Current Situation At Local Grocery Stores In Lake Charles & SWLA

All eyes have been on the Gulf of Mexico since this past weekend watching an area of disturbed weather. In its infancy, the forecast had this weather spinning up into a tropical storm which did occur on Monday.

The storm got a name Monday and it is called Francine. The National Weather Service started tracking the storm and the first set of cones of uncertainty were released and Lake Charles and Southwest Louisiana were directly in those cones.

The storm is forecasted now to become a category 2 hurricane and the current forecast has Francine making landfall along the Louisiana coast somewhere on Wednesday, September 11th, 2024 in the late afternoon or early evening.

Those forecasts encouraged local officials to take action on Monday. They issued a mandatory evacuation was issued for all of Cameron Parish. All schools in Calcasieu, Beauregard Parish, Jeff Davis, Allen Parish, and Cameron schools and facilities were closed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

They also cautioned residents to have a plan of action and start making preparations now for the storm like filling up their gas tanks in their vehicles and having hurricane supplies like batteries for flashlights, cash on hand, and food and water.

As you can imagine, that caused people to step into high gear as residents rushed to the gas stations to fill up and flooded the grocery stores for supplies. We went into a local grocery store on Monday around 3:30 pm to see how it was going. We were surprised to see that stores were already out of cases of bottled water and the bread was also flying off the shelves. Here are some pictures.

Dents on the shelves are being made for sure. We had reports of several stores already out of water and bread. Remember these stores wait for deliveries and some of the distributors come from other parts of Louisiana and the distribution centers are also dealing with the storms.

Remember when you go to get your food and supplies to remember others. Get what you need but make sure to remember others need the same things too so be kind.

We will all get through this together.