Local officials feel lucky after Cristobal near miss

Tropical Storm Cristobal brought few effects to St. Mary Parish. There were no reports of power outages or damages and only some minimal flooding at Burns Point, parish leaders said.
St. Mary Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness Director David Naquin said dry air from the west side of the storm was helpful for St. Mary Parish in avoiding problems.
Naquin said he wasn’t aware of any power outages, damage or road closures.
“So I would say at the end of the day we were very lucky, and everything worked out as well as it could be expected,” he said.
Naquin said Monday afternoon that Burns Point had some water in its recreation area.
He also said that officials still were monitoring the Atchafalaya River for a possible rise to just over 7 feet. However, according to the National Weather Service’s Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service, the river was at 6.38 feet Tuesday morning and expected to remain fairly steady.
Overall, though, St. Mary Parish avoided much more severe problems like Grand Isle and Biloxi, Mississippi, had.
“Six days out, they said it was going to come to central Louisiana, and they really didn’t miss it by much,” Naquin said.
“Had they missed it that far west, we would have gotten what Biloxi got, which would have been pretty bad for us, and this wasn’t even a hurricane. This was just a tropical storm, so just imagine had they missed the forecast instead of being 50 miles east, suppose it had been 50 miles to the west. We could have been Grand Isle, Biloxi, whatever and gotten all the water and all the rain.”
While the area wasn’t impacted much by the storm, the lingering effects will be headed back through Morgan City via the waterways as Naquin said the storm’s rain is falling in the Mississippi River Basin further north.
“It’s going to wind up in Morgan City anyway,” he said. “It’s coming back down.”
In Berwick, Mayor Duval Arthur said things went “exceptionally well” for the municipality.
While the town has applied for a grant that hasn’t been approved yet for long-term work to fix drainage issues in Country Club Estates, Arthur said that proactive measures such as digging a new ditch and repairing a collapsed pipe served their purpose in the meantime.
“This time, we had no water in the streets, so it was all good,” he said.
Patterson Mayor Rodney Grogan said the city was well-prepared but had no effects from the storm.
“We took every precautionary measure, but we were blessed and spared once again,” he said.
The same can be said for Morgan City, Mayor Frank “Boo” Grizzaffi said.
“It was a nonevent,” he said. “The city was prepared. We’re grateful that it didn’t affect us.”