Hurricane Isaac has been downgraded to a tropical depression. But the once formidable storm was the source of stunning images both from outer space and on the ground. Here’s a compilation of eye-popping images….
Hurricane Isaac just prior to landfall Tuesday, August 28. (NOAA)
Via NASA: This visible true color image of Hurricane Isaac was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on Aug. 29 at 2:50 p.m. EDT after it had made its second landfall.
Via NOAA: At 1:35 p.m. CDT on August 28, 2012 the recently launched Suomi NPP satellite flew over Isaac, capturing this image of the storm with the true color capability of the VIIRS sensor.
Wind streamlines wrapping into Isaac’s center just after landfall Wednesday morning. Part of personal art project created by Google scientists, (hint.fm/wind)
TRMM satellite 3-D view of rainfall on Aug. 28 showed a few very powerful thunderstorms near Isaac’s eye were reaching heights of almost 10.6 miles. (NASA)
The Suomi-NPP satellite captured a night view of then-Tropical Storm Isaac in the Gulf of Mexico. (NASA)
Via NASA: Using data from TRMM’s Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) instruments showed that intense bands of rain around Isaac were occasionally dropping rain at a rate of over 70 mm/hour (~2.75 inches) (just prior to landfall Wednesday).
Via NASA: This visible true color image of Hurricane Isaac was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradometer (MODIS) instrument onboard NASA’s Terra satellite on Aug. 29 at 1:15 p.m. EDT after it had made its second landfall.
Braithwaite, La.
Sam Maltese, right, wipes his face while being rescued from his flooded home, as Lanny LaFrance steers the boat in Braithwaite, La. (David J. Phillip / AP)
Upload photos of flooding to our Isaac Community Photos gallery! ow.ly/djYNt
NOLA.com@NOLAnews@NOLAnews this was taken from a three story Braithewaite home. pic.twitter.com/UwXCEiXw
Jeff Leblanc@JMLeblanc23
Biloxi and Gulfport
Water rises over the piers in the Biloxi Small Craft Harbor behind the Hard Rock Casino as Hurricane Isaac passes through Biloxi, Mississippi, August 29, 2012. (MICHAEL SPOONEYBARGER – REUTERS)
Waves from Hurricane Isaac batter the a pier, Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2012, in Gulfport, Miss. Isaac pelted parts of south Mississippi with heavy rains, flooding some homes in low-lying areas and turning parts of beachside U.S. Highway 90 into a river near Biloxi casinos. (John Bazemore – AP)
LaPlace, La.
A sherriff’s vehicle sits in flood waters caused by Isaac, Thursday, Aug. 30, 2012, north of LaPlace, La, off Lake Pontchartrain. (Eric Gay – AP)
A car sits submerged in the flood waters of Hurricane Isaac in the River Forest subdivision on August 29, 2012 in LaPlace, Louisiana. (Chris Graythen – GETTY IMAGES)
New Orleans
Two men navigate a sidewalk along a drenched Canal Street as Hurricane Isaac arrives in New Orleans. (Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post)
Links:
Riding out Isaac, with mac and cheese
View Photo Gallery: Floodwaters surged into scattered neighborhoods in the suburbs of New Orleans early Thursday, even as Isaac’s once-powerful winds tapered off and the storm meandered north.
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La. orders evacuation after Miss. dam threatened
From Associated Press
August 30, 2012 11:53 AM EDT MCCOMB, Miss. (AP) — Louisiana officials have ordered evacuation of low-lying, sparsely-populated areas along the Tangipahoa River because an Isaac-hammered dam at a state park lake in southwest Mississippi near the Louisiana border is in danger of failing.Officials in Tangipahoa Parish, La., fear the water it would pour into the already swollen river would flood low-lying areas downstream from the park.But Mississippi officials say they don’t believe the volume of water in the 700-acre lake at Percy Quin State Park near McComb, Miss., would add enough flow to threaten communities downstream.
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Isaac claims fatality as thousands forced to evacuate
Rescue workers transport residents trapped by rising water from Isaac in LaPlace, Louisiana, on Wednesday, August 29. Officials warn of continued threats from storm surges and flooding as the hurricane-turned-tropical storm moves inland.- NEW: Isaac has had a “major impact,” Mississippi governor tells CNN
- A falling tree killed one man in Mississippi, authorities say
- More than 978,000 customers don’t have power in Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi
- A Mississippi dam “is expected to fail,” the National Weather Service says
Have you been affected by Isaac? Share your photos here.
