Francine leaves behind a trail of damage in Louisiana
AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Houma, Louisiana, on the evening of Sept. 11, highlighting the damage left behind by Hurricane Francine.
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00:00Tony, you have entered the eyewall. It still looks at least a little breezy out there. What's going on out there?
00:07Well, Jeff, um, I'm a meteorologist and I focus mainly on convective severe weather, so hurricane's not my specialty,
00:14but the one tropical class that I took reminded me that when you get into the eye, things are calm.
00:20This is not calm.
00:22This is the lightest we've seen in the last few minutes,
00:25but we're still seeing some pretty hefty gusts here, probably 50, 60 miles per hour.
00:29In fact, standing out here,
00:31I am probably having the hardest time actually staying stationary than I've had probably through all the live hits I've done.
00:38So the wind has also shifted direction.
00:40So the shelter that we took behind this big brick building isn't really as direct as it was about an hour or so ago.
00:45So we are seeing those winds changing directions on us a little bit here.
00:48So that is providing a little bit more in my face wind as opposed to what I was seeing about an hour ago.
00:54But that wind has certainly created some problems here.
00:57Show you some video. We just got this in here.
00:59This was some of the stuff that we shot in Houma, Louisiana,
01:02as we were dealing with the tail end of the eye
01:05and we were seeing all sorts of stuff, power lines down.
01:07We were seeing power poles, a lot of them down, not so much from the wind itself,
01:11but from the debris the wind was throwing into them.
01:14So a lot of tree branches or pieces of roof hitting some of these wires
01:18were enough to take down some of those poles.
01:20They were blocking some of the streets there for a while.
01:22We know crews were running around that area.
01:24We've seen several running up and down the area we've been at.
01:27We saw some roof damage from some areas as well.
01:29That included some industrial buildings that had almost their entire roof peeled off.
01:34We saw a little bit of that as well.
01:36A lot of tree damage in the area.
01:38So we're seeing mainly most light tree damage.
01:41Maybe the branches, maybe some bigger limbs.
01:43We have seen a few full trees that have been tipped over,
01:47but for the most part, certainly not as bad as it could be.
01:50So that is some good news for us there.
01:52But again, as we are kind of been sitting in these strong winds
01:55for the better part of the last two or three hours,
01:57so they have been sustained probably about 40, 50 miles per hour
02:00for the last several hours.
02:01And we're going to continue that through the rest of the evening, Jeff.
02:03All right, Tony, we appreciate your report there from the eye,
02:06the not so quiet eye of still Hurricane Francine in Houma, Louisiana,
02:12in Terrebonne Parish there,
02:13the same parish that is a county equivalent there in coastal Louisiana
02:18where landfall occurred just two hours ago.
02:20Tony, we'll look forward to more reports from you.
02:22Be safe out there.