NEW ORLEANS: Dwight Powell lost his Lexus to the massive tornado that injured 33 people and destroyed or seriously damaged 940 properties on a half-mile wide rampage through 2 miles of east New Orleans.
He had just parked it inside his garage to avoid hail damage when the twister struck. At least his Yukon pickup truck would be OK, he thought: It was in a friend’s repair shop, 60 miles north.
Then his phone rang.
“The man called me this morning and said, ‘Man, the tornado hit your truck,’ ’’ Powell said Wednesday.
That’s a bad joke to tell a friend who just lost his house, he told him.
But it wasn’t. The truck was slammed by another tornado that hit Donaldsonville, one of at least five confirmed twisters tearing up Louisiana on Tuesday as a line of severe weather moved across the Deep South.
Other tornadoes injured nine people in the Baton Rouge area and two north of Lake Pontchartrain, but nobody was killed, authorities said.
Parts of the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama also saw severe weather Wednesday, but no injuries.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a news release Wednesday that two people remain hospitalized, and that 78 people spent Tuesday night in a shelter, which remains open.
His statement also said that two-thirds of the 10,400 Entergy customers who lost power have had their electricity restored — and the rest may have to wait up to five days before getting their lights back on.
He also said that he asked Gov. John Bel Edwards to keep the 150 members of the Louisiana National Guard assigned to New Orleans to remain in town “until after Mardi Gras,” which wraps up Feb. 28.
National Weather Service teams fanned out Wednesday, analyzing the destruction.
They determined that the twister that struck eastern New Orleans was an EF3 on the enhanced Fujita scale, meaning its winds reached from 136 to 165 mph.
The state was counting the buildings damaged or destroyed, Mike Steele of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said Wednesday.
Powell and an employee saw the tornado from the back door, and moved to the front.
“All we heard was that train sound, WooWooWoo BOOM! In 15 seconds it was over,” he said.
The front of the house was intact, but “the whole back is gone. The garage is gone. The kitchen gone.”