Nearly 750,000 residents and businesses in three states are without power after Delta made its was through the U.S. Gulf Coast as a hurricane before being downgraded to a tropical depression.
Data from PowerOutage.us shows a total of 743,584 utility customers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas were without power as of 10:40 a.m. EST on Saturday, NBC News reports. Louisiana reportedly experienced the most outages with more than 570,000 customers losing power as of Saturday morning.
Delta made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane near Creole, Louisiana on Friday night with maximum winds of 100 MPH, just six weeks after the Louisiana coast was hit by Hurricane Laura, NBC News reports. The storm then moved directly over Lake Charles, which had already experienced significant damage to homes and buildings brought on by Laura.
Lake Charles mayor Nic Hunter said tarps were flying off homes and piles of wreckage were blown around throughout the city, which included some debris floating into the ocean.
“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 via NBC News. ”It’s pretty intense.”
Roberta Palmero, who owns L'Banca Albergo in Lake Arthur, told NBC News Delta's winds peeled shingles off the roof of the eight-room boutique hotel, adding, "I probably don't have a shingle left on top of this hotel."
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