“You’ve got all of these people who hunt and fish who have more experience than the average first responder”, he said.
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Kieserman says the flooding in Louisiana is the worst natural disaster to strike the United States since Superstorm Sandy.
Amid scattered reports of looting, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said parishes with widespread damage were being placed under curfew as of Tuesday night.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Thousands of people in southern Louisiana hunkered down in shelters Monday, forced out of their homes by intense flooding that took many people by surprise.
The disaster has even drawn the attention of deep-pocketed celebrities.
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. Eleven deaths have been attributed to the storm.
Six people have died, Devin George, the state registrar for vital records, said Monday. A 66-year-old man’s body was found in the Sherwood Forest area.
“That’s never happened before”, said the governor, whose family relocated to a state police facility in the Baton Rouge area. “Even if the sun has come out in your area, we do not know when the floodwaters will recede, and they will continue to rise in some areas”. As waters begin to recede in parts of Louisiana, some residents struggled to return to flood-damaged homes on foot, in cars and by boat.
Residents evacuate with food in ice chests on Providence Boulevard in Hammond, La., where flood waters inundated homes after heavy rains in the region Saturday, Aug. 13, 2016.
“I’m not going to lie, I cried uncontrollably”, he said.
Now he has to rip out the drywall and insulation and de-humidify the house as fast as he can so the mold won’t spread.
Gov. John Bel Edwards’ office said Tuesday that Acadia, Ascension, East Feliciana, Iberia, Lafayette, Pointe Coupee, St. Landry and Vermillion parishes were approved for federal assistance.
Louisiana’s economic development office is encouraging business owners to register for federal disaster aid and to look at other available support services at www.OpportunityLouisiana.com.
Those with flood insurance will be in a much better place to begin rebuilding – but there won’t be many of them.
An additional evacuation recommendation was made in Vermilion Parish.
Pounding rains swamped parts of southeast Louisiana so that whole subdivisions and shopping centers appeared isolated by floodwaters, which have claimed at least three lives.
Experts estimate that from August 12 to August 14, the equivalent of 4 trillion gallons of water – enough to fill more than 6 million Olympic-size pools – fell on southern Louisiana.
Lori Steele, spokeswoman for the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office, says the sheriff estimates about 75 percent of the homes are “a total loss”. About 138,000 people live in the parish.
One of the worries, the governor said, is that as the rain lessens in the next several hours, people will become complacent and feel too at ease in areas where waters may still be rising for several days, getting in cars in areas that could still be risky.
In high-water vehicles, boats and helicopters, emergency crews hurried to rescue scores of south Louisiana residents as the governor warned it was not over.
Noel Michael, a school teacher, and her husband Deryl, a retired Marine, spent Saturday piling sandbags around their home in the Livingston Parish town of Walker but it became fruitless.
Retired LSU football and basketball announcer Jim Hawthorne has been rescued from his Baton Rouge home amid catastrophic flooding in southern Louisiana. It’s a tractor trailer equipped with metal cages, generator, battery power and a cleaning station.
The administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is coming to Louisiana to meeting with state officials on the ongoing flooding there.
The federal government declared a major disaster in the state, specifically in the parishes of Tangipahoa, St. Helena, East Baton Rouge and Livingston. State officials say disaster declarations for other parishes affected by flooding could come this week. Key, an insurance adjuster, fled his home as the flood water was rising with his wife and three children and returned today to assess the damage. “We’re talking about places that have literally never flooded before”, said Anthony “Ace” Cox, who started a Facebook group to help collect information about where people were stranded.
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Rivers and creeks were still dangerously bloated south of Baton Rouge as water drained toward the Gulf of Mexico. In one area, Ascension Parish, officials said some small towns have already been inundated.
