At least 14 people died during Hurricane Laura's passage over Louisiana and Texas in the southern United States, authorities and local media said on Friday.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards has confirmed that at least ten people have lost their lives in his state, half of them from carbon monoxide produced by portable generators used inside buildings due to power cuts. No less than 464,813 homes were left without electricity in Louisiana on Friday, according to the Poweroutage.us site.
In Texas three of the four deaths recorded are also due to carbon monoxide poisoning. The victims are homeless people who had taken refuge in a billiard room and had brought its generator inside, according to the Beaumont Enterprise newspaper.
Heavy toll on Haïtu too
Four other deaths were caused by falling trees, and a man drowned in the sinking of his boat, due to the storm. Local media also reported another fatality in East Texas but could not say whether it was directly related to the hurricane. The man was the victim of a fall from a tree on his mobile home in Hemphill, according to a television affiliated with CBS.
Laura, spent Sunday in Haiti, caused the death of at least 31 people in the country, according to the latest official report released Friday. In the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of Quisqueya, four people were killed.
After passing through the Caribbean, Storm Laura strengthened as it crossed the Gulf of Mexico and became a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which has five. It was then downgraded to a tropical storm Thursday afternoon.
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