(NewsNation) — New Orleans man Brian DeLancey is no stranger to large storms.
He’s been in the eye of Hurricane Zeta, which made landfall in 2020. And the next year, when Hurricane Ida hit, he had to evacuate for nine days.
These memories came back to him on Tuesday night, as DeLancey watched the local news station’s coverage of a tornado tearing through New Orleans and its suburbs Tuesday night.
At least one person is dead, and multiple injured, from the tornado in Louisiana, which was spawned by a storm that also produced multiple tornadoes through parts of Texas and Oklahoma.
The tornado appeared to start in a New Orleans suburb before moving east across the Mississippi River into the Lower 9th Ward of the city and parts of St. Bernard Parish before moving northeast.
When it stopped raining in his area on Tuesday, DeLancey stepped outside and saw blue flashing lights. That’s when he started recording.
Even though the storm was a mile away, he felt like he was right back in the eye of a hurricane.
“You’ll see it kind of come together and then get bigger and then come back together,” DeLancey said.
DeLancey’s thoughts turned to his friends, who were nearby. Luckily, he doesn’t have any damage to his house, and his friends are safe. But the house across the street was completely demolished.
“These people that live in these neighborhoods, including myself, a lot of them have blue tarps on the roof,” DeLancey said, explaining that they’re set up because of past storms. “It’s kind of like a three punch every year.”
Despite his past experiences with severe weather, DeLancey was caught off-guard by some aspects of this storm.
“It came a lot faster. It was unexpected,” he said.
The forecast was showing that a different area would likely get the worst, so DeLancey thought, “We’d be pretty much in the clear.”
“Then it all just started forming at the last minute, like literally the last minute,” he said.