As Hurricane Irma churns, TS Lidia causes four deaths

A week after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, another powerful storm system is looming.

But forecasters say it is too early to determine where Hurricane Irma, a Category 3 storm with 120mph winds that was moving west in the Atlantic Ocean early Friday, would have any impact on land.

“Right now it is more than 2,500 miles away from the U.S. mainland, or at least seven to 10 days away,” Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said in a telephone interview Friday. “Everybody breathe. We are OK.”

The hurricane center said early Friday that Irma was more than 800 miles west of the Cabo Verde Islands, and was expected to move west over the next few days — a typical weather pattern of storms in trade winds off Africa.

The prospect of a new hurricane making landfall so soon after Harvey drenched cities with record rainfall and flooding might fill Americans with dread.

But when a hurricane is more than five days away, the reliability of tracking models diminishes, which means forecasters advise being more watchful of Irma than fearful.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Lidia caused four deaths in Mexico’s Los Cabos, officials said Friday as it continued to lash the resort-studded southern Baja California Peninsula with heavy rains.

Arturo de la Rosa Escalante, mayor of the twin resorts of Los Cabos, said two people were electrocuted by power lines, a woman drowned after being swept away by water on a flooded street and a baby was ripped from its mother’s arms as she crossed a flooded area.