Hurricane Laura

Hurricane Laura struck southwestern Louisiana in August 2020 as a powerful Category 4, tied for the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in the state. It devastated Lake Charles and Cameron Parish with extreme winds and a significant storm surge, and its aftermath proved nearly as deadly as the storm itself.

Meteorological History

Laura crossed the Caribbean and then intensified explosively over the warm Gulf of Mexico, strengthening from a Category 1 to a Category 4 in roughly a day. It made landfall near Cameron, Louisiana, early on August 27, 2020, with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph (240 km/h).¹ At that intensity Laura tied the 1856 Last Island hurricane, and, the following year, Hurricane Ida, as the strongest hurricane on record to strike Louisiana by maximum winds.¹

As Laura bore down, the National Hurricane Center issued a stark warning of an "unsurvivable storm surge" with large and destructive waves along the southwestern Louisiana coast.¹ Before reaching the United States, Laura had already proved deadly in the Caribbean, killing more than 30 people in Haiti and several in the Dominican Republic as it passed over Hispaniola.¹

Impacts

Laura drove a destructive storm surge into Cameron Parish and battered Lake Charles with violent winds, damaging much of the city's building stock and raising serious concerns about the region's dense concentration of petrochemical facilities. The storm caused 81 deaths and at least $23 billion in damage in 2020 (roughly $28 billion in 2024).² Notably, many deaths were indirect and occurred after the storm, a large share from carbon-monoxide poisoning caused by the unsafe use of portable generators during prolonged power outages.¹

In Lake Charles, gusts well over 130 mph (210 km/h) blew windows out of the city's tallest building and destroyed airport hangars, while the region's dense concentration of refineries and chemical plants raised fears of hazardous releases.¹ Of Laura's 81 deaths, roughly a third were indirect, and the COVID-19 pandemic complicated every stage of the response, from evacuating and sheltering people safely to restoring power and housing in the months that followed.

Legacy

Laura highlighted the deadly danger of the post-storm period, when extended outages drive unsafe generator use, and the compounding strain of striking during the COVID-19 pandemic, which complicated evacuation and sheltering. Its rapid intensification just before landfall added to a growing list of storms that strengthened dangerously fast in warm Gulf waters.¹

The detail we keep returning to is that a large share of Laura's deaths came weeks after the winds had stopped, from carbon monoxide, in homes running generators through a long outage. In an engineering sense those are among the most preventable deaths on this whole list, and among the hardest to prevent in practice, because preventing them means getting safety information and working equipment to exhausted people in the dark. A storm's death toll does not close at landfall, and Laura is the clearest reminder of it. For how post-storm recovery and aid are meant to work, see government aid after a hurricane.

Sources

1. National Hurricane Center. (2021). Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Laura (AL132020). NOAA. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL132020_Laura.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/ ↩