Parts of Louisiana were blasted by Hurricane Delta this weekend, less than two months after Hurricane Laura ripped through the same area. The Category 2 hurricane made landfall on Friday night with wind speeds of 100 mph. The Southwest Louisiana coastal town of Creole, located roughly 15 miles from where Hurricane Laura made landfall in August as a Category 4 Hurricane, took a direct hit.
The high winds did even more damage to the area, which was still trying to recover from what hit them six weeks ago. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said Delta dumped over 15 inches of rain on Lake Charles, and over 10 inches in Baton Rouge.
While Hurricane Delta was somewhat less powerful than Hurricane Laura, it had a wind field the Governor called “much larger,” which means the second storm is knocking out power all over the state. As of Sunday morning, roughly 26% of Louisiana, or approximately 600,000 customers, was without electricity. Repair crews working fast and efficiently were able to restore service to almost 200,000 of those residents. “So restoration appears to be happening more rapidly than was the case after Laura, and that’s because the damage to the infrastructure is not as significant. But that’s still an awful lot of power outages,” the governor said.
So far there haven’t been any deaths attributed to Hurricane Delta, but the danger is real for residents of this area. Of the 32 people who lost their lives in Hurricane Laura, seven died after the hurricane struck. Hurricane season in the Gulf officially runs though the end of November, and the area may not have seen the last of the destructive storms of 202
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