Hurricane Francine makes landfall in Louisiana as Category 2 storm
Hurricane Francine struck the Louisiana coast Wednesday evening as a dangerous Category 2 storm that rapidly knocked out electricity to more than 100,000 customers and threatened widespread flooding as it sent potentially deadly storm surge rushing inland along the northern U.S. Gulf Coast.
Having drawn fuel from exceedingly warm Gulf of Mexico waters, Francine had maximum sustained winds of 161 km/h when it roared ashore in Terrebonne Parish, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said — hitting a coastline that has yet to fully recover from a series of devastating hurricanes in 2020 and 2021.
Morgan City Fire Chief Alvin Cockerham said the hurricane’s arrival quickly flooded streets, snapped power lines and sent tree limbs crashing down.
‘Worse that what I expected’: fire chief
“It’s a little bit worse than what I expected, to be honest with you,” Cockerham said. “I pulled all my trucks back to the station; it’s too dangerous to be out there in this.”
TV news broadcasts from Louisiana’s coastal communities showed waves from nearby lakes, rivers and Gulf waters thrashing sea walls. Water poured into city streets and neighbourhoods amid blinding downpours. Oak and cypress trees leaned in the wind, and some utility poles swayed back and forth.
Power outages in Louisiana exceeded 109,000, spreading across a wide area of southeast Louisiana. Hardest hit by the blackouts was Terrebonne Parish, near where the storm’s centre hit land, as well as neighbouring St. Mary Parish, which includes Morgan City.
The National Hurricane Center urged south Louisiana residents to take shelter for the night as the hurricane moved to the northeast at 28 kilometres per hour. That included New Orleans, where forecasters said the storm’s eye could pass through.
“Conditions are going to go downhill really rapidly over the next couple of hours,” Jamie Rhome, the hurricane centre’s deputy director, said in an online briefing just before landfall. “It’s not going to be a good night to be driving on the roads, especially when the sun goes down.”
Morgan City gas stations had put plywood on the windows and moved trash cans inside before the storm hit, with a few pumps still serving the trickle of cars passing through shortly after dawn.
People in Morgan City, La., shuttered shops and boarded up windows amid evacuations as they prepared for Hurricane Francine to make landfall on Wednesday. Saint Mary Parish Sheriff Gary Driskell said officials have readied high-water vehicles and extra patrols in anticipation of the storm.
The community of some 11,500 people, 115 kilometres southwest of New Orleans, is surrounded by lakes and marsh.
Retired boat captain Pat Simon, 75, and his wife, Ruth, loaded all their possessions in garbage bags and tied them down in the back of a rented U-Haul pickup truck as they evacuated their home near the banks of the nearby Atchafalaya River.
“I don’t think it’s going to be that bad, like some of the other ones like Ida and Katrina,” Pat Simon said. “I mean, we’ve had some bad ones.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry urged residents to “stay off the roads, stay home and stay put.”
“I know that we have been through a lot here in Louisiana, but I urge everyone to take the necessary preparations,” he said.
Hurricane season typically peaks around this time of year and Louisiana residents have often faced threats from such storms. Since the mid-19th century 57 hurricanes have tracked over or made landfall in Louisiana, according to The Weather Channel. Among them were some of the strongest, costliest and deadliest storms in U.S. history.
Landry said the Louisiana National Guard was being sent to parishes that could be impacted by Francine. They have food, water, nearly 400 high-water vehicles, about 100 boats and 50 helicopters to respond to the storm, including possible search-and-rescue operations.
Biden declares emergency
U.S. President Joe Biden granted an emergency declaration that will help Louisiana secure federal money and logistical assistance from partners such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Both Landry and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves also declared states of emergency, authorizing them to quickly free up resources for disaster assistance.
A hurricane warning was in effect along the Louisiana coast from Cameron east to Grand Isle, about 80 kilometres south of New Orleans, according to the NHC. A storm surge warning stretched from the Mississippi-Alabama border to the Alabama-Florida border. Such a warning means life-threatening flooding could occur.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said it distributed more than 100,000 sandbags to the southern part of the state and the Department of Education reported a number of school district closures for Wednesday and Thursday.
Bands of heavy rain were hitting New Orleans Wednesday morning. The city’s historic streetcars that roll on South Carrollton Avenue had to ease past cars parked next to the tracks on the grassy median. The median is a few inches higher than the street and drivers sometimes park there to avoid street flooding.
Francine is the sixth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. Much of Louisiana and Mississippi could get 10 to 20 centimetres of rain, with the possibility of 30 centimetres in some spots said Brad Reinhart, a senior hurricane specialist at the NHC.
Francine’s storm surge on the Louisiana coast was forecast to reach as much as three metres from Cameron to Port Fourchon and into Vermilion Bay, forecasters said, adding tornado watches also have been posted over a large area of south Louisiana and neighbouring Mississippi as the storm heads inland.
The hurricane centre said parts of Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle were at risk of considerable flash and urban flooding incoming. The lower Mississippi Valley and lower Tennessee Valley could experience flooding later in the week as the disbanding storm’s considerable remnants sweep northward across several states in coming days.
Published at Wed, 11 Sep 2024 22:41:27 +0000
Gisèle Pelicot’s husband is accused of inviting men to rape her. She wants you to know her name
WARNING: This article may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.
The trial surrounding Gisèle Pelicot — the French woman whose husband is accused of inviting more than 50 men to secretly rape her while she was drugged unconscious — has horrified the public, making headlines around the world.
But the case isn’t significant only because of the nature of the crimes, which her husband filmed and has confessed to, but because we know Gisèle Pelicot’s name at all.