(CNN) — Authorities warned people in a handful of towns outside New Orleans to get out early Thursday ahead of rising water brought on by hurricane-turned-tropical storm Isaac, which dumped more than 20 inches of rain in some areas.
The warning came as the storm claimed its first fatality. A tow truck driver attempting to clear debris on a road in Mississippi was struck by a falling tree, officials said. The incident took place at midnight, said Amanda Harris, deputy director of the Pearl River County Emergency Management office.
The National Weather Service said it received reports of the fatality in Picayune, Mississippi.
Isaac has had a “major impact” on Mississippi, Gov. Phil Bryant told CNN in Gulfport. “This is a man-made beach,” he said of where he was standing. “Most of that sand is gone. Thousands of homes have been damaged; people have been out of their homes and will be.”
Storm tracker
Isaac leaves residents stranded
Parish official on controlled levee breaks
Family recounts rescue
The state had 70 rescues along the Gulf Coast overnight, he said.
State by state: Isaac soaks region
On Louisiana’s border with Mississippi, residents of Washington Parish were alerted that the Bogue Chitto River was expected to rise by 14 feet overnight.
To the southwest, in St. John Parish, National Guard troops looked for people stranded after thousands were forced to flee when a surge forced water over the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
Residents get saved from rooftops
“What we’re doing is we have got law enforcement and fire personnel who are going door to door to notify people,” Tommy Thiebaud, the Washington Parish director of emergency services, told CNN early Thursday.
Meanwhile in Plaquemines Parish, southeast of New Orleans, 3,000 people remained in an area close to an 8-foot-tall levee that was threatened by rising waters, Gov. Bobby Jindal’s office said.
About 100 people who had ignored an evacuation order were rescued Wednesday in a flooded part of the parish, officials said. On Thursday, authorities from the sheriff’s office and National Guard “will begin looking house to house to make sure they got everyone,” Parish President Billy Nungesser said.
“We didn’t have time to panic,” Rafael Delgadillo of Braithwaite, Louisiana, told CNN on Thursday. He, his wife and daughter were rescued by a neighbor Wednesday. “We were in survivor mode,” he said.
Nearly a million customers were without electricity across Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Utility companies reported more than 978,000 customers without power.
Water boiling advisories were being issued in a number of towns and cities along the Gulf Coast.
Open Story: Isaac soaks Gulf Coast
Isaac was centered 55 miles southeast of Alexandria, Louisiana, early Thursday, moving slowly at about 8 mph with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph, the National Weather Service said.
A flash flood emergency was issued for Slidell, Louisiana. Surge flooding from Bayou Bonfouca and the W-14 canal gushed into parts of the city, and sudden inundation of up to 5 feet was possible in low-lying areas, the National Weather Service said.
Evacuations were under way in the city Thursday morning.
Isaac damages could reach $1.5 billion
Slow-moving Isaac floods region
Evacuee: ‘The water kept coming’
Plaquemines Parish residents rescued
Authorities expected some street flooding in a few subdivisions on the south side of town, “but at present, that street flooding is minimal,” the city said in a statement Thursday morning.
“There is water all around me,” Vincent Molino, who lives in the area, told CNN in an iReport. “It looks like my home is in a lake. The area is completely flooded … pretty much the whole neighborhood has three to five feet of water. We saw a big military vehicle stop by to ask us if we are OK.
“It is strange that the water is going down really slowly.
“The most amazing thing is that I still have power,” Molino said.
At Mississippi’s Lake Tangipahoa, a dam is “expected to fail,” the National Weather Service said, issuing a flash flood warning until 11:15 a.m. CT (12:16 p.m. ET). Water levels could reach 8 feet, the service said.
If that happens, pastures and woodlands, along with some crops near the river, would be inundated, and parts of a highway would become impassable, forecasters said.
Throughout parts of the Gulf Coast, the National Weather Service warned, “life-threatening hazards from storm surge and inland flooding are still occurring.”
