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After a brief life as a Category 1 hurricane, Barry was downgraded to a tropical storm as it made landfall and continued to weaken. But the threat of flooding brought on by the storm’s incessant rain remained high, particularly in and around Baton Rouge, as the system churned north.
“This is just the beginning,” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said at an afternoon news conference. “I ask everyone to stay vigilant and be safe. This has always been projected to be a rain-flood event and it will be.”
The governor said that officials were closely watching the Amite and Comite rivers. These rain-swollen waterways contributed to the catastrophic flooding in and around Baton Rouge in August 2016 that killed 13 people and displaced tens of thousands.
The Comite River’s crest could be “very close to if not slightly higher than the crest in August of 2016,” Edwards said. “That is obviously not good news here.”
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New Orleans may receive only 2 to 4 inches of rain through Monday morning, while the Baton Rouge area could see an additional 6 to 10 inches, said Danielle Manning, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
The storm came ashore near Intracoastal City, Louisiana, a low-lying industrial town in Vermilion Parish, south of Lafayette. The storm moved north and west, with maximum sustained winds of 65 mph. It was expected to plow through the state toward the Arkansas border.
More than 121,000 people were without power in Louisiana as of Saturday afternoon, according to the state’s largest energy companies.
In New Orleans this past week, many had feared that the storm would deluge an already-engorged Mississippi River, straining the multibillion-dollar flood protection system put in place since Hurricane Katrina struck 14 summers ago. But some of those fears were assuaged Saturday, when officials said that the river was predicted to crest at 17.1 feet by Monday — about 2 feet lower than earlier estimates. Although flood stage for the city is at 17 feet, most of the fortresslike levees and flood walls are at least 20 feet high.