St. Mary Parish dodges severe impacts from Laura

St. Mary Parish dodged severe impacts from Hurricane Laura, local government leaders said Thursday afternoon.
While the parish has not encountered any serious damage, St. Mary Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness Director David Naquin said Thursday afternoon that the parish still is accessing areas.
“We’ll do a more in-depth assessment tomorrow,” he said.
So far, though, the parish appears to have escaped serious harm, and levees and flood structures as well as preventative measures all worked as they should.
However, a curfew still remains in effect from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. for areas west of Calumet to keep people from going in areas where there still is flooding.
“We’re not quite finished dewatering these neighborhoods,” Naquin said. “You think you can drive through a neighborhood, but the wake of your car will put more water in a guy’s house, and that’s just not right.”
He said areas such as Eastwood and Franklin are battling water, while a portion of Byrnes Point is blocked-off, too, that Naquin thinks will be opened Friday. He said he didn’t think they were letting people back on Cypremort Point yet, either.
“The water’s going down,” Naquin said. “There’s no question about that. Of course, there’s still a (south-west) wind.”
That southwest wind was keeping some of the water from leaving.
While Naquin said those who are under mandatory or voluntary evacuations could return home, he said they only should do so if the roads leading to their homes are free of water as driving on watery roads will agitate the situation.
Most of Laura’s impact was on the parish’s west end.
Naquin said he hasn’t had any reports of water in homes or businesses, but he does expect some damage in the Cypremort Point areas, where storm surge was about what it produced in Ike and Berry.
“It didn’t get quite as high as Rita, but it was higher than they thought it would be,” he said.
Naquin also said homes in Louisa, off Kelly Canal and in the Vacherie, Ashton, Glencoe and Four Corners areas that all have had water before, they prob-ably will have water again.
St. Mary Parish Levee District Executive Director Tim Matte said Thursday he received reports of water rising on areas west of the Charenton Canal that are not protected by levees.
He also reported there was some water in another area south of La. 317 in the Gordy Levees area in parts where there no levee, but he said that wasn’t unexpected and has happened before.
Flood protection measures along the Charenton Canal on Industry Road also worked as planned.
“Although it did get some leaking, that wasn’t unexpected. What we were trying to do is block off a major flow there, and we were successful,” Matte said, adding the water appears as if it is starting to recede.
Laura brought St. Mary Parish maximum sustained winds be-tween 35 and 45 mph, with some gusts higher.
While there were 3,000 power outages, Naquin said about 50% had been restored by 2 p.m. Thursday by crews who had less than a full day to work.
Further east, the Atchafalaya River was estimated to rise to 7 feet, but it peaked at 6.44 feet, Naquin said.
“It’s not flowing out yet, but it’s pretty close,” he said. “We monitor a few things on the river that indicate to us it’s not going to get any higher, and it’s going to be going out before long.”
In Berwick, Mayor Duval Arthur said that things went very well, noting they lost power early Thursday morning, but it had been restored. He said just a few limbs fell throughout town.
“We feel just overjoyed that that’s all we had,” he said.
In Patterson, Mayor Rodney Grogan said that Cleco is still working to restore power to some areas, noting that power is still out in the area from Red Cypress Road area to the Patterson High School area and has been for a while.
Cleco also is working to fix a transformer that went down in the Taft Street area and affected the city’s sewer station near Red Cypress Sub-division.
Meanwhile, Grogan reported no issues with drainage, trees in the roadway or damage to homes.
“It was basically the trees fell on private property, but nothing that the city of Patterson had to use its manpower with,” he said.
In Morgan City, issues were limited to “minor” power outages Thursday, which were fixed before 1 p.m., Mayor Frank “Boo” Grizzaffi said.
While the river did rise, Grizzaffi said it didn’t cause a threat, and all floodgates have been reopened.
“We prepared. It never came,” he said of storm effects.
In Lower St. Martin Parish, Maj. Ginny Higgins, public information officer for the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office, said the area fared “very well” compared to what was expected.
The area was helped by water levels already down prior to rain the storm brought.
She said they did have a power outage Thurs-day due to a power line in a tree that caught on fire around 10 a.m., but SLECA was notified of the issue.
“Other than that, we didn’t have any water issues that we thought we were going to have,” Higgins said. “We didn’t have any reports of anything significant as far as wind damage or anything like that, so we did very well.”