Tropical Storm Barry is now working it’s way up The Boot after making landfall near Intracoastal City in Vermillion Parish, and the system is still expected to track just to the west of Lafayette before moving towards Alexandria, and off into north Louisiana.
The system is moving even slower than officials thought it would, which means this won’t just be a one day event. Governor John Bel Edwards says get ready to hunker down for the weekend and don’t go outside unless you need too.
Cut 11, 12 seconds, challenges
The slow-moving system is still projected to dump over a foot of rain across the south-central portion of the state. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Wilson says the new, slow moving track will complicate the situation on the roads…
Cut 5, 6 seconds, closurers
DOTD has closed 16 roads so far, mostly in coastal Parishes.
After a mostly quiet morning conditions in the Baton Rouge area are beginning to deteriorate with heavy wind gusts cutting through the city and the rain continuing at a steady pace for the last two hours. Authorities are concerned that the significant amount of rainfall will lead to a record crest at the Comite River.
As nasty as those rains will be, at least the state looks set to dodge some of the worst cast scenarios that were projected in the previous 48 hours. State Climatologist Barry Keim has the new rainfall projections for Barry.
The rainfall levels for the already saturated New Orleans have also thankfully been reduced to four to eight inches.
105,000 customers are now without power as Barry make’s his way onto land. Those outages appear to be clustered in coastal parishes, and Entergy spokesperson Lee Sabatini is warning that the power can’t be fixed until the winds fall below 30 miles per hour