Hurricane Laura Impact Update

Announcement Number: CN2020-42
Categories: General Announcements
Posted Date: August 27, 2020

To Our Customers,

Hurricane Laura made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane along the Texas/Louisiana border early this morning.

As we continue assessing the impact to our network, following is a summary of current conditions:

  • Crews have begun inspections on our network at locations where the storm has passed.
  • The area around Lake Charles, Louisiana, sustained heavy damage to main line and industry lead tracks, these tracks are currently out of service.
  • Our Houston area rail yards did not sustain damage and plans are in motion to reopen by this evening.
  • Union Pacific's Avondale, Louisiana intermodal terminal and the Settegast and Englewood intermodal terminals in Houston are scheduled to reopen tomorrow with normal operating hours.
  • The New Orleans flood gates remain closed with no interchange to the eastern carriers. Some trains are being rerouted over Memphis during the outage.

Current Embargoes
Due to the significant damage in the Lake Charles area, embargoes have been issued, please see our embargo page for detailed information.

Customers in the affected area with facilities or tracks out of service should open a case in Case Management. Please refer to the detailed instructions on our Hurricane Planning and Recovery page so we are aware of these outages.

Any additional network outages will be communicated in future updates as the inspection process progresses. If you have any questions, please contact Customer Care & Support at 800-272-8777 or your Union Pacific representative.

Large | Hurricane Laura Impact Map