NATION/WORLD
Thursday, February 9, 2017
East Oregonian
Page 7A
Twisters plague Louisiana, hitting same man in two towns
By JANET
MCCONNAUGHEY
Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS —
Dwight Powell lost his
Lexus to the massive tornado
that injured 33 people and
damaged 300 properties on
a two-mile rampage through
east New Orleans. He had
just parked it inside his
garage to avoid hail damage
before the twister struck.
At least his Yukon pickup
truck would be OK, he
thought: It was in a friend’s
repair shop, 60 miles north.
Then his phone rang.
“The man called me this
morning and said, ‘Man,
the tornado hit your truck,”’
Powell said.
That’s a bad joke to tell
a friend who just lost his
house, he told him.
But it wasn’t. The truck
was slammed by another
tornado that hit Donaldson-
ville, one of at least four
confirmed twisters tearing up
Louisiana on Tuesday as a
line of severe weather moved
across the Deep South.
“I’ve got to pick up the
pieces and walk in faith. God
is going to take care of me,”
Powell said Wednesday.
The other tornadoes
injured nine people in the
AP Photo/Max Becherer
Dwight Powell recovers mirrors from the bathroom of his master bedroom a day
after a tornado touched down in eastern New Orleans on Wednesday.
Baton Rouge area and two
north of Lake Pontchartrain,
but nobody was killed,
authorities said. Parts of
the Florida Panhandle and
southern Alabama also saw
severe weather Wednesday,
but no injuries.
New Orleans Mayor
Mitch Landrieu said in a
news release Wednesday that
two people remain hospital-
ized, and that 78 people spent
Tuesday night in a shelter,
which remains open.
His statement also said
that two-thirds of the 10,400
Entergy customers who
lost power have had their
electricity restored — and
the rest may have to wait up
to 5 days before getting their
lights back on.
National Weather Service
teams fanned out Wednesday
in Louisiana and Mississippi,
which had one confirmed
tornado, to analyze the
destruction and estimate their
power. They determined that
the twister that struck eastern
New Orleans was an EF3 on
the enhanced Fujita scale,
meaning its winds reached
from 136 to 165 mph, capable
of causing severe damage.
Tornado damage has a
distinctive pattern, meteo-
rologist Christopher Bannan
Hundreds of bison sent to slaughter over tribes’ objections
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Yellow-
stone National Park on Wednesday
started shipping hundreds of wild
bison to slaughter for disease control,
as a quarantine facility on a Montana
Indian reservation that could help spare
many of the animals sat empty due to a
political dispute.
Fifteen female bison initially slated
for quarantine on the Fort Peck Reser-
vation were instead loaded onto trailers
near the town of a Gardiner, Montana
and sent to slaughter. Hundreds more
will be shipped in coming days and
weeks, park officials said.
More than 400 bison, also known
as buffalo, have been captured this
winter attempting to migrate out of the
snow-covered park to lower elevations
in Montana in search of food. More
animals are expected to be captured
and shipped to slaughter through
AP Photo/Matthew Brown
This 2016 photo shows a bi-
son from Yellowstone National
Park being held for shipment to
slaughter near Gardiner, Mont.
March.
Fort Peck’s Assiniboine and Sioux
tribes built their quarantine facility to
house up to 300 animals in hopes of
using it to establish new herds across
the U.S with Yellowstone’s genetically
pure bison.
Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure said
state and federal officials “slapped the
Fort Peck tribes in the face” by not
using the facility.
“They knew we were building a
quarantine facility. A lot of money
and time and effort were involved in
this and all of a sudden they throw a
monkey wrench in it,” Azure said.
Montana livestock officials and
federal animal health agents oppose
transferring bison to the quarantine
site because the animals have not been
certified to be free of brucellosis, a
disease that can cause animals to abort
their young. Ranchers in the state fear
bison could transmit the disease to
cattle and would pose competition for
grazing space on public lands.
No transmissions of the disease
from wild bison to cattle have been
documented.
VALENTINE’S DAY
SALE!
said, unlike damage from a
downburst, which radiates
outward from a central
point, and straight-line wind
damage, which all points the
same direction.
The state was counting
the buildings damaged or
destroyed, Mike Steele of
the Governor’s Office of
Homeland Security and
Emergency
Preparedness
said Wednesday.
Powell had just finished
restoring his house after
buying it as blighted prop-
erty.
“I was about to put my
house on the market for sale
this Friday. This Thursday,
I was going to get home-
owners and flood insurance,”
he said.
He and an employee saw
the tornado from the back
door, and moved to the front.
“All we heard was that
train sound, WooWooWoo
BOOM! In 15 seconds it
was over,” he said. The front
of the house was intact, but
“the whole back is gone. The
garage is gone. The kitchen
gone.”
Rocqueisha
Williams
lives in the same neighbor-
hood and was sitting on her
bed when a friend called to
warn her to take shelter. She
said she didn’t see any rain,
but then she heard thunder.
She grabbed a mattress and
looked out her front window
as she ran to the bathroom.
The sky was “charcoal
grey, like the world was just
grey. ... and, running through,
a strong bolt of turquoise
lightning.”
“Glass
was
coming
toward me. It sounded like
the wind and everything was
chasing me,” she said. “The
wind was whistling, tyoo!
Tyoo! Glass was breaking
out of the window I’d just
looked out of.”
She emerged to find the
bed she just left covered by
shattered glass.
“The Lord was on my
side,” she said.
Then she ran, shaking,
to the nearby school where
her eighth grade boys were,
because “I knew if I was hit,
they were also hit,” she said.
Eric Williams, 14, and
Erin Williams, 13, were fine.
Her other children, Ke’Erica
Williams, 15, and Evrin
Thompson, 11, were at other
schools outside the tornado’s
path.
She said pieces of walls
and part of a blue door had
crashed through her car
windows.
“Someone else’s lingerie
is in my front yard,” she said.
Oil pipeline opponents call
for ‘last stand’ protests
CANNON BALL, N.D.
(AP) — With the federal
government about to green-
light the final phase of the
Dakota Access pipeline,
opponents of the project
called
Wednesday
for
protests around the world in
an action they dubbed their
“last stand.”
Some members of the
Standing Rock Sioux tribe,
which has been at the center
of the debate for nearly a
year, urged “emergency
actions” via social media.
The Indigenous Environ-
mental Network told people
to target fuel-transportation
hubs and government build-
ings and to expect violence
and mass arrests.
Protesters posted an
online list of nearly 50 events
in 23 states and the District of
Columbia. In one early rally,
several people were arrested
for blocking public access
to a federal building in San
Francisco.
At a North Dakota
encampment that’s been the
focus of the pipeline battle
for months, the mood was
tense, with a few dozen
people milling about on a
frigid morning and refusing
to talk about their plans.
They ordered an Associated
Press reporter to leave.
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