to the worst-hit places, Edwards said. Winds were still too strong for helicopters to fly.

In East Texas, rescue teams were out in the Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange areas, Gov. Greg Abbott said, noting major evacuations "no doubt saved lives." Further north, tornadoes were still a threat.

At least one person has died as a result of the storm. A 14-year-old girl died when a tree fell on her home in Louisiana's Vernon Parish, the governor's office said.

Damage to a building is seen Thursday in Vinton, Louisiana, in this photo from CNN affiliate KXAN.

In Lake Charles, Paul Heard left his house just as the storm was pulling part of the roof off around 1 a.m., he said.

He took shelter in his car. As he watched from 25 feet away, he "could see my roof was heaving up and down several inches."

"There's a lot of damage. People are going to need a lot of help around here," Heard told CNN.

Flooding inundates the Crystal Beach and Galveston areas near Texas' coast, aerial video from KRTK shows.

Laura tied with a hurricane from more than 160 years ago for the strongest storm to hit Louisiana. The 1856 hurricane also had winds of 150 mph when it made landfall, CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller said.

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More destruction is ahead: Parts of northern and central Louisiana still were under a hurricane warning late Thursday morning, as the storm's center pushed toward Arkansas.

"Laura will likely set the standard for a near worst-case scenario with a landfalling tropical system in our region," the National Weather Service's Shreveport, Louisiana, office wrote Thursday morning.