Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Hurricane Laura Live Updates: Storm Intensifies to Category 4 Strength

hurricane-laura-live-updates:-storm-intensifies-to-category-4-strength

hurricane-laura-live-updates:-storm-intensifies-to-category-4-strength

The hurricane is projected to make landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border, pushing a storm surge of 15 to 20 feet into some areas.

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The center of Laura, now a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of nearly 140 miles per hour, is about 200 miles south of Lake Charles, La., and moving toward the city.

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Credit…William Widmer for The New York Times

Forecasters say Laura could cause an ‘unsurvivable’ storm surge.

Hurricane Laura, now a major Category 4 storm, hurtled toward the coasts of Louisiana and Texas on Wednesday, prompting state leaders to make dire warnings about life-threatening conditions as the storm gained further strength.

The storm had sustained winds of about 140 miles per hour as it powered north through the Gulf of Mexico, the National Hurricane Center said.

Laura is set to make landfall Wednesday night or early Thursday, most likely near the Texas-Louisiana border, but meteorologists said storm surge, powerful gusts of wind and heavy rains would arrive much sooner.

The Hurricane Center warned that an “unsurvivable storm surge with large and destructive waves will cause catastrophic damage” along a section of the Gulf Coast near the border. The surge could reach as high as 15 to 20 feet in places and stretch as far as 30 miles inland.

“Only a few hours remain to protect life and property and all actions should be rushed to completion,” the center said.

“This is a very serious storm,” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said during a briefing on Wednesday, beseeching residents again to heed official warnings and noting that the window for evacuations would rapidly close as conditions deteriorate.

“In the five years I’ve been governor, I don’t believe I’ve had a press conference where it was my intention to convey the sense of urgency that I am trying to convey right now,” Mr. Edwards said. “Our state hasn’t seen a storm surge like this in many many decades.”

Though the center of the storm is bound for the Texas-Louisiana border, a vast and heavily populated stretch of the Gulf Coast is bracing for the possibility of hurricane-level conditions, reaching from west of Galveston Island in Texas to Morgan City, La.

There is also the threat of flash floods and tornadoes further inland, with the potential for the storm to maintain hurricane strength as it pushes north toward Shreveport, La.

City and county officials in Texas and Louisiana have issued evacuation orders affecting about 500,000 residents, particularly those living in low-lying areas. In Texas, thousands of emergency workers, including the National Guard, were poised to spring into action with boats, aircraft and other equipment when the storm hits. President Trump said his administration had been in contact with state officials.

“There will be a lot of devastation wrecked upon Texas as the storm sweeps through,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said during a briefing on Tuesday.

The geography of the region offers little buffer to the approaching storm surge.

The city of Lake Charles, right in the path of Hurricane Laura, sits some 30 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. But this does not mean it is safe from an “unsurvivable surge” expected to march in front of the storm.

Between the city and the coast lies mostly treeless marshland, which, most dangerously, is cut through with shipping channels that lead directly in from the Gulf. Given a storm surge predicted to be as high as 20 feet, these channels “provide conduits like a hose going in,” said Paul Kemp, a professor of coastal sciences at Louisiana State University.

The place expected to take the first direct hit, coastal Cameron Parish, has been repeatedly devastated by hurricanes, Rita and Ike most recently. A wide swathe of marsh and farmland, it has a faction of the population it once had.

The vulnerability has gotten worse over time. For decades, saltwater has steadily crept inland all along the coast, through these shipping channels and coastal erosion, turning freshwater lakes — including Lake Charles itself — into a brackish coastal inlets and killing trees that once offered protection from big storms.

The kind of storm surge that Laura is forecast to bring, which builds up easily over the Gulf’s relatively shallow continental shelf, could reach as far as 30 miles inland, forecasters said.

“You’ve got all these things coming together, and then adding insult to injury, this storm is big,” said Jamie Rhome, who oversees the storm surge forecast unit at the National Hurricane Center. “Big storms push harder, exert more force than little storms of the same intensity.”

He said that the surge could very well reach Interstate 10, the main artery along the Gulf, which was flooded most recently in Tropical Storm Imelda last year. During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the interstate disappeared under a choppy ocean, shutting off the primary route between south Louisiana and southeastern Texas for days.

Just west of the Louisiana-Texas state line lie the cities of Port Arthur and Beaumont. Both were hit badly during Hurricane Harvey, whose torrential rains submerged Port Arthur and parts of Beaumont. Both cities are in mandatory evacuation areas, and just how much trouble they will be in this time will depend on the last-minute wobbles of the storm as it approaches the coast.

Laura has drawn comparisons to Hurricane Rita, which smashed the region in 2005.

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Credit…David J. Phillip/Associated Press

Laura was approaching the United States on the anniversary of another major Houston-area storm, Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in Texas on Aug. 25, 2017, lashing the Gulf Coast with extensive flooding and causing nearly $125 billion in damage.

But Mr. Edwards drew a comparison to another storm, one of the most devastating to hit the region: Hurricane Rita, in 2005, which caused an estimated $25.2 billion in damage. He said the storms resembled each other in their paths and intensity.

Memories of Rita, which left a deep physical and emotional toll on the region, remain vivid for many, even 15 years later.

“That point of reference sometimes helps people understand the seriousness of the situation,” Mr. Edwards said.

But Benjamin Schott, a National Weather Service meteorologist, warned those who rode out Rita at home against assuming they could do the same with Laura.

“There is no way to be certain if you lived through Rita, and you’re hunkering down today where there is an evacuation notice, that you will survive,” he said.

This week also marks 15 years since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, overwhelming a poorly designed levee and drainage system and swamping much of New Orleans. The commemorations will mostly be understated because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Stay or go? The coronavirus is complicating the decision to evacuate.

