At least six people dead and millions of homes without power as Hurricane Zeta devastates the US

Atlanta fire crews worked to free a man trapped in his third-floor bedroom after a tree came crashing down on a home
AP
29 October 2020

At least six people have died and millions of homes  left without power after Hurricane Zeta  surged across the US.

A category 2 hurricane when it hit the southeastern Louisiana coast on Wednesday with winds over 100mph, the National Hurricane Center said Zeta had weakened to a post-tropical storm on Thursday.

More than 2.6 million homes and businesses were without power in Atlanta. Widespread power outages occurred across seven states from Louisiana to the south Atlantic seaboard. Some places could be in the dark for days.

The storm was still buffeting North Carolina and southeastern Virginia with gusty winds, but it was moving along at 53 mph (85 km/h), meaning no single place was in the eye of the storm for too long.

Some voting places were affected and hundreds of schools closed or planned to open late across from the Gulf Coast to the Carolinas. 

Tropical Storm Zeta swept through leaving millions of homes without power
AP

Officials said life-threatening conditions would last into the day, with Zeta crossing the mid-Atlantic states as a tropical storm before moving offshore around Delaware and southern New Jersey.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said the most severe destruction - what he described as "catastrophic damage" - appears to be on the barrier island of Grand Isle in Jefferson Parish, where Zeta punched three breaches in the levee, the only levee failure from the storm in the state. Edwards says he ordered the Louisiana National Guard to fly in soldiers to assist with search and rescue efforts, including door-to-door checks on property.
The governor also urged people to be cautious during the recovery.  
"Oddly enough, it isn't the storms that typically produce the most injuries and the fatalities. It's the cleanup efforts. It's the use of generators. It's the carbon monoxide poisoning. It's the electrocution that comes from power lines. So, now is the time to be very, very cautious out there," Edwards said Thursday.
Four people died in Alabama and Georgia when trees fell on homes, authorities said. The dead included two people pinned to their bed when a tree crashed through, Gwinnett County fire officials said.
A sailboat sits among debris along Highway 90 in Pass Christian, Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Zeta, which passed through Wednesday. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
AP
In Mississippi, Leslie Richardson, 58, drowned when he was trapped in rising seawater in Biloxi after taking video of the raging storm, Harrison County Coroner Brian Switzer said. Richardson and another man exited a floating car and desperately clung to a tree before his strength "just gave out," Switzer said.  
A 55-year-old man was electrocuted by a downed power line in New Orleans, a Louisiana coroner said.  
Morning rush hour commuters in Atlanta had to dodge downed trees and navigate their way past signals with no power. Trees blocked lanes on two interstates, the Georgia Department of Transportation said.
The storm raged onshore Wednesday afternoon in the small village of Cocodrie, Louisiana, and then moved swiftly across the New Orleans area.  
Damage from Zeta extended far inland. More than 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of the coast, Mayor Sheldon Day of Thomasville, Alabama, said hundreds of fallen trees blocked roads and crashed into houses, with canopies at some gas stations blown over.
"At one point, every major thoroughfare was blocked by trees," Day said. Hundreds of miles away in North Carolina, a highway was blocked by a toppled tree in Winston-Salem and Wake Forest University canceled classes for the day.
Zeta was the 27th named storm of a historically busy Atlantic hurricane season with more than a month left to go. It set a new record as the 11th named storm to make landfall in the continental U.S. in a single season, well beyond the nine storms that hit in 1916.  

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