Hurricane Ubadah blasts through Mississippi River Delta

Many dead, commerce stopped

PILOTTOWN, La., Bible Belt (RWN) - Hurricane Ubadah came across Louisiana today, knocking down homes, sending people fleeing and blocking the Mississippi River's channel.

Winds up to 175 miles per hour lashed southern Louisiana, capsizing a freighter moored at a grain terminal near Pilottown. Pilottown itself, which housed about 50 people who worked the mouth of the river, no longer exists. The winds destroyed the concrete pilings the town was built on, houses tumbling into the river.

There are no official casualty counts yet, but some authorities are estimating as many as 30 deaths just near the river's mouth.

"This is tragic, tragic," said Mitch LeCoteau, the state's governor. "Even with all of our technology being able to predict where the storm was going to go, we still lost lives. Ubadah just came on too quick."

The hurricane formed off of the Yucatan Peninsula just three days ago and stayed at seas, gathering strength until it made landfall early this morning.

Beyond the body count and the damage - LeCoteau referred to it as "biblical" - there are concerns about the Mississippi River, the main export route for the Bible Belt's extractive industries. The river handles about 70 percent of the region's coal exports and about 80 percent of the agricultural exports.

The mouth of the Mississippi is comprised of four major passes that empty into the Gulf of Mexico - Southwest, South, North passes and Pass a Loutre. Southwest, South and North have all been clogged with sediment, and only an aggressive dredging project at Pass a Loutre has kept the Mississippi open for business, but the freighter capsized within the pass, and it is not known how long it will take to clear it.

"It's a mess, that's all I can say," said Tom Tibbett, a longtime fisherman who watched the freighter make its slow tip over. "I wanted to ride out the storm in my house - it survived, thank you, Jesus - and I looked out the window when I heard this awful moaning sound. It was the freighter, snapping its bow chain. It was a terrible sight. I thought it was going to break its keel right in half, but tipped over instead. Oh, those poor boys in there."



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