A county road worker in southwestern Mississippi is dead, at least 200 homes in rural Louisiana are underwater, and rescue crews are still pulling residents from floodwaters after the remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur dumped nearly two and a half feet of rain on parts of the Gulf Coast in 48 hours. The first named storm of the Atlantic season was downgraded almost as quickly as it formed, but the damage it left behind is anything but minor.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced the worker's death in a social media post Thursday night, saying the man was killed while helping with storm cleanup operations. The cause of death has not been disclosed. Thirty homes below the Anchor Lake dam in southern Mississippi were being evacuated as a precaution, Reeves said, over concerns that rising waters could overwhelm spillways and compromise the structure. He urged residents to seek higher ground.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry issued a state of emergency after Arthur battered his state. In Avoyelles Parish, roughly 70 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, state Rep. Daryl Deshotel said flooding hit at least 200 homes. National Weather Service data told the story in raw numbers: Cottonport recorded 29 inches of rain, Plaucheville got 22.5 inches, and Simmesport took more than 17 inches, CBS News reported.
Donald Jones, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lake Charles, put it plainly:
"Even by this region's standards, that's catastrophic rain."
In Perkinston, Mississippi, life-threatening floodwaters trapped people in a campground. Rescuers used canoe paddles to break through the windows of RVs. Cars and mobile homes washed away. A rain gauge near the town showed upwards of 12 inches on Thursday alone, with another 12 inches recorded about 25 miles north near Black Creek.
The Harrison County Sheriff's Office told CBS News that roughly 38 people had been rescued by Thursday night. No fatalities or serious injuries were reported in that county. But the flooding across the Gulf Coast kept growing more dangerous even as Arthur itself weakened.
In Stone County, Mississippi, Nicole Jackson and her fiancé Hayden barely escaped before head-high floodwaters swept through their home. Jackson told CBS News the speed of the water caught even longtime residents off guard:
"It's insane how quickly it rose. People that lived here a lot longer than us are absolutely shocked."
Emergency officials asked residents near the Jourdan River to consider evacuating. The river was under a flood warning and expected to crest Friday morning.
Across the state line in Louisiana, the National Guard and state wildlife officials joined local rescue crews. In Avoyelles Parish, 40-year-old Cody Coco, a cypress sawmill operator, rescued stranded workers who were waist-deep in water at his mill. Then he grabbed a boat and went back for his four pigs, penned up and about to drown. He shared a video on Facebook showing the hogs swimming out of their enclosure in murky water.
"If I'd left them in the pen, they'd have drowned. They were happy to see me."
At least four tornadoes broke out along the Gulf Coast. One was confirmed in Avoyelles Parish. Three others struck near New Orleans. In Avondale, just across the Mississippi River, a tornado wrecked four homes, Jefferson Parish spokeswoman Rachel Strassel said. Two people were hospitalized with minor injuries and later released.
In Houma, southwest of New Orleans, resident Coni Dubois said several inches of water flooded her home overnight. She has lived through many hurricanes and other storms, but nothing quite like the relentless barrage Arthur delivered:
"It was unbelievable, it literally sounded like h*** broke open. I thought for sure we had a tornado on top of us. The lightning and the thunder was so consistent, the whole house was lit up like daylight for about 20 minutes."
New Orleans itself got off comparatively easy. Mayor Helena Moreno posted a video on Facebook describing relatively minor damage and cleanup efforts. The city's police department had prepared boats and set up barricades in flood-prone areas ahead of the storm, and sandbag distribution sites were opened across the state.
The storm had already proven deadly before reaching Louisiana and Mississippi, and the system's remnants continued to threaten a wide swath of the Southeast.
Arthur earned its name as the first tropical storm of the Atlantic season. Within a day of forming, it was downgraded. But that bureaucratic reclassification meant nothing to the people standing in chest-high water across two states. National Hurricane Center director Michael Brennan had warned that the main threat was "a prolonged, multiday, heavy rainfall event that could produce dangerous to life-threatening flash flooding," AP News reported.
That warning proved accurate. CBS News meteorologist Nikki Nolan reported that flooding risks threatened more than 63 million people on Friday, with another one to three inches of rain possible in some areas. Cities as far east as Atlanta, Birmingham, and Jacksonville were in the crosshairs. More than 257 flash flooding incidents had been reported since Sunday across a strip of the Southeast stretching from Texas to Georgia.
Rain was falling at rates of three inches per hour in parts of southern Louisiana and Mississippi, and tens of thousands of homes and businesses lost power across the affected region, Breitbart reported. The system was on track to move out into the Atlantic over the weekend, cold comfort for the communities already digging out.
The Gulf disturbance that preceded Arthur had already placed millions under flood watches before the storm even had a name. The escalation from tropical disturbance to named storm to catastrophic inland flooding unfolded in a matter of days.
Several questions hang over the aftermath. The name of the county road worker killed in Mississippi has not been released, nor has the cause of death. The status of the Anchor Lake dam, whether waters actually overtopped its spillways, remains unclear. Whether the campground flooding in Perkinston resulted in any injuries among those trapped has not been confirmed.
The Jourdan River was expected to crest Friday morning, but no update on its level has been provided. And while severe storms have torn across the Midwest and Southeast in recent weeks, the full scope of Arthur's damage, particularly to homes in rural parishes and counties with limited resources, may take days or weeks to assess.
What is clear: the Gulf Coast communities that bore the brunt of Arthur's remnants did what they always do. They sandbagged, they evacuated, they rescued their neighbors, and in Cody Coco's case, they rescued their hogs. The National Guard showed up. Local sheriffs' offices pulled people from flooded vehicles and RVs. Governors declared emergencies and urged people to get to higher ground.
The system worked, to a point. One man still died on a county road in Mississippi doing the unglamorous work of clearing storm debris. Two hundred families in Avoyelles Parish are dealing with flooded homes. And the first named storm of the season was barely a tropical storm at all.
If a system that couldn't hold its name for 24 hours can do this much damage, the Gulf Coast had better hope the rest of hurricane season is quieter than the start.
