AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from the midst of Hurricane Francine as it made landfall in Louisiana on Sept. 11, blowing down signs and sending sparks flying.
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00:00Let's get the latest from AccuWeather meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach.
00:04Tony is reporting in Houma, Louisiana that is in Terrebonne Parish.
00:11You've been in that right front eyewall and I'll tell you what,
00:14that eye looks to me like it's coming right towards you within the next I'd say hour and a half, Tony.
00:23Yeah and it's been a wild ride here just since we've last talked and you see I'm holding
00:27some of the damage that has occurred here. This was a street sign that actually came
00:31flying off as we were rolling up here and this landed in the parking lot so
00:35call it a sign that landfall has happened here folks. We are in Houma as Bernie mentioned here
00:42and right now it's actually, believe it or not, relatively calm compared to what we had
00:46just about 10-15 minutes ago. I'd say the strongest winds that we've seen
00:50came ripping through here a little while ago. We've been kind of rolling around through town
00:54slowly making the occasional stops and then we do get those stronger gusts that come rolling
00:59through. Most of the damage we've seen again relegated to signs to some of the tree branches.
01:04We haven't seen any major damage. We did get into a trailer park home that did have some
01:09siding ripped off of some of the trailers through running through there but so far we haven't seen
01:12anything of notice here. I'm going to put this down off screen so it doesn't go flying off
01:17somewhere else but I want to show you behind me the gas station. You see the lights that are on
01:20right now and we've got traffic lights on so power for the most part still on which is kind of
01:25surprising. We have seen a few sparks from some of the tree branches that have hit some of the live
01:30wires but really for the most part power in town is on with the exception of a few small blocks
01:36that we've seen a couple of traffic signals that have been out but again we kind of really got into
01:41the heavier bound of the eyewall I'd say about 30 to about 15 minutes ago kind of in that window
01:48and then we are kind of calmed down a little bit if you will still obviously dealing with some
01:53pretty significant gusts but we haven't seen anything significant here probably within the
01:56last five or ten minutes so we might be getting into the eye part of this as Bernie mentioned
02:02here where we expect things to calm down for a little bit but again we saw those wind gusts
02:06easily exceeding 60-70 miles per hour. There goes the sign and we are going to be dealing with
02:12these gusts here again we're still in it even on occasion here we're seeing these gusts and you can
02:17see the rain and the wind really blowing behind me here this I can't really read the road here I
02:22believe this is going to be East 24. I'm not sure what the actual road name is it might be Park
02:28Avenue it might be New Orleans Street I don't know what that sign orientation was before it
02:33came off but this is one of the main drags here we're just outside of downtown just a couple of
02:38blocks to our west and again you're hearing the wind really blowing here and up there goes some
02:43power we just saw some sparks here off the live wire that just came out so we've got the sparks
02:48coming off of that you can see that happening right now this again this is kind of a common
02:53scene that we're seeing for sure you can see the dramatic look at that right now as we're getting
02:57the sparks coming off those power poles so that is something that we're seeing but notice again
03:02though the power's still on despite the sparks here we haven't seen any power flashes coming
03:06out of this area we're in a safe spot we're down we're upwind of that so anything that comes off
03:10that is going to blow away from us but you're seeing those sparks all that happening here in
03:15real time getting some flickers of the power now so we are going to be dealing with that we're
03:19talking about the power outages not off yet but you saw the sparks we're seeing some flickers now
03:24so I would imagine here before too long especially if these winds keep up we're going to see the
03:28power go out here in Houma and again with the sparks and everything else going on so again he
03:33just saw that live here that again blowing downwind of us here we're in a safe spot here
03:39we're kind of actually covered with a gas station and a pretty sturdy building here so not expecting
03:44that to be an issue for us but again Bernie we're talking about a pretty significant storm that's
03:49rolling through here again in the eyewall right now the winds overall have kind of lightened up
03:54considering what we saw about 30 minutes ago but again we're still going to be dealing with those
03:58issues and again we're not done because we got the back side of this that's going to come up
04:01behind it here before too long so folks in Houma continue to hunker down we got the wind we got
04:06the power lines kind of flickering a little bit here so hopefully the power can stay on I'm kind
04:11of in amazed that it has been to this point but we will see what happens as we go through the rest
04:15of the evening. All right Tony Laubach live in Houma, Louisiana I want to take you to the radar
04:20Tony has been in that right front eyewall here but now here's the center of circulation in southwest
04:26Terrebonne Parish the eye of Francine coming right toward right toward Tony right now.