Gov. John Bel Edwards talks to reporters Saturday at Department of Public Safety and Corrections headquarters in Baton Rouge.
Screen Capture from Louisiana Public Broadcasting
Hurricane Delta lived up to forecast; heavy rain across south Louisiana, 600,000 without power
Hurricane Delta wasn't as powerful as Laura, but it affected a wider area and left more people in the dark Friday night, Gov. John Bel Edwards said Saturday.
More than 600,000 Louisiana utility customers were still without power at noon after a quarter of the state's customers lost power at some point, Edwards said.
The poweroutages.us website reported about 542,000 Louisiana customers without power at 2 p.m., but the site doesn't track outages for all utilities. Among the unreported utilities are SLECA and those serving Pointe Coupee and Lafayette. Widespread outages lasted into the afternoon in Lafayette.
Poweroutages.us reported at 2 p.m. that 4,896 of CLECO's 18,981 customers in St. Mary remained without power. That's down from more than 6,900 at 6 a.m.
Delta resulted in 15 inches of rain in 48 hours in Lake Charles, already struggling to recover from Laura's strike on Aug. 27, but also across the state in Baton Rouge, where 10 inches of rain fell, Edwards said in a press conference.
Rapides also saw heavy rain, and Edwards said 10 people were rescued there. In all, 83 people received assistance either from search and rescue operations, evacuation or relocation.
The National Guard has 3,000 activated troops ready with 1.5 million meals, 1.5 million bottles of water, 32,000 tarps and 48,000 bags of ice, Edwards said.
Delta's eye came ashore near the Cameron Parish community of Creole early Friday evening, only 12 miles from where Laura came ashore.
The proximity of the two storms makes it hard to distinguish Laura damage from Delta damage, the governor said.
"This is really important," Edwards said. "The way we work with the federal government, with regard to the way we document storm response and damages and the reimbursement, it depends on which storm caused what damage."
The state government is urging the Federal Emergency Management Agency to treat the storms as one event so that the 90% reimbursement of state response expenditures will apply to Delta damage, too. The state has also applied for 100% reimbursement for debris removal for Laura damage.