Hurricane Cindy (2005) - Impact

Impact

See also: Hurricane Cindy (2005) tornado outbreak

Five deaths were attributed to Cindy, none of them near the storm's landfall. Two people were killed in Georgia, one in Alabama, and two in Maryland. Approximately 300,000 homes and businesses in southeast Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast lost electrical power and a storm surge of 4–6 feet (1.2-1.8 m) affected the same area, causing some beach erosion near Grand Isle, Louisiana. Hurricane Cindy's total damage was estimated to be US$320 million.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, wind gusts reached 70 mph (110 km/h), many trees were damaged or uprooted and scattered street flooding was reported. As thousands lost electrical power, the city experienced its worst blackout since Hurricane Betsy 40 years earlier. Although still listed as a "Tropical Storm" by the weather service at the time, many laypeople in New Orleans were under the impression that Cindy was a hurricane, and referred to it as "Hurricane Cindy" before it was officially upgraded. Many people in the New Orleans metropolitan area expected minimal effects from the storm, but were cleaning up debris and were without power for days after Cindy's passage. In Louisiana, 260,000 residences were left without power.

Even though it had weakened to a depression when it moved inland, Cindy's effects were still significant across the final portion of its track. The day after its landfall in southeastern Louisiana, Tropical Depression Cindy reached central Alabama. There its rainbands produced heavy rainfall and eight tornadoes. Damage was mostly limited to trees and powerlines, but an F1 tornado in Macon county injured one man, destroyed an auto-repair shop, and damaged several nearby cars. About 35,000 residences in Alabama and 7,000 in both Florida and Mississippi were left without power following the storm.

In Georgia, some parts of Atlanta Motor Speedway and Tara Field airport in Hampton, Georgia suffered US$40 million damage from an F2 tornado spawned by the storm. An F1 tornado in Fayette county damaged three homes and caused an estimated US$3 million of damage. Four other tornadoes were confirmed across the state, although none of them caused significant damage. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta recorded over 5 inches (130 mm) of rain on July 6, its sixth-highest one-day rainfall since records began in 1878; most of the rain fell during just two hours (8–10 p.m. EDT). This is more rain than the area normally gets in all of July.

Cindy's remnant low moving across western and northern North Carolina combined with a frontal boundary to produce several supercell thunderstorms. These supercells spawned a number of tornadoes in western North Carolina, at the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, but their effects were minimal. Continuing north, Cindy brought over 5 in (125 mm) of rain to areas as distant as Salisbury, Maryland.