Tropical Storm Lee gives Gulf Coast a soaking
Tropical Storm Lee pounded the Gulf Coast on Saturday with heavy rainfall and tidal surges, forcing evacuations of some areas but leaving others, including New Orleans, relatively unscathed — although officials warned that the sloppy, slow-moving storm was capable of causing more trouble.
“We’re not out of the woods,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at a Saturday afternoon news conference. “Don’t go to sleep on this storm.... The intensity of it is still there, and the wind and the water can still cause great damage.”
Lee, which intensified from a tropical depression Friday, is a large, lopsided system, with much of the precipitation on the northeast side — the side facing New Orleans — and tropical-storm-force winds extending out 230 miles. Late Saturday afternoon, it was southwest of the city and “drifting erratically” to the north at a mere 4 mph, the National Weather Service reported. High winds and heavy rain are likely through Sunday or Monday.
New Orleans, which was inundated in 2005 by floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina, remained on alert Saturday, closing floodgates along its upgraded levee system and keeping swift-water rescue crews at the ready. But none had been called into action yet. Landrieu said only a few homes had been affected by water from rain that pooled in city streets. About 14,000 homes in the metro area were without power, however.
A more troubling situation was unfolding south of the city, where winds from Lee were blowing water from the Gulf of Mexico into the small communities of Jean Lafitte, Barataria and Crown Point.
A mandatory evacuation order for those areas was issued Saturday by Jefferson Parish President John F. Young Jr., who spent the day coordinating a response from a dump truck as water sloshed into parts of these communities, which are just outside of the New Orleans-area levee system.
“It’s not like the entire place is underwater, but certain places are,” Young said in a phone interview, adding that only “two or three houses” had been flooded. “Right now, we’re acting out of an abundance of caution. We don’t want to have people trapped in there.”
Mississippi and Louisiana have declared states of emergency, and the Weather Service has issued a tropical storm warning that stretches from the Florida Panhandle to the Louisiana-Texas state line.
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