Tornado touches down in Mississippi
Isaac is believed to have spawned three tornadoes overnight in Mississippi and Alabama, the weather service said.
Tornadoes are suspected to be behind damage in Gulfport and Jackson, Mississippi, while a twister is blamed for knocking down power lines and damaging a home in Geneva, Alabama.
President Barack Obama signed major disaster declarations for Louisiana and Mississippi after slow-moving Isaac pummeled the Gulf Coast, dropping more than 20 inches of rain in some locations and creating a dangerous storm surge.
Isaac made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane seven years after Hurricane Katrina swept ashore in Louisiana and Mississippi. Katrina is blamed for the deaths of 1,800 people, most in New Orleans after the levee system failed and the city flooded.
Isaac’s greatest punch bypassed New Orleans.
The city reported relatively minor damage from the storm, and officials said there were at least a dozen incidents of looting. New Orleans Police said arrests were made in each case, but didn’t specify how many people were involved or where the arrests occurred.
Still, New Orleans will continue to face some pounding rain Thursday, forecasters say.
“This storm took forever to get here, and now it doesn’t want to leave,” said Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, deputy mayor in charge of public safety.
National Guard troops and authorities searched St. John the Baptist Parish for people trapped by up to 6 feet of water.
By late Wednesday, about 1,500 people had been evacuated from the parish, and another 1,500 were expected to leave their homes, Jindal’s office said.
How to help Gulf Coast residents
Dozens of buses moved residents out of flooded portions of the parish, while authorities worked to rescue others.
“We’re continuing to rescue people from different areas throughout the parish,” Paige Falgoust, communications director for St. John the Baptist Parish, said early Thursday. “Our main focus right now is getting people out of their homes.”
The storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain came quickly and “in a different way from what we were expecting,” Falgoust said.
The surge was unusually bad in LaPlace, about 25 miles northwest of New Orleans, where many people had been rescued or still needed to escape rapidly rising water.
By Thursday morning, at least 200 rescues had taken place, parish officials said.
How to stay safe when the lights go out
Dusk-to-dawn curfews were in effect from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where authorities were urging residents to stay inside and ride out the slow-moving storm.
In Plaquemines Parish, an initial estimate showed that as many as 800 homes may have received significant water damage, Jindal said.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reported a significant storm surge in the parish, which was the scene of many rescues. One involved National Guard troops who moved 112 residents from the Riverbend nursing home to another facility.
Officials were considering intentionally breaching the levee downstream to allow some of the floodwater to flow back out of the inundated area, Jindal said.
That could happen as early as Saturday, said Nungesser, the parish president. The Times-Picayune reported that digging could begin as early as Thursday.
Airports from Baton Rogue to Biloxi were closed until at least Thursday as the stubborn storm continued to saturate the region.
In Mississippi’s Hancock County, near the Louisiana border, National Guard troops rescued dozens of people stranded by the storm surge Wednesday.
Joey Amann thought he and his family would be safe after Isaac made landfall until he saw the fast-rising water.
At that point, he knew he had to get his family out of their home, Amann told CNN affiliate WLOX.
That’s when he called for help, and the National Guard responded.
CNN’s Leslie Tripp, Brian Todd, Soledad O’Brien, Ed Lavandera, Martin Savidge, John Zarrella, Chandler Friedman, Anika Chin, Mike Ahlers, Aaron Cooper and Ed Payne contributed to this report.
Isaac weakens but drenches Louisiana and Mississippi as it plods toward Midwest
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Updated at 8:19 a.m. ET
(CBS/AP) NEW ORLEANS – Tropical Storm Isaac continued to pound Louisiana and Mississippi Thursday as the immense, slow-moving system weakened over land while trudging roughly north.
By Thursday morning, Isaac’s maximum sustained winds had decreased to 45 mph and the National Hurricane Center said it was expected to become a tropical depression by Thursday night, meaning its top sustained winds would drop below 39 mph. The storm’s center was on track to cross Arkansas on Friday and southern Missouri on Friday night, spreading rain as it goes.
The hurricane center said in its 8 a.m. ET advisory that Isaac was about 35 miles southeast of Alexandria, La., and was heading northwest at 8 mph.
