“I’m confident more parishes will be added as we move forward”, Edwards said during a press conference that included Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate.
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The Louisiana flooding is likely the worst natural disaster in the United States since Superstorm Sandy hammered the East Coast in 2012, according to the Red Cross.
The governor said he is anxious about “battle fatigue” setting in as rescuers and residents deal with day upon day of stress. About 30,000 people had been rescued, including a 78-year-old woman who spent a night in a tree, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson told CNN.
Raymond Lieteau, 48, returned to his home in the Woodlands neighborhood of Baton Rouge to survey the damage Tuesday and begin cleaning up. The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office said it also made four looting arrests.
Eight Acadiana parishes were added to the federal disaster declaration list Tuesday with Gov. John Bel Edwards promising other parishes and victims won’t be forgotten. There were 14,000 people staying in shelters, mostly in the state capital Baton Rouge and surrounding communities, he said.
“There are still a lot of people who are suffering”, he said.
While flooding receded in parts of southern Louisiana, other areas saw rising waters.
The number of confirmed deaths due to severe flooding in the USA state of Louisiana has increased to eight, and tens of thousands of people have been rescued, Governor John Bel Edwards said at a press conference on Tuesday.
At least eight people have died in the floods, which started Friday when a torrent of about 2 feet of rain inundated the state. The storms threatening Texas are part of the same system that deluged Louisiana, although it is now less potent, said NWS meteorologist Gavin Phillips.
David Key used a small boat to get to his house in Prairieville and said it had taken on 5 inches of “muddy nasty bayou water”. There were fish and thousands of spiders, and mold had started to grow. Although the water was receding quickly, people remained stranded.
In Livingston Parish, one of the hardest-hit areas with about 138,000 people, an official estimated that 75 percent of the homes were a “total loss”.
Steele remained upbeat, calling it a “good day” because the parish hasn’t seen any storm-related deaths and the rescues are no longer people in their attics, but people who are running low on supplies in flooded areas.
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“I can not stress to our residents enough the magnitude of this situation”, Meredith Conger, planning and intelligence officer at Ascension Parish Homeland Security, said in a video statement Monday night. In one dramatic rescue in Baton Rouge captured on video, rescuers on a boat pulled a woman from a vehicle that had just slipped under water.
