thank you so much, we ll keep checking with you. meantime, cnn anchor, and national correspondent erica hill who s live in lafayette, louisiana, what s happening there? what are they bracing for in. it looks pretty quiet right now. i want to point out and a lot of what we heard from allison is this is the calm before a significant storm. the last update we got where barry was upgraded to a hurricane, it s about 40 miles south of where we were in lafayette. not quite as low as new orleans, as allison was pointing out. surrounding us, there are plenty of low areas, there s a river here, the vermilion river, which folks weren t overly concerned about. it s below normal levels. that started to change in the last 12 hours or so when officials started telling our teams here, the sheriff telling nick watt on the ground that they are monitoring that river much more closely because depending on the amount of rainfall that does come down here, as it flows downstream, there are areas just about
luckily there hasn t had to be rescues in town thus far, just downed trees and such. this city did assist a nearby town when a family called in for help. they had a live power line fall down on their mobile homes. the morgan city folks went and helped with that. i want to show you why this is such a problem. here, the river is so flooded and you can see that trash can right there, the water can has come up this morning already in the last few hours. this is, you know, flood stage has been going on for quite some time. this river has already been very high, and now you re adding a tropical storm, a hurricane on top of that, so we are talking about the potential for a lot of streets to flood in the city, and that is why there was such concern about those pumps and hopefully, they will have a fighting chance if the rain takes breaks. if they get all this rain at once, they re going to be in real trouble, fred. natasha chen, thank you so much. we ll check back with you in
morgan city. jerry tuchman is in the french quarter in new orleans, inside the protective flood walls. describe conditions there, gary. reporter: well, the utter quiet in the perpetual party in the frercnch quarter is very disconcerting, until you think about this, people who have suffered so much from tropical storms are not complacent, and they are sheltering in place. this is the wall protecting the city. the metropolitan area of 1.3 million people. the brown steel structure there, that is a flood gate that has been shut. one of more than 200 gates that have been shut in the new orleans area, near lake pontchartrain to the north and near the mississippi river where we are right now. this is a closed area. the public is not allowed here for their safety right now, but here s the main worry about this particular storm, about this storm that was just declared a hurricane, hurricane barry. the levels here have been very high for weeks because of torrents of rain that have come throu
right now, and one of these bands of rain. it s not so much the wind that concerns city officials here but the rainfall. they re expecting 10 to 20 inches over the course of the next few days, and that is a problem because of the pumps that they have in the city. they brought in extra ones yesterday. the way those pumps work, they can only handle so much. here is the mayor talking about how they plan to deal with the rainfall. our city can handle the first 5 inches comfortably, after that, 1 inch every additional hour, when you have a forecast of 30 inches, the math doesn t work. reporter: and they really haven t had a major storm in morgan city hit them directly since 2012. a lot of people are bracing themselves. there was a voluntary evacuation order yesterday but not many people actually left town. we know that a large portion of the town is now out of power.
thing is tracking. we just got the brand new update at the top of the hour. it is hurricane barry. winds sustained at 75 miles per hour. gusting to 90 miles per hour. it s still moving incredibly slow, however to the northwest at 6 miles per hour. that is the key all along. the slower the storm is, the longer it has to dump a tremendous amount of rain over this area. the hurricane hunters have been out. that s where we have been getting a lot of the recon from this storm, giving us that minute by minute data on this particular storm. that in part is what caused the hurricane center to upgrade this to a category one storm. the track is still expected to make land fall in the next few hours from now in the state of louisiana. from there, it will start to deteriorate and weaken. it also means it s going to continue to drop a tremendous amount of rain in other states. louisiana is not going to be the only state impacted. mississippi, alabama, tennessee, arkansas, all expecting to get a t