Hurricane Laura lashes gulf coast with high winds; ‘catastrophic’ flooding feared

Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana and Texas coasts as it made landfall near Cameron, Louisiana, as a Category 4 storm early Thursday, delivering a barrage of 150 mph winds and a surge of water that was predicted to reach as high as 20 feet.

The National Hurricane Center called the expected storm surge “unsurvivable,” and said that it could push as far as 40 miles inland. Officials also said that low-lying areas facing the brunt of the storm, like Cameron Parish in Louisiana, would essentially be annexed by the Gulf of Mexico until floods receded.

Landfall came after officials in both states issued the gravest of warnings, sounding the alarm about a storm that could be one of the worst to hit the region in decades.

“I’m asking people right now to pay attention to this storm, to get out of harm’s way,” Guv John Bel Edwards of Louisiana told residents during a briefing before the storm’s arrival. “Understand, our state has not seen a storm surge like this in many, many decades. We haven’t seen wind speeds like we’re going to experience in a very, very long time.”

More than 1.5 million people in the coastal regions of Texas and Louisiana were under some form of evacuation orders.

In Calcasieu Parish, Tony Guillory told CNN that it “sounded like a train” was bearing down on the building where essential workers were based as the storm raged.

Guillory, a member of the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, said that while a mandatory evacuation order was in force, not everyone was able to get out.

“There are still people out there,” he said. “It’s too late.”

Hundreds of thousands of people across the region were without electricity early Thursday, and there were widespread reports of downed trees and power lines.

For those riding out the storm, there was little to do but hunker down and wait for the winds to die down, allowing search and rescue crews to set out to help those who were stranded.

Laura was among the strongest storms to ever hit the United States, according to data compiled by Philip Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University who studies hurricanes.

The hurricane began to weaken to a Category 2 storm as it swept inland, with winds of 110 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. It is expected to move through southwestern Louisiana in the morning, then continue northward across the state through Thursday afternoon.

The city of Lake Charles, Louisiana, was pummeled early Thursday, lashed by punishing rains and winds as Hurricane Laura swept overhead.

At 3 am local time, the National Hurricane Center said that the city’s airport was reporting gusts of 132 mph. For over an hour, there were reports of wind gusts over 120 mph, 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, Texas and Arkansas over the next two days.

“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.

The city’s mayor, Nic Hunter, told a local television station Wednesday that some residents might be without electricity, water or wastewater services for days.

“Get out of Lake Charles,” he said. “Get out of Calcasieu Parish.”

People who did not flee a vast stretch of the Gulf Coast spanning from west of Galveston, Texas, to near Lafayette, Louisiana, 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 were staying 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 in a Ziploc 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.

More than 500,000 residents in Louisiana and Texas were urged to flee their homes in recent days as Hurricane Laura roared toward the Gulf Coast. Laura intensified into a Category 4 hurricane Wednesday afternoon as it churned through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

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,” O’Donnell, 33, said. “It doesn’t feel right leaving my city like this.”

A frequent city volunteer, 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 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 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,” O’Donnell said. “And there’s a lot of people left back there.”

Still, his efforts were clear in one way: 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.”