Gulf Coast braces for tandem hurricanes
The Gulf Coast braced yesterday for a potentially devastating hit from twin hurricanes as two strong storms swirled towards the United States from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Officials feared a historymaking onslaught of lifethreatening winds and flooding along the coast, stretching from Texas to Alabama.
A storm dubbed Marco grew into a hurricane yesterday as it churned up the Gulf of Mexico towards Louisiana. Another potential hurricane, Tropical Storm Laura, lashed the Dominican Republic and Haiti and was tracking towards the same region of the US coast, carrying the risk of growing into a far more powerful storm.
Experts said computer models show Laura could make landfall with winds exceeding 110 mph, and the overlapping storms could bring two feet of rain to south-central portions of Louisiana.
“There has never been anything we’ve seen like this before, where you can have possibly two hurricanes hitting within miles of each over a 48-hour period,” Benjamin Schott, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service’s Slidell, Louisiana, office, said.
The prospect of piggybacked hurricanes was reviving all-too-fresh memories of damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. The storm has been blamed for as many as 1,800 deaths, and levee breaches in New Orleans led to catastrophic flooding.
STORM SURGE
“What we know is there’s going to be storm surge from Marco. We know that water is not going to recede hardly at all before Laura hits, and so we’ve not seen this before, and that’s why people need to be paying particular attention,” Louisiana Govornor John Bel Edwards warned at a briefing yesterday.
In New Orleans, the city’s aging drainage system has been a particular point of concern in recent years after an intense 2017 storm flooded streets and raised questions about the system’s viability.
Because the city is surrounded by levees and parts are below sea level, rainwater must be pumped out to prevent flooding. Any storm system that sits over the city and dumps rain for extended periods, or bands of rain that come in rapid succession, is a cause for concern.
New Orleans resident Matthew Meloy and two friends loaded a van with cases of bottled water in the parking lot of a New Orleans Walmart Sunday. He said they still have a lot of storm preparations ahead.
“Check the batteries, flashlights, stocking up on food, and trying to park the car on the highest point possible we can find,” he said. “I already spent like 40 minutes this morning filling up the tanks in the cars.”