Oct. 11 (UPI) — Tropical Depression Delta drenched southwestern Louisiana with nearly a foot and a half of rainfall, causing flash floods and heavy winds that cut power to hundreds of thousands Saturday.
At 4 p.m. the National Hurricane Center had downgraded the Category 2 hurricane to a tropical storm with winds moving about 12 miles per hour about 80 miles west-southwest of Tupelo, Miss.
River flooding is expected to continue through much of next week across the Calcasieu and Vermilion river basins in Louisiana, the weather agency said.
Heavy rains seeped into homes and stranded cars in the Lake Charles metropolitan area, including the towns of Iowa and Sulphur in Calcasieu Parish, and as far north as Alexandria, resulting in numerous reports of flash flooding in the region, NOLA reported.
More than 17 inches of rain fell in the town of Iowa, and by 9:30 p.m. Friday, Lake Charles also saw more than 16 inches of rainfall.
The area was still recovering from the Category 4 Hurricane Laura, which made landfall six weeks ago, less than 12 miles west of where Delta came ashore.
Delta, which made landfall Friday with 100 mph winds, began to lose strength as it moved inland.
During the evening, gusts of wind knocked out power across the western half of the state’s coastline as power poles and trees fell.
Statewide, 595,963 customers reported outages, including over 75,000 outages in Calcasieu Parish alone, according to poweroutage.us.
As the storm moved further inland Saturday morning, power was also cut in Texas and Mississippi. In Texas, there were 104,389 power outages, and in Mississippi there were 80,319 power outages.
