I get for coming out today. I had an opportunity to meet ,ith local elected Officials Police and sheriffs offices, the office of emergency preparedness. We took off and we flew encircled that flew in circles and we flew in come on row and circled back. The devastation is nowhere near what he saw in Southeast Louisiana yesterday. Powermistic the restoration is going to happen relatively rapidly, but i cant get a prediction on that. Have wendy of power crews that are here working already. We had more power crews positioned ahead of storm than ever in the history of our state. And i think it was the worst storm to ever strike louisiana. I talked to individuals here who can never remember Hurricane Force winds this far north in louisiana, after the experience yesterday. We have got a long way to go. We will be posting a major federal disaster declaration today and i expect they will turn that around fast and that will enable us to even more assistance and we can start looking for parishes who might qualify assistance. I cant make any representations right now about that with respect to any to killer parish, but we will get all the damage assessments done in some at that donemation assessments and get as much assistance as we can get. Fatalitiesrting 10 across louisiana. Four of those are from trees falling on homes, when individual drowned, and we have had five Carbon Monoxide poisoning. People are running generators indoors or in earlyventilated in poorlyventilated areas. Dont do that. We are hopeful power restoration will happen fast, but your safety is incredibly important. Oftentimes in storms like this, it is during the recovery phrase the recovery phase that you have more casualties, because people injured themselves cutting trees or run into a downed power line and dont respected or understand outline his life, and certainly Carbon Monoxide dont understand that line is live, and certainly Carbon Monoxide poisoning. We have been doing tremendous work across the state. We are going to start our testing sites backup on monday. We cant afford to lose sight of our testing. It was about three weeks ago that our schools came back and we had students back on our college campuses. It takes about two weeks to see if there is a change in positivity in cases which will moreto more hostile hospitalization and deaths. So this is a really bad week us not to be doing more robust testing. Today we will report 30 deaths from covid. We have had 10 deaths distort. 30 deaths from covid today. So this remains a very a serious a very serious situation when it comes to the Public Health emergency and the hurricane. Put them both together and it is extremely challenging last night, we had over 3000 people across the state of louisiana in hotel rooms, because we cant do safely. Nt louisiana ine in state agencies and local parish governments are working extremely hard to make this safe. There are 82 Water Systems that are down louisiana right now. It is a real problem when you have electric and Water Systems down. A lot of times, the electric system being down is what causes the water problems. We have to do with rolling series of evacuations on Nursing Homes and hospitals. So getting water backup is incredibly important. We also need water to fires. Until we get the Water Systems back up, we are asking people to be very, every careful. I will tell you that i am heartened about saw here today and the conversations we had with your leaders. We know how hard people are working. Herepect power restoration to be hours or a few days, not many days or potentially weeks. Please treat every downed power line as if it is live. If you dont do that and you are wrong, you are going to for that your life. I want to thank the lieutenant governor, he has been traveling with the end this entire storm weh me, and is making sure are taking good care of our city parks. And where we have capacity, especially here in north louisiana, he is making that available to house power crews, so lineman who need a place to while they restore power will have a place to stay, and that will lead to us having our power back on sooner. Our Faithbased Community has been tremendous already, stepping up across louisiana where it needed the most. They are already in the community. There is no bureaucracy attached to churches, so they can act very clear. They are already doing that. I want to tell them how much i appreciate that. Especially now is the time to be a Good Neighbor. Being a Good Neighbor is doing all the things would normally do, just doing it from six feet away and with a mask on. We are still the state in the country with most cases per capita and still have tremendous challenges with covid, although we are doing better today than several weeks ago because of negation measures with wooden place. To men address questions or any individual behind me. Is the damage nearly as severe as katrina . Governor edwards the storm was more powerful than katrina. It came on short 1 00 yesterday morning at 100 Miles Per Hour, seven Miles Per Hour less than a category 5. Category very strong four. In 36 hours, laura went from Tropical Storm to a very, very strong category four, because of how warm the water was in the elf of x account and how ideal conditions were to the formation and strength of the storm. It is the strongest storm