This is so, so bad. And it’s terrifying to realize how much worse it could have been.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1298794491936149506
With winds topping 150 mph, Hurricane Laura is approaching Category 5 status as it barrels toward the Texas-Louisiana border.
As of 7 p.m., the system was located about 120 miles southeast of Port Arthur, moving toward the coast at about 15 mph. It remains course to make landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border around midnight, according to the National Weather Service. A roughly 150-mile stretch of coastline from Sea Rim State Park, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana, is expected to take the brunt of the storm’s impact.
Wind speeds and water levels are currently rising along the northwest Gulf coast. Sustained winds of 39 mph were reported at 6 p.m. along the southern-most edge of the Louisiana coast. Heavy rains also are beginning to spread onshore. The hurricane center said “possible tornadoes” were sprouting from Laura’s outer bands at 7 p.m. over southeastern Louisiana and extreme southwestern Mississippi.
Regions directly in Hurricane Laura’s path and east of the storm face catastrophic consequences from what the National Hurricane Center called an “extremely dangerous” storm expected to ravage portions of the northwest Gulf coast with “unsurvivable” storm surge, extreme wind and widespread flash flooding.
A tornado watch is expected to last through 9 p.m. for areas east of the Houston area and most of the Louisiana coast. The pressure around the storm has dropped to about 940 mb. Outer swaths of rain have been whipping across inland areas, with gusty winds and downpours expected in Liberty and Chambers counties.
How bad is Hurricane Laura? This bad:
#Laura’s central pressure is down to 937 hPa. Only 3 #hurricanes on record (since 1851) have made landfall in Louisiana with a central pressure of <=937 hPa: Katrina (2005, 920 hPa), Last Island (1856, 934 hPa) and Rita (2005, 937 hPa). Lower pressure = stronger storm pic.twitter.com/rXkRdnCnNW
— Philip Klotzbach (@philklotzbach) August 27, 2020
Never good to be grouped with Katrina and Rita. And as bad as this is, shift this thing 150 miles west for a direct hit on Houston, and, well, I don’t even want to think about it. There are plenty of articles out now about how bad that would be. We need the Ike Dike ASAP, but we need more than that, too. We’re sitting on dynamite and playing with matches until we take this seriously.
We got very, very lucky in the Houston area, but Louisiana has been hit with hurricanes so many times in the last 15 years, they didn’t really need this, either.