Before taking off to fly across the ravaged Western Louisiana after Hurricane Delta moved on through and was on its way to Mississippi, Governor John Bel Edwards addressed the media out front of the Department of Public Safety headquarters.
“The highest rainfall totals were in Lake Charles with over 15 inches over the past 48 hours,” Edwards said leading off his comments. “Additionally the Baton Rouge-area received 10 inches during that same time. So obviously this was a very big storm, although it wasn’t as powerful as Laura, it appears to have been a big storm that produced a significant amount of damage.”
The Governor then address the electricity situation Louisiana finds itself in:
“With respect to power outages, oddly enough because Hurricane Delta was much larger in terms of its wind field, there were more power outages from Delta than there were from Laura,” Edwards explained. “The peak was 688,000 outages across Louisiana as of Noon.”
By the time the Governor started his press conference, he indicated the number had gone down to around 600,000.
“Restoration appears to be progressing more rapidly than was the case after Laura,” Edwards said. “That’s because the damage to the infrastructure is not as significant, but that’s still an awful lot of power outages.”
So while the Metro area of New Orleans still has the lights on, Governor Edwards says: “Twenty-five percent of all customers in Louisiana are without power as we speak,” Edwards spoke. “The good news is we have about 10,000 utility workers in state working on this.”