It hit Louisiana as a strong Category 2 hurricane but quickly lost punch and was downgraded to a tropical storm after speeding through Mississippi and Alabama.
A fast-moving Zeta weakened to a tropical storm as it barreled northeast Thursday morning after ripping through Louisiana and Mississippi and moving through Alabama. The storm hit land Wednesday afternoon over the small village of Cocodrie, Louisiana as a strong Category 2 and then moved swiftly across the New Orleans area and into neighboring Mississippi, bringing with it both fierce winds and a storm surge. There was heavy rain at times but since the storm was so fast-moving, rain related flooding wasn’t as much of a concern. Zeta weakened over central Alabama but its strong winds continued across portions of the state and the Florida Panhandle. The National Hurricane Center said the storm was about 50 miles west of Asheville, North Carolina at 8 a.m. EDT with maximum sustained winds of 60 mph. Zeta was racing northeast at 39 mph. The National Weather Service Birmingham, Alabama office tweeted about the wind: Zeta was expected to accelerate and weaken even more as it headed through the southeastern U.S. Thursday morning and across the Mid-Atlantic states Thursday afternoon before heading over the western Atlantic by Thursday night. Zeta was forecast to be a non-tropical gale-force low later today. Nearly 2 million homes and businesses were without power across several Southern states before dawn Thursday. According to the website PowerOutage.us, about 1.8 million were without power in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Georgia had the most with more than 800,000 in the dark. The storm killed a 55-year-old man who a coroner said was electrocuted by a downed power line in New Orleans and someone in Biloxi, Mississippi whose body was found by a marina. It wasn’t clear how that person died. Waveland Mayor Mike Smith told CBS Biloxi affiliate WLOX-TV his Mississippi Gulf Coast city, which was part of the area most heavily damaged by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, took what might be its worst hit since then from Zeta. «We’re going to see a whole lot of damage in the morning,» Smith said.
