With memories of the August 2016 floods fresh in mind, local business owners are keeping a close eye on and bracing for Tropical Storm Gordon, which is forecast to make landfall tonight as a Category 1 hurricane.
For Jim Lloyd, owner of Cornerstone Commercial Flooring, protecting inventory is a top priority after the business lost one-third of it during 2016 flooding.
The company is going through its normal hurricane preparedness drills and they’re elevating the computer systems tonight, he says.
“As we found out a little rain can turn into big problem if the system stalls over us,” Lloyd says.
In Denham Springs, Mike O’Neal isn’t expecting his restaurant Big Mike’s Sports Bar and Grill, which flooded in 2016, to take water from Gordon, but he’s concerned streets in the area will flood, preventing employees from coming to work.
He’s meeting with managers this morning to contact everyone scheduled to work tomorrow to make sure they can either come to work, or have someone lined up to take their shift. He also says they’re only prepping about half the amount of food they normally do in case of power outages or slow business.
“We don’t want to go through what we went through before,” O’Neal says.
Rainfall from the storm is currently expected to be comparable to a summer shower or thunderstorm, local meteorologists are predicting, though a shift in the storm’s track could dramatically increase rainfall amounts.
Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency Monday and says 200 National Guard troops will be deployed to southeastern Louisiana. The storm’s predicted track had shifted slightly east, meaning Louisiana is currently just outside the area under the hurricane warning. Still, the southeastern part of the state remains under a tropical storm warning and residents need to be prepared for the storm to shift west, Edwards says.
