BATON ROUGE, La. – An act of God is how some are describing it, a catastrophic 48-hour torrent of rain that sent thousands of people in Louisiana scrambling for safety and left many wondering how a region accustomed to hurricanes could get caught off guard so badly.
At least six people have been killed and more than 20,000 have had to be rescued since Friday in some of the worst flooding the state has ever seen.
As of Monday, the rain had mostly stopped, but rivers and creeks in many areas were still dangerously bloated and new places were getting hit by flooding. In areas south of Baton Rouge, people were filling sandbags, protecting their houses and bracing for the worst as the water worked its way south. In Ascension Parish officials said some small towns have already been swamped by floods.
More than 11,000 people were staying in shelters, with a movie studio and a civic center that usually hosts concerts and ballets pressed into service.
“It was an absolute act of God. We’re talking about places that have literally never flooded before,” said Anthony “Ace” Cox, who started a Facebook group to help collect information about where people were stranded. He was in Baton Rouge to help his parents and grandparents, who got flooded out.
“Everybody got caught off guard,” he said.
Forecasters said one reason was the sheer, almost off-the-charts intensity of the storm and the difficulty of predicting how bad it would be.
Meteorologist Ken Graham of the National Weather Service’s office in Slidell said forecasters alerted people days in advance of the storms. The forecasts Thursday were for 8 inches of rain, with higher totals expected in some areas.
But Graham emphasized that forecasting exactly how much rain is going to fall and where is nearly impossible. “It’s one thing to say we’re getting set up for a lot of rain. It’s another thing to say where is this going to be,” he said.
Some areas, such as the town of Zachary, received more than 2 feet of rain in a 48-hour period that ended Saturday morning. Another hard-hit area, Livingston, got nearly 22 inches over the same stretch.
Graham said the odds of that much rain were 1 in 500 in some places, and 1 in 1,000 in others.
Those rainfalls sent river levels in the region to historic highs – in some cases shattering the old records mostly set during the 1983 floods.
