Pour one out for Lake Charles, though. It's not a major city, but it's right in the blast zone of this monster storm.
Worse than harvey?
Yeah I was about to say they got hit hard in Houston three years ago and seem to have recovered fine.
Harvey was a much smaller slower hurricane that destroyed tens of thousands of homes due to flooding and was one of the most expensive hurricanes EVER. Houston would be in big trouble with a fast direct hit from a cat 5, largely due to lax building codes.
Harvey came ashore a category 4 storm then proceeded to loiter over Houston for days with hurricane force winds. I don’t see how it gets much worse than that.
I don’t believe that is accurate. Harvey’s winds caused little to no damage to Houston. Harvey was a rain event, not a wind event. Laura would have been a wind event, not a rain event.
If the dice had rolled just slightly differently, tonight would have been a decade defining event as a major US city was destroyed. We just barely scraped by and avoided that fate.