Hurricane Barry downgraded amid flooding, property damage and power outages

Flooding hit Louisiana and parts of Mississippi on Sunday 14 July after Hurricane Barry came ashore on Saturday 13 July bringing intense rain.

The US National Hurricane Center said Barry made landfall as a hurricane, but due to difficulty pinpointing its centre the exact times and locations were unconfirmed.

Once on land the weather system began to lose strength and was downgraded to a Tropical Depression over Northwestern Louisiana on Sunday, however, it was still predicted to dump up to 20 inches of rain. Swollen rivers breached levees in some areas and strong winds caused property damage, while an estimated 100,000 people are without power.

New Orleans, which has been on alert, avoided the worst of the storm. The coast guard airlifted 12 people to safety from flooded homes in Terrebonne Parish, in southern Louisiana.

On Saturday evening, global property analytics firm CoreLogic published data analysis showing that 339,480 homes in Louisiana were “at moderate-to-extreme risk of tropical storm-driven flash flood damage from Tropical Storm Barry”.

The firm said that in the likely impacted metropolitan and micropolitan areas of Louisiana, 32.6 percent of homes are inside a ‘Special Flood Hazard Area’, which requires homeowners to purchase flood insurance when their mortgages are backed by the federal government. Further hydrological analysis of flash flood risk by the firm estimated that in the likely impacted areas 26 percent of the homes have moderate-to-extreme flash flood risk.

In this analysis, CoreLogic data includes only single-family residential properties likely to be impacted by a lower category storm.

CoreLogic analysis said: “The area along the Mississippi River, where concern is highest, appears to be able to withstand the amount of flooding expected. After Hurricane Katrina, $14 billion of levee and pumping capability improvements were made along the river; this event is not expected to cause catastrophic problems given these enhancements.”

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