Forecasters expected Isaac to move farther inland over the next several days, dumping rain on drought-stricken states across the nation’s midsection before finally breaking up over the weekend.
CBS News hurricane consultant David Bernard reports from CBS Miami station WFOR-TV that Isaac’s final rainfall totals for southern Louisiana could be 18-30 inches. Bernard reports that the storm’s feeder bands still posed a flooding threat for the Louisiana capital of Baton Rouge, north of New Orleans.
Escaping the floods in Plaquemines Parish
Isaac steers clear of direct blow on New Orleans
Intentional breach weighed as Isaac batters La.
The rain fell almost constantly for more than a day, flooding neighborhoods in a rural part of the state and in neighboring Mississippi. Officials had to respond quickly because the waters were rising fast — even as Isaac meandered slowly northward Thursday on a path toward Arkansas.
With water still trapped between two floodwalls in Plaquemines Parish, a sparsely populated area south of New Orleans that is outside the federal levee system, officials are considering cutting 10-15-feet-wide holes in a levee to let the standing water drain back into the Mississippi River and marshland, CBS News correspondent Byron Pitts reports from New Orleans.
Along the shores of Lake Ponchartrain, officials sent scores of buses and dozens of high-water vehicles to help evacuate about 3,000 people as rising waters lapped against houses and left cars stranded. Floodwaters rose waist-high in some neighborhoods, and the Louisiana National Guard was working with sheriff’s deputies to rescue people stranded in their homes.
Early Thursday, a Coast Guard helicopter hoisted a couple and their dogs from a home in LaPlace, near the lake, after storm surge poured into their neighborhood and local authorities called for help. The couple was taken to New Orleans and reported in good condition.
“The husband and wife and their two dogs were in an area where a lot of houses washed away,” said Lt. Cmdr. Jorge Porto. “They used a flashlight inside the house as a signaling device, which made all the difference in locating them effectively.”
The floodwaters “were shockingly fast-rising, from what I understand from talking to people,” Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne said. “It caught everybody by surprise.”
In Plaquemines Parish, dozens of people were stranded in flooded coastal areas and had to be rescued. The storm pushed water over an 18-mile levee and put so much pressure on it that authorities planned to intentionally puncture the floodwall to relieve the strain.
Officials rushed to evacuate more than 100 nursing home residents from Plaquemines Parish, an area with a reputation for weathering storms and perhaps the hardest hit by Isaac. In this hardscrabble, mostly rural parish, even the sick and elderly are hardened storm veterans.
“I don’t think we had to evacuate to begin with,” said Romaine Dahl, 59, as he sat in a wheelchair Wednesday. “The weather was a hell of a lot worse last night than it is now. And I got an idea that after all this is said and done they’re going to say everything is over with, go on back home.”
At left, watch video of a levee in Plaquemines Parish being overtopped as filmed by storm chaser Jeff Piotrowski
Other residents in the Riverbend Nursing and Rehabilitation Center were loaded into ambulances and taken to a nearby naval station. Residents had their names and birth dates attached to their shirts.
Josephine King, 84, handled the move well, waiting in a wheelchair. “I’m feeling good,” she said.
By mid-afternoon Wednesday, Isaac had been downgraded to a tropical storm. The Louisiana National Guard ceased rescue operations in Plaquemines Parish, saying it felt confident it had gotten everyone out. There were no serious injuries. National Guard spokesman Capt. Lance Cagnolatti said guardsmen would stay in the area over the coming days to help.
Isaac’s whistling winds lashed New Orleans and the storm dumped nearly a foot of rain on its desolate streets, but the system of levee pumps, walls and gates appeared to withstand one of the stiffest challenges yet.
President Obama declared federal emergencies in Louisiana and Mississippi late Wednesday, according to a statement from the White House. The disaster declarations free up federal aid for affected areas.
Isaac arrived seven years after Hurricane Katrina and passed slightly to the west of New Orleans, where the city’s fortified levee system easily handled the assault.
“Unfortunately, that’s not been the case for low-lying areas outside the federal system, in particular lower Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes,” said Louisiana Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu. “Hurricane Isaac has reinforced for us once again just how vulnerable these critical areas are. We must re-engage the Corps of Engineers on this.”
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