Nearly 750,000 homes and businesses in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi are in the dark after losing power due to Delta, which hit the U.S. Gulf Coast as a hurricane and has since been downgraded to a tropical depression.
According to the data aggregator PowerOutage.us, 743,584 utility customers are without power across the three states as of 10:40 a.m. ET Saturday. The highest number of outages is in Louisiana with more than 570,000.
Delta made landfall on Friday evening as a Category 2 near Creole, Louisiana, with maximum sustained winds of 100 mph, Just six weeks earlier, the Louisiana coastal area was battered by Hurricane Laura.
The storm then moved directly over Lake Charles, a waterfront city about 30 miles inland where homes and buildings were already damaged by Laura.
Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter, who rode out Delta’s arrival downtown, said tarps were flying off homes across the city and piles of wreckage were being blown around, some of it floating in the surge of ocean water.
“I’m in a building right now with a tarp on it and just the sound of the tarp flapping on the building sounds like someone pounding with a sledgehammer on top of the building,“ Hunter said. ”It’s pretty intense.”
In Lake Arthur, Delta’s winds peeled shingles off the roof of L’Banca Albergo, an eight-room boutique hotel in what used to be a bank.
“I probably don’t have a shingle left on the top of this hotel,” owner Roberta Palermo said as the winds gusted outside.