Recovery efforts are already underway to reestablish power to more than 300,000 Entergy and Cleco customers, primarily in parts of southeast Louisiana. It follows Francine making landfall in Terrebonne Parish as a category 2 hurricane with 100 mile per hour winds at 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday.
By early on this Thursday morning, the National Hurricane Center had reported that Francine was downgraded to a tropical storm with windspeeds down to 45 miles per hour. Fracine then turned into a tropical depression in south-central Mississippi shortly after dawn. The storm system was still headed northeast at 12 miles per hour towards Mississippi, as it continues to knock down trees and power lines, leaving behind structural damage and causing flooding, including the areas in and around both Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Shortly before making landfall, National Weather Service meteorologist Hannah Lisney had described the path of Francine continuing to shift eastward. “I could see an additional minor shift to the east, just based on, you know, looking at some things and what NHC has been doing here. But I don’t expect it to drastically shift at this point.”
Jefferson Parish became one of the areas were authorities had issued a mandatory evacuation order for residents outside the levee protection system. That included Lafitte, Barataria, Crownpoint, and Grand Isle. Parish president Cynthia Lee Sheng said many residents heeded the warnings. “We are expecting life-threatening storm surge. So A lot of people got off the island, which that was good news.”
Since Hurricane Ida, Jefferson Parish leaders added live cameras to Lafitte and Grand Isle, to avoid losing communication and to monitor storm impacts. Many coastal parishes had also issued curfews for residents ahead of Hurricane Francine making landfall as a precautionary measure, as Lafourche Parish president Archie Chaisson explained. “We fully expect the power to be out to most of the parish as the storm kind of continues to move through, and then we're hopefully going to have that restored as quickly as possible.” Curfews were expected to expire once the storm moved far enough to the northeast, into Mississippi.
Residents in Denham Springs, east of Baton Rouge, were also taking precautions ahead of the approaching storm. That included Lisa Francis. As she filled sandbags earlier in the week, Francis said she couldn’t seem to shake the memory of the devastating flooding she endured in 2016. “Slept on the floor for six nights and didn’t know where anybody was. No one could call me and realized after one the seventh day that I’d lost my home to seven feet of water.” Francis recalls having just paid-off her house in the spring of 2016, only to lose her home that August.
