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IOWA — It was just six weeks ago that Hurricane Laura’s winds, whistling like a freight train, tore the roof off Brian Schexnayder’s home just east of Lake Charles and nearly destroyed it.

On Friday evening, Hurricane Delta came to finish the job. The late-blooming storm came ashore in the coastal hamlet of Creole, in Cameron Parish, just a dozen miles east of where Laura made landfall on Aug. 27, and drew a bead on Iowa.

Delta’s Category 2 winds — about 100 mph at landfall — were not nearly as strong as Laura’s. But they were plenty strong enough to undo the measures Schexnayder had taken to protect what was left of his house.

“In the first five minutes, it blew the tarp off,” said Schexnayder, 62, who goes by “Shakey.”

Torrential rains soon poured into every room in his house, which will have to be rebuilt completely, he said.

Rain gauges maintained by the National Weather Service show Iowa received 17 inches of rain as Delta blew through Friday evening. That was the heaviest rainfall total seen anywhere in the state, but not by much. Several other locations around southwest Louisiana, including parts of Lake Charles, Sulphur and Moss Bluff, got a foot of rain or more.

If there was good news to be found, it was that Delta caused no reported fatalities and didn’t linger long. The storm raced across the state and was over north-central Mississippi by Saturday evening, where it had weakened into a depression. It was expected to dissipate into a remnant low by Sunday.

On Saturday morning, Schexnayder and several neighbors were trying to sort out the new damage from the old. The story was the same around much of southwest Louisiana: While it was clear that Delta’s winds were no match for Laura’s, Delta in many cases exacerbated damage caused by the earlier storm.

Delta also knocked out power to nearly 700,000 homes and businesses around the state, according to Gov. John Bel Edwards. By noon Saturday, that number was down to 600,000. Delta actually caused more widespread outages than Laura, but Edwards said he expects power will be restored more quickly this time because the damage to infrastructure this time wasn’t as bad.

Edwards said he was asking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to consolidate the two storms in the context of recovery dollars to give the state a 90%-10% federal-state cost share.

Many utility customers around Lake Charles, including Schexnayder and his neighbors, were out of power for nearly a month after Laura, and even then, their grid was being powered by a generator.

While Delta was weaker than Laura, it brought significantly more flooding, Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter said. He estimated that hundreds of already battered homes across the city took on water. Having to recover from twin disasters will be a stiff challenge, he said.

“Add Laura and Delta together and it’s just absolutely unprecedented and catastrophic,” Hunter said. “We are very concerned that with everything going in the country right now, that this incident may not be on the radar nationally like it should be.”

Calcasieu Parish Police Jury spokesman Thomas Hoefer said Delta’s impacts were most severe outside of Lake Charles, in the eastern reaches of the parish.

“We took tremendous rainfall,” Hoefer said. “There was quite a bit of home flooding.”

In some cases, Hoefer said, people who had done drywall repair or replacement or mold remediation after Laura will have to start all over.

Hoefer and Hunter weren’t the only ones who sounded weary Saturday.

North of Lake Charles in Moss Bluff, John and Melanie Harper had to wade through water on Saturday to get back to their home along U.S. 171.

Their yard, which is near Little Indian Bayou, was under as much as 4 feet of water after Delta passed. But the inside of their home stayed dry, and a tarp that they had put over Harper’s knife-sharpening shop stayed intact.

John Harper described the three stages that he’s used to deal with the tribulations: get past the shock of it, pray, and then move forward.

“I’ve had three major surgeries since February and I’ve went through two major hurricanes,” he said. “Lord, we don’t need more.”

A few miles further east, residents of Jennings said they were grateful that Delta wasn’t as catastrophic as Laura. Still, it recreated a landscape full of downed tree limbs and power lines that they had just finished clearing.

“We’re numb, we’re really numb,” said Ralph LeBlanc, 73. “This town was all cleaned up, we just got it cleaned up last week. Of course, we’re without electricity, but we’re just about used to that.”

Over in Holmwood, just southeast of Lake Charles, Jerry Mallett found a way to look on the bright side.

“There was some damage, but compared to what Laura did, it’s minute,” Mallett said as he surveyed what little remained of his home.

Outside, his horses had weathered the storm pretty well, though Mallett had just pulled a nail — one of countless bits of flotsam strewn about by the twin storms — from one animal’s hoof.

One reason Mallett was hurt less by Delta was because Laura had already dealt him a pretty rough blow. It destroyed the house Mallett’s father built in 1942, and also flipped a neighboring trailer home over and rolled it about 15 feet.

By contrast, Delta just stirred up and soaked the existing debris, including the remnants of his trailer, demolished just days earlier.

“I’m going to tear this one down, add another 18 inches of dirt and rebuild. That’s all you can do,” said Mallett as he peered into the wreckage. He fretted that the second storm might complicate his existing homeowner’s claim. “I’m like everybody else in this area, fighting with the insurance company.”

For Gerard Victoriano, Laura and Delta each served up measures of misery.

Laura rendered his home outside of Lake Charles “unlivable,” and though it was gutted, he still hadn’t moved back in when Delta churned across the Gulf.

The downpours that accompanied the second storm flooded the storage pod in his driveway — where his family had stashed furniture, clothes and other items that made it through Laura. Blue tarping flapped in the breeze and Victoriano said he feared the few walls he didn’t rip out after Laura might’ve gotten soaked in Delta.

“Laura initially did all the roof damage and then Delta ripped the tarp off, so now we’ve got the same rainwater coming in the house and then some,” Victoriano said. “It is what it is.”

Tavita Carrier rode out both storms with relatives, including her ailing mother, who recently had open-heart surgery.

For Delta, she was able to rely on a recently acquired generator for her mother’s medical devices and a stockpile of water, after living for weeks without power or reliable water.

But the storm still brought plenty of fresh suffering. Winds tore away a tarp covering major roof damage inflicted by Laura and off fresh new chunks of roofing as well, sending rain pouring into parts of the home that had stayed dry until now.

Carrier, who was collecting food and supplies Saturday afternoon from a Salvation Army crew circling the neighborhood, said she considered evacuating again. But there were just too many obstacles.

In the end, she said she was glad she stayed. At least when rain started pouring inside, she and others were in a position to try and save furniture and other possessions.

“I thought about it but it just didn’t make sense financially. I’m on disability, my mom’s on disability,” said Carrier. “I had her up in Mississippi for about five weeks after Laura, so I’d just gotten her home about a week.”

Carrier, a Lake Charles native who moved to Connecticut after Hurricane Rita, moved back a couple of years ago while battling cancer herself and trying to take care of her mother. But after getting walloped by two storms in six weeks, Carrier said she’s feeling ready to go.

“I’m ready to leave Lake Charles,” said Carrier. “I’m seriously considering it.”

— Staff writers Sam Karlin and Ken Stickney contributed to this report.