Hurricane Laura kills six but causes less damage than forecast

The remnants of Hurricane Laura doused Arkansas on Friday and were due to bring rain to the US east coast over the weekend.

Since downgraded to a tropical depression, the hurricane had proved less damaging than feared, despite arriving in Louisiana this week as one of the most powerful recorded in the United States.

The storm killed at least six people in Louisiana, including four who were crushed when trees fell on to homes in separate incidents. It damaged buildings in Louisiana and Texas and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of residents.

US president Donald Trump is expected to head to the Gulf Coast over the weekend to survey the damage.

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The storm was forecast to drop heavy rain over Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri and Kentucky as it headed out to the east coast, the National Weather Service said.

At its peak upon making landfall on Thursday morning, Laura had maximum sustained winds of 241km/h, faster than even Hurricane Katrina, which sparked deadly levee breaches in New Orleans in 2005 after arriving with wind speeds of 200km/h.

A potentially dangerous 6m storm surge that forecasters had predicted could move 64km inland was avoided when Laura tacked east just before landfall, Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards said. That meant a mighty gush of water was not fully pushed up the Calcasieu Ship Channel, which would have given the storm surge an easy path far inland.

Neverthless, Laura was “the most powerful storm to ever make landfall in Louisiana”, he said.

The hurricane tore through Louisiana on Thursday, flattening buildings across a wide swath of the state before moving into Arkansas with heavy rains.

Its powerful gusts uprooted trees. In addition to the four people killed when tress fell on to homes, the state’s department of health said there were two fatalities attributed to the hurricane – a man who drowned while aboard a sinking boat and a man who had carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a generator in his home.

Chemical plume

In Westlake, in western Louisana, a chemical plant caught fire when hit by Laura, and the flames continued to send a chlorine-infused plume of smoke skyward nearly 24 hours after landfall. Buildings were levelled in many parts of the state and a wall of water almost 5m in height crashed into the tiny coastal town of Cameron.

Residents of Lake Charles heard Laura's winds and the sound of breaking glass as the storm passed through the city of 78,000 with winds of 135km/h and gusts up to 200km/h in the hour after landfall.

National Guard troops cleared debris from roads in Lake Charles on Thursday afternoon. There were downed power lines in streets around the city, and the winds tipped a few semi-trucks onto their sides.

The windows of the city's 22-storey Capital One Tower were blown out, street signs were toppled and pieces of wooden fence and debris from collapsed buildings lay scattered in the flooded streets, video footage on Twitter and Snapchat showed.

Lake Charles resident Borden Wilson, a 33-year-old paediatrician, was anxious about his return home after evacuating to Minden, Louisiana.

“I never even boarded up my windows. I didn’t think to do that. This is the first hurricane I’ve experienced. I just hope my house is fine,” he said in a telephone interview. – Reuters