Hurricane Francine wreaks havoc in Louisiana, with residents still reeling from impacts of previous ones

Hurricane Francine slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast on Wednesday, causing no fatalities but significant damage especially in communities that are still recovering from previous hurricanes.

More than 100,000 homes and businesses across the U.S. state of Louisiana were without power on Friday.

In Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, volunteers are giving out food and water as a large number of residents in the county suffer power outages for two days, which has spoiled contents of their refrigerators as temperatures creep towards 32 degrees Celsius with 70 percent humidity.

Volunteers from the Bayou Blue Assembly spent Friday handing out food, water, and hygiene products to over 600 people.

"We in two hours have served 406 cars - that's not including how many families were in each car," said Michelle Guidry, a Children's Pastor from Bayou Blue Assembly.

Volunteers Convoy of Hope - a non-profit humanitarian organization- are also loading supplies, including food and water, into cars.

"We were heavy on food and water this time. Had there been more damage, we would have chosen more cleaning supplies, more tarps and that sort of thing. So that's kind of how we gauge it based on how much damage there is," said Mark Epps, the Response Manager of Convoy of Hope.

Mark says the organization gets busier by the year as storms become more frequent and more intense.

Many of the residents here in Terrebonne Parish still vividly remember Hurricane Ida from three years ago, when storm surges left 60 percent of the homes in this community unlivable.

"Some are just now, three years later, getting into their homes, getting their roofs fixed, getting those things done, working overtime, doing second jobs, doing everything they could do to try to fix their stuff. And so here another hurricane comes in," said Pastor Patrick Thompson from Bayou Blue Assembly.

Many households hit by the previous hurricane did not have insurance, yet those who did hardly got enough money to rebuild their houses. Moreover, they are starting to feel the impacts of the new hurricane.

Felicia Davenport and her husband were still in the process of repairing damage from Ida when Francine hit, ripping off part of their roof and destroying their ceiling.

"We were still repairing the floors and stuff like that. We're in a rental house, we don't even have rental insurance. [With] the last hurricane Ida we got the 500 dollars, that's everybody got and that was it," said Felicia Davenport

Though the storm has weakened to a post-tropical cyclone on late Thursday afternoon, according to the U.S. National Weather Service, many in this community still feel like they have their heads just above water.

Hurricane Francine wreaks havoc in Louisiana, with residents still reeling from impacts of previous ones

Hurricane Francine wreaks havoc in Louisiana, with residents still reeling from impacts of previous ones

With the beginning of the cotton harvest season, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is anticipating higher yields from advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization.

Xinjiang is the largest production area of high-quality commodity cotton in China. The 2.47-million-hectare cotton growing area in the region has produced more than 5 million tons of cotton for six consecutive years.

The northern and southern parts of the vast autonomous region have different climates, different cotton varieties and also different growing periods. Currently, cotton picking started two weeks ago in northern Xinjiang, while the harvesting has just begun in the southern areas.

In Tumxuk City, located in southern Xinjiang, cotton farmers are using all-in-one harvesters to help them pick cotton, separate the flowers from the stalks and pack them into bundles.

"In the past, we picked the cotton manually. It took us more than a month to pick 100 mu (6.67 hectares) of cotton, and the cost reached 1,000 yuan per mu (about 2,106 U.S. dollars per hectare). Now, we use domestically produced cotton pickers to gather them, which have high efficiency and low cost. It now takes less than a day to harvest my 100 mu of cotton, with a cost less than 200 yuan per mu," said Turaxun Samat, a local farmer.

This year, Xinjiang has vigorously promoted the new cotton planting technology of drip irrigation under the mulching film at the appropriate emergence temperature, replacing the old method of irrigating before sowing. The technology can greatly improve the emergence rate while also saving water resources.

In addition, the precision sowing supported by BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and remote sensing monitoring by the agricultural big data platform have also been widely adopted across Xinjiang, contributing to the growth of cotton output.

"This year, a total of 1,057,800 mu (about 70,520 hectares) of cotton have been planted in Tumxuk City, and the unginned cotton yield is estimated at 451.4 kilograms per mu, an average increase of 11.7 kilograms per mu over the previous year," said Chen Yongsen, a member of the leadership of the city's Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

The cotton harvesting in Xinjiang is expected to end in early November.

Xinjiang enters cotton harvest season with higher yield expected