The storm made landfall some 20 miles from where Laura touched down a few weeks ago, intensifying the devastation the state has experienced during a brutal hurricane season.
BATON ROUGE, La. — Hurricane Delta tore across Louisiana late Friday, leaving a trail of destruction as it raked over the state with shredding winds and pounding rainfall, stirring flash floods and pummeling areas that had already been hobbled by earlier storms. Residents and officials were just beginning on Saturday morning to assess the extent of the damage wrought by the storm, which retreaded ground that had been battered in late August by Hurricane Laura. Delta made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane before rapidly weakening. Still, Delta hurled debris still piled up after Laura, and toppled utility poles and power lines that had just been restored. “People are feeling a little despondent,” Nic Hunter, the mayor of Lake Charles, said in an interview on Saturday morning. “To go through what we went through six weeks ago, and have another punch in the gut like we received last night, is just unimaginable.” The storm made landfall less than 20 miles east of where Laura struck, yet Delta’s path deviated just enough from Laura’s to strike parts of Louisiana that had experienced more of a glancing blow in the earlier storm. A span of the state reaching from Lake Charles to Lafayette received a direct hit from Delta, turning roadways into rapids and knocking trees down onto the roofs of homes and into tangles of utility lines. In some parts of the state, meteorologists said the storm dumped as much as 15 inches of rain. Nearly 600,000 customers in Louisiana were without power on Saturday morning, with thousands more reported in Texas and Mississippi. In Lake Charles, the flooding had been more severe than that from Hurricane Laura, a Category 4 storm that was largely wind-driven. “It just shows you that every storm has its own DNA,” Mr. Hunter said. On Saturday, many homes were inundated with water, drainage laterals were overflowing and debris was scattered across the city.
