Zeta mostly misses St. Mary, strikes east

St. Mary Parish had yet another close call with a hurricane Wednesday, escaping with no more than brisk wind and a handful of power outages.
But Hurricane Zeta, the fifth named storm to hit Louisiana this year, slammed New Orleans with winds of more than 100 mph and killed at least two people as it headed northeast.
Zeta was still packing 60 mph winds as it approached Atlanta on Thursday morning, causing widespread power outages there. In all, the storm knocked out power to nearly 2 million people across the South, according to media reports.
St. Mary Parish spent much of the time since the weekend under a hurricane warning or a tropical storm advisory as Zeta gathered strength in the western Caribbean, hit the Yucatan and then moved into the Gulf of Mexico.
While Zeta headed northwest from the Caribbean early in the week, meteorologists predicted a sharp turn to the northeast from the central Gulf. The prediction turned out to be right.
Zeta came ashore around 4 p.m. Wednesday near the Terrebonne-Lafourche line as a Category 2 storm. Zeta was also a fast storm, cutting across southeast Louisiana at more than 20 mph.
That put St. Mary Parish on the west side of landfall, where wind and water effects tend to be less extreme.
The National Weather Service reported 26 mph winds with 33 mph gusts at Harry P. Williams Memorial Airport in Patterson just before 4 p.m. Wednesday.
By 6 p.m., sustained winds were down to 14 mph. The service was reporting 0.71 inches of rain at the airport.
The poweroutages.us website was reporting 10 of Cleco’s nearly 19,000 St. Mary customers as being without power at 8 a.m. Thursday.
But the site was also reporting more than 481,000 black-out Louisiana utility customers statewide, including more than 10,000 in Assumption, more than 27,000 in Terrebonne and more than 44,000 in Lafourche.
Orleans was reporting 194,000 customers without power.
St. Mary public schools were scheduled to reopen Thursday morning after suspending classes Wednesday. Central Catholic remained closed to in-person instruction Thursday, according to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, which was concerned about storm impacts on schools in Terrebonne and Lafourche.
The hurricane-related deaths were reported in Orleans, where a 55-year-old man was electrocuted by a downed power line, and in Biloxi, Mississippi, where an Alabama man died as he shot a video of the storm.
Although St. Mary was originally under a storm surge warning because of Zeta, the parish saw little of the effects felt during hurricanes Laura or Delta.
The Atchafalaya River at Morgan City was at 2.66 feet Wednesday night, or nearly 3½ feet below flood stage. The river rose to only 3.26 feet at 5 a.m. Thursday and was heading down again.
But Zeta was stronger to the east. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gauge at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port measured a 50-foot wave Wednesday.
The record-breaking 2020 tropical weather season may not be finished yet. On Thursday morning, the National Hurricane Center was tracking a disturbance in the eastern Caribbean and giving it a 20% chance of cyclone formation within two days.