The latest deaths were attributed to three accidental drownings.
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East Baton Rouge Parish Emergency Management Director JoAnne Moreau told CNN that the body of an elderly man was recovered.
Harrowing rescues were posted on social media as emergency rescue teams continued to evacuate residents Monday in East Baton Rouge, Livingston and Ascension parishes. “We do not know when the flood waters will recede, and they will continue to rise in some areas”.
In some areas, clean-up work was already beginning, with members of the Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge dumping water-damaged pews on a growing pile of debris outside.
In Ascension Parish alone, south of Baton Rouge, almost 15,000 homes have been affected by the flooding, and that number is expected to grow.
Many people have gone from shelter to shelter, and the parish is still in emergency mode.
“It was an absolute act of God”.
“Good God the water wasn’t high” on the interstate, she said. He says they’re staying at the home of Baton Rouge sports radio personality Charles Hanagriff.
“Everybody got caught off guard”, he said. The National Weather Service issued renewed flood warnings.
Jones says there’s a chance of more rain all week, but the individual systems shouldn’t produce more than a half-inch and will have little or no effect on the flooding situation.
“It’s coming up fast, man”, said Best, who was wearing little more than shorts and a pair of boat shoes.
“It’s going to be hard”, he said.
Close to 2ft of rain fell over a 48-hour period in parts of southern Louisiana, causing residents to scramble to safety from flooded homes and cars. Another hard-hit area, Livingston, got almost 22 inches over the same stretch. Edwards and his family were also forced to flee the Governor’s mansion after chest-high water flooded the basement. He said so far, 15,000 to 20,000 people have been rescued.
Nearly a third of all homes have flooded in Ascension Parish, Louisiana after the region’s levee system failed to keep floodwaters at bay. They’re getting people to safe, higher ground, but not all the way to where the shelters are, which have food water, places to sleep.
The major storms have moved away, but the slow-moving water was expected to take days to fully recede.
After a night in the shelter, Marc Matherne planned to head back to see if he could help stranded neighbors.
“I don’t have flood insurance so everything is gone”, he said. All was going well until one month ago, when her home went up in flames, she said.
More than 20,000 have been rescued or evacuated, they said.
“It’s not over”, the Governor John Bel Edwards said yesterday. “I was like, ‘How are we going to get out of this?'”
The people of Ferguson, Missouri, held several events this weekend to mark the second anniversary of the death of Michael Brown. In St. James Parish, authorities called for volunteers to help fill sandbags. He criticized government officials for closing roads, blocking boats from reaching launch areas.
“You have the Olympics, you got the election”.
But going out on the water carries dangers, too. More than 1,700 rescue personnel had been mobilized with hundreds of thousands of sand bags deployed in different neighbourhoods.
The Louisiana National Guard reported that its soldiers rescued almost 500 people and 61 pets by boat, helicopter and high-water (high-clearance) vehicles in the 24 hours between Friday and Saturday.
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Despite the dangers, people ventured out.