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Credit…William Widmer for The New York Times

No matter how much experience residents of Louisiana and Texas have with storms blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico, the decision to evacuate can be an agonizing one. But in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, it has become even more complicated.

Many living in Laura’s path, particularly those vulnerable to the virus or caring for older relatives, have found themselves weighing the risks of riding out the storm against potential exposure to the virus. Others simply don’t have the means to escape, as their livelihoods were eviscerated when the economy cratered.

The worst of the storm is bound for a part of Louisiana that has also been hit hard with the coronavirus, with officials noting that Cameron and Calcasieu Parishes have the highest positivity rates for virus tests.

Like many of his neighbors in Lake Charles, where a mandatory evacuation order was issued, Chris Vinn spent much of Tuesday sawing lumber to board up his windows. “You could hear saws all over the neighborhood,” he said.

Mr. Vinn, who tested positive for the coronavirus in July, and his family decided to book a home about three hours east in Lafayette through Airbnb instead of looking for a hotel.

“We do try to take safety precautions as much as possible, so we did not want to be in a hotel full of people or run to a shelter or anything like that,” Mr. Vinn said, adding that his three dogs would also have been a hassle in a hotel.

Residents of Sandpiper Cove, a subsidized housing complex in Galveston, Texas, rushed to evacuate on Tuesday evening, cramming into charter buses headed for shelter at hotels in Austin.

Ericka Bowman, a community navigator for Texas Housers, an organization that advocates for tenants at the 192-unit housing complex, said the families were distraught at the prospect of being displaced.

The pandemic added another layer of insecurity, she noted, as families sometimes with three and four children were cramped together on the vehicles. “There was fear of the sickness from being crowded on these buses,” Ms. Bowman said.

In Newtown, a small town in East Texas that is right in Laura’s sights, the Rev. Joe Miller, 75, had planned to hunker down despite a mandatory evacuation.

On Wednesday morning, after the storm grew much stronger overnight, he said he was reconsidering. “I don’t know if it’s too late,” he said. “We couldn’t hardly get out with Rita.”

“I’m starting to worry now,” he added.

Evacuation shelters are adjusting for the virus, too.

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Credit…William Widmer for The New York Times

Although large shelters are being set up throughout the hurricane zone, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas encouraged evacuees to consider booking rooms in hotels and motels instead of using shelters, as a safer way to isolate themselves from others who might be infected.

Mr. Abbott and Chief Nim Kidd of the Texas Division of Emergency Management said buses used for evacuations would carry fewer people than in the past, to let riders stay a safe distance from one another. Planners are bringing in more buses than in previous disasters, to make up for having fewer people on each bus.

Traditional shelters like gymnasiums and convention centers that have hosted hundreds of evacuees in past disasters will be set up to provide “layers of separation” between the occupants, Mr. Abbott said. The shelters and buses will be supplied with hand sanitizer and personal protective equipment like face masks, and state officials plan to dispatch testing teams to the larger shelters.

“The state and local governments are fully aware that they are dealing with a pandemic while they are responding to Hurricane Laura,” the governor said.

In Louisiana, the state had helped transported about 900 people in the Lake Charles area to hotel rooms, mostly around Baton Rouge, said Mike Steele, a spokesman for the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

What does it mean when meteorologists say Laura underwent ‘rapid intensification?’

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Credit…William Widmer for The New York Times

Adam Sobel is an atmospheric scientist and the director of the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate at Columbia University. His podcast, Deep Convection, is about science, climate and life.

Laura reached its current state as a Category 4 hurricane — in which it has maximum sustained winds of 140 miles per hour — through a process known as “rapid intensification,” a scientific term that denotes a tropical cyclone that becomes much stronger in a short time.

To be precise, we say a tropical cyclone has undergone rapid intensification when its maximum sustained winds increase by at least 35 knots, or 40 miles per hour, in a period of 24 hours. Laura has already done that, going from being just barely a hurricane on Tuesday to its current fearsome state — and it is still strengthening.

The numbers don’t tell the whole story, though.

When a storm rapidly intensifies, it becomes much more organized. Generally speaking, the more perfect a tropical cyclone looks in satellite images, and the closer it gets to the classic circular symmetry with a clear eye in the middle, the more powerful and dangerous it becomes.

A major hurricane, meaning Category 3 and up, is not just a stronger version of a tropical storm. It’s an entirely different animal, like a butterfly is to a caterpillar. In mathematical terms, we can think of a major hurricane as a special solution of the equations of physics that govern the atmosphere’s motion — almost a singularity, like a black hole in astrophysics, but much more terrifying, despite its smaller scale, because it’s here with us on earth.

Rapid intensification is dangerous simply because it produces powerful hurricanes. In fact, most tropical cyclones in the world that reach major hurricane status do so after at least one period of rapid intensification. And a 2019 study found compelling evidence that rapid intensification has been happening increasingly often over the last couple of decades, especially in the Atlantic. The authors couldn’t say with certainty that this was a consequence of human-induced global warming, but that interpretation would be consistent both with their models and that of an earlier study predicting such an increase.

This problem is on the bleeding edge of the current science of extreme weather and climate. It points to a future where hurricanes are not just stronger, but more difficult to predict. Perhaps the science and technology of weather prediction can keep pace so that forecasts continue improving nonetheless, as they have historically. But it will take real climate adaptation: better protecting people from storms, getting them out of harm’s way and helping them to recover better once disaster has struck.

Reporting was contributed by Chelsea Brasted, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, David Montgomery, Campbell Robertson and Rick Rojas.

Read the Original Article HERE

The post Hurricane Laura Live Updates: Storm Intensifies to Category 4 Strength first appeared on MetNews.



from MetNews https://metnews.pw/hurricane-laura-live-updates-storm-intensifies-to-category-4-strength/

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