Southwest Louisiana Reeling From Hurricane Laura

 As I write this, dawn is breaking on coastal southwestern Louisiana as Hurricane Laura pushes deeper inland toward Shreveport and southern Arkansas.  

Most of the windows in the Capital One building
in downtown Lake Charles were blown out
Photo by Stephen Jones

There's not a lot of confirmed news out of the hardest hit area yet. It's still early. But from what little I've seen so far, it's terrible to say the least.   

Laura crashed ashore in Cameron, Louisiana last night with top winds of 150 mph. That's just shy of Category 5 status, but the categories don't matter much here. 

This was one catastrophic hurricane.  The population center in the area that seems to have taken the biggest hit is Lake Charles, Louisiana, population about 78,000.

Video on social media show large sections of the roof at the Golden Nugget Casino and Hotel blowing off. At least half of the windows of the 22-story Capital One building in downtown Lake Charles blew out, and there is surely extensive interior damage to that building. 

I'm not sure on this yet, but the expected storm surge might not have been quite as high as some forecasts suggested. But nobody as of this writing has been able to report yet out of coastal locations hardest hit by the surge. 

I suspect, due to the track of Laura, ,that the highest storm surge was east of Lake Charles. That's a good thing, since the area with the suspected highest storm surges are very sparsely populated.

Probably the best way to see and follow what happened with Hurricane Laura is to follow hurricane chaser Josh Morgerman (@iCyclone) on Twitter.   As always with his hurricane chasing, Morgerman, is releasing some amazing footage and reporting.

One thing that concerns me the most is people who couldn't evacuate.  A big proportion of the people in the worst hit areas are living in poverty.  

Hurricane Laura was huge and scary as seen
in this satellite view Wednesday afternoon

Lucky people like me, if I had lived in Lake Charles, would have easily been able to collect my dogs, important papers, medications, devices, momentoes and such to get in the truck and drive away well before the storm hit.  I can afford to stay in a hotel or whatever in safety until the storm passed.

What about people who had no car, no money, no way to move out of the way?  I imagine some people were bused out, but I don't think everyone was helped.  I wonder how they fared in possibly flimsy house. 

Ferocious hurricane force winds will continue in western Louisiana and southern Arkansas this morning, as it will take a few hours for Laura to weaken as it pushes inland.  

The governor of Louisiana just told MSNBC that he was aware of one death from the storm, that of a 14  year old girl.  I'm sure the death toll will rise as search and rescue people head out into the worst of the hurricane zone.

As always, Covid-19 complicates things, especially in terms of putting people in evacuation centers if their houses are destroyed or damaged. The Lake Charles area currently has the highest Covid transmission rate in Louisiana.

I'm sure there will be news updates as we go through the day.