The remnants of the once-mighty storm Barry, the first hurricane of the 2019 season, yesterday dumped dangerous amounts of rain as it crawled north through the United States after coming ashore west of New Orleans at the weekend.
Barry, now downgraded to a tropical depression, still packed winds of up to 40kph and could drop 14cm or more of rain on a water-logged Louisiana, forecaster Andrew Orrison of the National Weather Service said yesterday.
That brings the risk of dangerous flash floods from already bloated rivers across much of the gulf region and Mississippi Valley, he said.
“We’ll see the winds coming down as the day progresses,” he said.  “But the big story is the rain. This is still capable of very heavy rains through the next 24 hours.”
Through yesterday and today, the storm will bring up to 14cm of rain, with spots of 22cm to 30cm to eastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, and parts of Missouri and Mississippi, as it heads north toward Ohio, he said.
As of yesterday morning, about 50,000 homes and businesses in Louisiana were without electricity, according to the tracking site PowerOutage.us.
Barry, which made landfall on Saturday as a Category 1 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of intensity and then quickly weakened to a tropical storm, is expected to break up into a post-tropical depression, forecasters said.
Fears that Barry might devastate the low-lying city of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005 were unfounded, but rain in the forecast yesterday could still cause dangerous flooding, meteorologists said.
The additional rainfall could cause life-threatening conditions, the NWS said in a bulletin.
New Orleans saw light rain on Sunday, and churches and several businesses were open, including some on Tchoupitoulas Street along the flooded Mississippi River.
Streets in the city’s Garden District were quieter than usual but some joggers and dogwalkers ventured out.
A concert by the Rolling Stones scheduled for Sunday at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, which served as an emergency shelter during Katrina, was postponed until yesterday because of the weather forecast, the venue said.
Barry has shut in 73%, or 1.38mn barrels per day, of crude oil production in the US-regulated areas of the Gulf of Mexico, officials had said on Sunday.
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