ever recorded. There are estimations of a storm in 1856 that may have matched it. Knowno how they i dont how they could record that. There may be some people around who know. The problem with new orleans was the levees new orleans is in a bowl and the old old with water. This was actually a stronger storm. It came on as predicted, where and when predicted. The storm surge was about 15 feet, they said 1520 feet, it came in at15 it 15. The most forceful winds that would have loan ships out of the calcasieu channel never happened because storms winds stayed on the east side of there. So we didnt have such strong winds inland, but it didnt mean we dont have devastation. Truck travel south on the storm, you will progressively find more damage. Areae going to alexandria to visit other parishes, including vernon parish, which i expect will be some between what we saw yesterday in calcasieu and cameron and what we saw today. How will the storm and Recovery Efforts impact your decision to weeks from now . Governor edwards decisions we make with respect covid on whether we stay in place or impose additional measures, we do that by the data and the date is driven by the testing and because we are not doing robust testing right now, i cant tell you what that is going to look like. Im more concerned because we have 24 more people in the hospital with covid today than yesterday. But it is not always an even slow. That doesnt necessarily mean you will have fewer tomorrow, but i got that reporter earlier today. Stillod news is, we are reporting more than 10,000 tests per day, six hundred cases, 30 deaths. That generally keeps his on the trajectory we were on, showing improvement. The only number that went up his hospitalizations. I would like you to understand that the hottest region of our state in terms of positivity is south west louisiana. People fromsands of southwest louisiana are scattered all overseas shelter, about 3500 in hotel rooms but many more with electives and friend and so forth. So we dont know exactly what this is going to look like. And this is a college town, with grambling state diversity in louisiana tech. We brought our campuses back to ,ife, students are showing up one quarter of the state population is either students, facultyckle staff or k12 and higher ed. Since march, these people have been on the move. Until we start seeing what positivity and cases and hospitalizations are right, are like, it is not possible for me to tell you what will happen in two weeks. But i am asking people to wear your mask, stay six feet apart, wash hands frequent the, stay home when you are sick. If we do those things, we are much, much better off. You give us an update, mayor, on where we are facilitywise . We are 40 . That means 60 of households are without and businesses without our. We hope to have everything up and running tuesday. But governor has taught me to what were the words . underpromiseds and overdeliver. Right. We are still asking people to conserve water but our wells are in good shape, our Water Treatment plant is in good shape , we have the power backup. The main thing we are looking at is picking up the debris and getting the rest of the power lines, so debris removal can take place. So the city is faring much cities in theny south part of the state and also the north. Grocery stores are open, a lot of businesses are coming, our fiber, we have issues, but will work that out hopefully before tuesday. Governor edwards we did see long lines at service stations. We know few is an issue, especially diesel to run generators. We are working to make sure, and by the way, our refineries are coming online here. Any interruption i will be very shortlived. The last thing is that we know in this region that we have a lot of poultry producers, and they have to keep the fans on in august to keep those chickens alive. This is no minor thing, there are hundreds of thousand chicken , so we have got to make sure they have they need to run their generators until electricity comes back on or they will lose their poultry. The commissioner is on top of the, working with the secretary of dnr to access as much fuel as we need and get it to where it can be obtained by the producers. We also have to keep generators running to make sure cold storage stays on. But all of the seals can and will be solved once the electricity comes back on, and that is going to happen within the next couple of days, im confident. It will be much longer southwest louisiana. Thank you all for covering this and i want to think the people behind me who are working hard to make sure their constituents have what they need to do the best they can do until their lives are normal again. Likehe normal doesnt look the real normal, im just talking about getting past this storm. They are working hard and are in constant communication with my office to make sure we are aware of the needs in this region. Always try, i am going to ask that we pray for one another, pray for our state. We have 10 families who lost somebody from the storm, and 30 people who died in todays report on covid. Work together and be Good Neighbors and we will get through this and build back stronger than ever before. Thank you, god bless. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. 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