landfall in cameron, louisiana. shredding this office tower, downing power lines. more than half a million customers are without power tonight. and of course, all of this playing out in the middle of this pandemic. falling trees responsible for several deaths. so many homes and buildings damaged or destroyed. this fire at a chemical plant in lake charles, louisiana, spewing toxic chemicals tonight. residents have been warned, stay home, to close windows. storm winds ripping a riverboat casino from its moorings, slamming it right into a bridge over interstate 10. meteorologist rob marciano was with our team riding out the storm in lake charles, louisiana, all night. he said he could feel the building swaying. and so rob leads us off tonight. reporter: tonight, laura driving inland after making landfall on the louisiana coast in the middle of the night. the storm packing 150-mile-per-hour winds, just shy of category 5 hurricane strength. this is the ridge of the eye wall, you can see
here started to sink, so they disassembled them to some degree. you ll see behind there there is a riverboat casino. that has been shut for a while as they cope with the very high water here. most of natchez up on a bluff protected from these floodwaters, just a historic area here, a few businesses and a few homes impacted by high waters. that s not the case elsewhere in the mississippi. the u.s. coast guard took our cameraman on an overflight yesterday. he got a chance to see from the air what the situation looks like, and what he saw was a lot of submerged land, a lot of that muddy brown mississippi water overspilling its banks. the real issue here today, auz mentioned, t.j., is the weather forecast. we had torrential rains earlier. we watched the water just pour onto this river here, and it s expected there will be more of that today up and down the mississippi river basin. clearly very bad news when they re monitoring this water so
bracing themselves. the rain may be coming later today, the last thing the mississippi river valley needs. it s been higher than it s ever been before. if you want to have coffee out here, you have to do it in your hip waders. they ve made a lot of preparations here. you can see they ve built some temporary levees here to try to protect some of the historic buildings. i m told they were much taller and much more extensive. they had to knock them down because the weight of the levees was sinking the road, and unfortunate fortunately, it doesn t look like the road is going to get that high here. but if you follow the road around the curve, which we d like to do but can t because of water, the road there is under about 11 feet of water, according to locals, and that riverboat casino has closed. i ve been told there was one regular visitor there. an alligator has parked himself
yesterday. what exactly is ahead for the former head of imf. also, today, this, folks, is our last day. today is doomsday. you might have heard about did. so far so good, but we re told the apocalypse should be starting today. the radio networks have spent millions of dollars to warn you that the end is here. we re here at the beginning of this cnn saturday morning. it might be our last. let s all try our best to make it a good one. it s saturday, may 21st. up front, let s start with a breaking story we re getting out of kabul, afghanistan. at least one or more suicide bombers have attacked a hospital there. at least six people have been killed, another 26 are hurt. the taliban is claiming responsibility along with a far higher death toll than afghanistan authorities are confirming. we will take you back live to kabul in just a few moments with the latest on this still developing story. this morning s bomb attack in kabul coincides with a warning from david petraeus. in it