Delta made landfall as the 10th named storm to hit the United States this year, and six weeks after Hurricane Laura hit Cameron Parish.
Hurricane Delta delivered yet another assault of wind and storm surge on Friday on a stretch of the Louisiana coast that had been eviscerated just six weeks ago by Hurricane Laura, one of the most powerful storms to hit the state. Delta, which had weakened as it approached the United States, made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane at roughly 6 p.m. local time in Creole, La., sweeping in with 100-mile-per-hour winds, according to the National Hurricane Center. After midnight, it was downgraded to a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 60 miles per hour. But as dawn approached, storm surge warnings were still in effect for portions of Louisiana, and five to 10 inches of rain were expected in some areas of the state. The outer bands of the storm had arrived earlier on Friday, lashing communities reaching from the Texas coast to as far east as Baton Rouge, where the authorities said that nearly two dozen emergency calls included high-water rescues. Residents already weary from a long and punishing hurricane season restocked their pantries, boarded up their homes and either cleared out or hunkered down in advance of the storm. Delta is expected to cut a path similar to that of Laura, which wrought an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in damage, upending lives in communities that were struggling to claw their way back. Across the southwestern part of the state, officials braced for even a slight rerun of Laura. “People are frustrated, people are emotional, people are fatigued,” said Nic Hunter, the mayor of Lake Charles, where power was finally fully restored this week and where thousands of homes remain uninhabitable. Mr. Hunter said he worried that residents would try to ride out Delta in compromised structures that could collapse completely, though he added that more people had evacuated this week than for Laura. Still, there was no escaping the bruised feelings. “We just went through a major catastrophe,” he said, “and in our wildest dreams, no one would have thought that six weeks later we would be going through the same thing.” Delta was the 10th named storm to make landfall in the continental United States this year, breaking the previous record of nine storms in 1916, according to Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University. At a news conference on Friday afternoon, Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said he was praying that Delta, the 25th named storm of the busy Atlantic hurricane season, would rush quickly through the state, and stay on a projected path that kept it to the east of Lake Charles, sparing it from the storm’s more destructive eastern flank.
