On Friday night, Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter gave an update on the conditions in the city as Delta pushed inland.
He also noted how the city is faring while still recovering from Hurricane Laura.
"To have us go through what we went through six weeks ago with Laura and then this, it is quite a blow to the city."
Hunter says that cleanup efforts from Hurricane Delta will make the ongoing cleanup from Hurricane Laura a Herculean task.
"Laura was the fifth strongest hurricane to hit the United States of America and the strongest hurricane to hit Louisiana in the last 150 years and to have another major hurricane right after it is another punch to the gut," he said. "We already had an enormous amount of debris that our cleanup crews said they haven't seen since Katrina. Now we're just adding to it with Delta."
The main concern from citizens was the safety of their families, said Hunter. "A home is a cherished asset, but it can be replaced. A life cannot be replaced."
He says that the local government's main concern is also the safety of citizens and the preservation of human life.
Hunter estimates that between 6,000 to 8,000 citizens are still displaced due to Laura. He says that even more have evacuated for Delta than did for Laura six weeks ago.
"The emotional toll and the raw nature of what people went through six weeks ago is very much on everyone's mind. There's a lot of people who stayed six weeks ago who now have homes that are not in any shape prepared for a storm. There are thousands of tarps on roofs, thousands of holes in homes and some don't even have homes."
Despite those conditions, Hunter says he's glad that people evacuated. Delta, he adds, will be more of a water or flooding event for Lake Charles.
"Every storm has a different DNA," he says. "Laura was catastrophic, but I think we'll see more flooding from Delta than we had from Laura even though Delta's winds were not as strong as Laura's."
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