The media doesn’t typically identify survivors of sexual abuse. Usually, publication bans prevent the media from doing so in order to protect the privacy of survivors and encourage them to report the crimes in the first place. But Pelicot, now aged 72, waived her legal right to anonymity.
She said she wanted the trial to be held publicly to alert the public to sexual abuse and drug-induced blackouts.
“So when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they might remember the testimony of Ms. Pelicot,” she told the court in the southern French city of Avignon on Thursday, according to the New York Times. “No woman should suffer from being drugged and victimized.”
Lawyer Stephane Babonneau, who represents Pelicot, told French media she wanted to show “that shame must change sides.”
The case is “horrifying,” but choosing to speak out publicly sends a powerful message, said Bailey Reid, CEO of the Ottawa-based sexual violence prevention program The Spark Strategy.
“That she chose to be public with it shows an important value that women should not be ashamed when they’re sexually assaulted. It’s never their fault, and they shouldn’t feel that it is,” Reid told CBC News.
“It’s actually quite different than a lot of the victim-blaming and shaming that we see in a lot of media, and sexual violence tropes in television and movies.”
‘This really happened’
Dominique Pelicot, now 71, and 50 other men are standing trial on charges of aggravated rape and face up to 20 years in prison. The trial started Sept. 2 and is expected to run until December.
Beatrice Zavarro, a lawyer for Dominique Pelicot, has told French media that he admits to his crimes.
News website Vox reports that a psychologist told the court that Dominique Pelicot’s reasoning for the assaults is that his wife rejected swinging. He was supposed to testify Tuesday, but was instead hospitalized for medical checks and treatments for a possible bladder infection, his lawyer told reporters.
Last Thursday, Gisèle Pelicot said she pushed for the trial in open court in solidarity with other women who go unrecognized as victims of sexual crimes.
“I no longer have an identity…. I don’t know if I’ll ever rebuild myself,” Pelicot told the court.
Tanya Couch, a co-founder of advocacy group Survivor Safety Matters and a survivor herself, told CBC News that’s exactly how she felt when she reported her own high-profile military sexual assault case.
“You don’t know who you are anymore, and that takes a long time to heal from,” Couch said. “I’m so thankful that she’s willing to do this publicly.”
Couch, who lives in the Greater Toronto Area, noted that sometimes when a survivor’s name isn’t published, the attacker’s identity is then also protected if it would identify them.
But that’s not the case in this trial, where Dominique Pelicot’s name is also front and centre.
“Kudos on her to be willing to use her story as an example to show the public that this really happened, and her own husband gathered evidence for her,” Couch said.
“The amount of strength it takes to be public, and come across as credible, and manage your own pain throughout all of it? It’s an extreme act of courage in my opinion.”
While both Couch and Reid applaud Gisèle Pelicot for going public, they add it’s important to recognize that not everyone might make the same decision or even have the choice under a publication ban. Couch, for instance, was identified by a pseudonym in media stories about her case.
“Survivors always know what’s best for themselves,” Reid said.
An exhibit at the Nova Scotia Community College in Lunenburg looks to dispel a myth around sexual assault. On display are outfits representing what survivors were wearing at the time they were assaulted.
Alleged rapists had to follow a protocol
The court learned that Gisèle Pelicot and her husband of 50 years lived in a house in Mazan, a small town in Provence. In 2020, a security agent caught Dominique Pelicot taking photos of women’s crotches in a supermarket, leading investigators to search his phone and computer.
They found thousands of photographs and videos of men appearing to rape Gisèle Pelicot in their home while she appeared to be unconscious. Police investigators found communications Dominique Pelicot allegedly sent on a messaging website commonly used by criminals, in which he invited men to sexually abuse his wife.
The alleged abuses began in 2011. Dominique Pelicot told investigators that men invited to the couple’s home had to follow certain rules — they could not talk loudly, had to remove their clothes in the kitchen and could not wear perfume or smell of tobacco.
They sometimes had to wait up to an hour and a half in a nearby parking lot for the drugs he secretly administered to her — a mixture of Temesta and Zolpidem, hypnotic and anxiolytic drugs, according to a toxicologist — to take full effect.
Because Dominique Pelicot videotaped the alleged rapes, police were able to track down — over a period of two years — a majority of the 72 suspects they were seeking.
Besides Pelicot, 50 other men, aged 22 to 70, are standing trial. Several defendants are denying some of the accusations against them, alleging they were manipulated by Pelicot.
Questioned in court, Gisèle Pelicot rejected the argument that any of these men were manipulated or trapped.
“These men entered my home, respected the imposed protocol. They did not rape me with a gun to the head. They raped me in all conscience,” she said. “Why didn’t they go to the police station? Even an anonymous phone call could have saved my life.”
Couch said the case is important because it details the “excuses” of the alleged attackers.
“It’s always women who are the ones accused of lying, but it’s not us lying,” Couch said.
She added the case also highlights how common it is for sexual assaults to occur in the home, and how — without the video proof of the assaults on Gisèle Pelicot — “there wouldn’t have been any evidence that she wasn’t just crazy.”
According to People magazine, Gisèle Pelicot told the court that until police told her of the assaults, she had been convinced that her drug-induced memory lapses and blackouts could be due to Alzheimer’s disease, and that Dominique Pelicot drove her to the doctor.
For anyone who has been sexually assaulted, there is support available through crisis lines and local support services via the Ending Violence Association of Canada database.
For anyone affected by family or intimate partner violence, there is support available through crisis lines and local support services.
If you’re in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911.
Published at Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000
