People Return Home in Flood-Damaged Louisiana
ROSEMARY CHURCH, CNN ANCHOR: A warm welcome back to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. I am Rosemary Church. I want to update you on the stories we have been following this hour.</s>CHURCH: Brazil has bid farewell to the Olympics after more than two weeks of competition. The closing ceremony brought fans and athletes together one last time. But it's on to Tokyo now on the 2020 games. Japan's prime minister and the country's first female governor were in Rio for the handover of the summer Olympic Games to Tokyo. Will Ripley is in Tokyo with more on the Olympic planning. Will, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stole the game dressed as Super Mario. What can we expect four years from now?</s>WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wow, if the prime minister dressed as Super Mario, it could be an interesting and exciting Tokyo 2020 game. That image is going viral. Most Japanese did not get to see it. People were running for cover with their umbrellas to get to work and stay dry as opposed to stopping and watching the ceremony throughout the city. I will tell you, people are, of course, looking forward to the showcase on Japan and Japanese technology and innovation. This is expected to be one of the most futuristic Olympics, doing everything from super fast bullet trains, super translation technology, robots doing everything from driving taxis to directions to giving directions. But there are also serious concerns about how Japan will pay for this. The multi-billion price tag has continued to grow. They have to throw out the first stadium design, one, because there is a controversial over how it looked, but also because it was going so far over budget. Two of the previous Tokyo governors had to resign over funding scandals. I asked one of the executive directors a short time ago, this afternoon, if Tokyo 2020 has bounced back from all of that.</s>UNIDENTIFIED EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, JAPAN OLYMPIC COMMITTEE: With that, you know, positive wind behind us. We are going to make the most innovative games ever.</s>RIPLEY: One interesting thing, Rosemary, Tokyo is putting a lot of focus in the infrastructure they are building for the Paralympics games as well, because this is a country with an aging society, a shrinking workforce, and the average age continues to rise dramatically. So the Paralympics facility will be of great use for the 2020 games and senior citizens who will be using that as well.</s>CHURCH: That's interesting. A lot of the problems for these countries that host the game is the amount of money that they spend and whether there is future use of these structures. But I did want to go back to this problem and this challenge of trying to keep everything under budget because really the cost is being enormous and people in Japan are angry about that, aren't they?</s>RIPLEY: They are, and rightfully so, when you look at the fact that the public debt of Japan is twice the size of its economy. There is still expensive ongoing Fukushima clean up effort under way and people's salaries have been stagnant and the economy has been in the doldrums for many years and people are looking at the price tag and wondering why does it have to be this expensive. Even with Japan reusing some of the summer Olympic infrastructure from 1964, still, the costs are enormous. When I spoke with the Tokyo's governor a short time ago, she said she's basically an accountant, going line by line, going over everything, trying to get the cost under control.</s>CHURCH: That's the biggest challenge right now. Will Ripley reporting for us from Tokyo. Just after 3:30 in the afternoon. Many thanks. Well, an update on the catastrophic flooding in the USA, in Louisiana now. More than 60,000 homes have been damaged. Many people are returning to find there's just not much left. CNN's Polo Sandoval has more from the flood zone.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FLOOD SURVIVOR: This is where the kitchen was right here. The water got up to about 2.5 foot in the House.</s>POLO SANDOVAL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Step through the door in the city of Gonzalez and you'll see what hundreds of homes in southern Louisiana look like today. A bare interior stripped of any comforts of home.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FLOOD SURVIVOR: We had to gut everything totally in house.</s>SANDOVAL: LeBlanc only saved what he and his son could carry out as the water approached his doorstep last Sunday. Most of it was left behind, had to be discarded and now sits soaked on the front lawn.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FLOOD SURVIVOR: It happened fast. And it's sad. You do what you got to do. We saved a lot. Thanks to him and my brother, they put everything adds high as they could.</s>SANDOVAL: LeBlanc saved his family and the small irreplaceable items, including his mother-in-law's album.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FLOOD SURVIVOR: Her stuff she kept in this blue tote. I said we're not going -- we need to get that. So I felt bad the next day. Because I didn't want to destroy it. And I said I'm going back. I don't care how deep it is to get her things that she wanted.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FLOOD SURVIVOR: This is a damn shame.</s>SANDOVAL: LeBlanc used his cell phone to capture that return home along with his son.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FLOOD SURVIVOR: I didn't remember it was his birthday because all the trauma that was going on.</s>SANDOVAL: There was time for a brief celebration amid the heartbreak though.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FLOOD SURVIVOR: I sang "Happy Birthday" to him while we were standing in the water in the hall.</s>SANDOVAL: Dad fashioned a cake out of whipped cream and few cookies. Like many families on his block, LeBlanc has help from friends and coworkers and neighbors.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FLOOD SURVIVOR: I'm living in my camp. It's going to be rough for the next two months. But all of us are safe. We're alive.</s>SANDOVAL: Even with those helping hands, he says it will be weeks, perhaps months before he turns his house into a home again. Polo Sandoval, CNN, Ascension Parish, Louisiana.</s>CHURCH: Meteorologist Karen MaGinnis is here with us. It is heartbreaking too see what people are dealing with. And it is extraordinary. Talk to us about the weather going forward and what's happening with some of this water and where it can go?</s>KAREN MAGINNIS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: It cannot go anywhere. It is like in a bulb. The ground is so saturated and a lot of the heavy rainfall that we saw earlier where they saw almost a year's worth of rainfall of a short period of time, over a couple of days, well, that kind of settles in and a lot of this were actually going to make its way to other areas. But, it is so locked down and it was a thousand years. I want to show you what we can expect as we go through time. This is a short range computer model. Here is where most of that moisture is. Nothing is significant and that is as we start to look that three to five days outlook. On the border of maybe two or three inches of rainfall. I say that because when you need time to recover and getting resources back together, any rainfall is problematic. People are still shifting through their belongings. We saw about 30 inches of rainfall or about 1200 millimeters of precipitation. You heard earlier about the tropical system that's moving across Tokyo. Yes, it made land fall. We are supporting this of 95 kilometers an hour. It is weakening. What will be impressive is that we'll see staggering rainfall totals here on the order of maybe 200 millimeters. The ground is saturated as well. Mud slides and landslides is certainly a possibility and down power lines and some of the rainfall totals is just about 160 millimeters in some areas. Looks like the computer models are saying maybe we are going to the next five days and we may see another tropical system. That one is so crazy acting up. It is hard to say.</s>CHURCH: Absolutely. Thank you for keeping an eye on that.</s>MCGINNIS: Thank you.</s>CHURCH: We'll talk again next hour. Many thanks, Karen. Canada's indigenous women are a frequent victim of the sex trafficking. How one community is facing this crisis. That's still to come, ahead.