The Gulf Coast was bracing Sunday for a potentially devastating, historic hit of back-to-back hurricanes — with Louisiana and Texas set to bear the brunt of the monster storms.
“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,” said Benjamin Schott, chief meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s office in Slidell, La., to reporters Sunday.
Louisiana, which declared a state of emergency last week in anticipation of the weather hell, is set to be battered first Monday evening by Marco, a former tropical storm that whipped itself into hurricane status with 75 mph winds Sunday afternoon.
But it’s not necessarily the winds that are at issue, forecasters said. It’s the rain Marco is expected to bring — at least 10 inches, plus storm surges of 4 to 6 feet, some of which could hit northern Texas, too.
Then there’s the very real threat of Tropical Storm Laura turning into an even stronger hurricane and making landfall in western Louisiana and along the Texas coast by Wednesday — leaving the area unable to catch its breath before getting pummeled again, forecasters said.
“What we know is there’s going to be storm surge from Marco, we know that 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 Gov. John Bel Edwards said at a press conference Sunday.
New Orleans is particularly vulnerable given its location in the storms’ paths, said experts — adding they are concerned its levy system may not stand up to Mother Nature’s wrath a la Hurricane Katrina. That ’cane made landfall Aug. 29, 2005, and cost 1,800 lives and $160 billion in damages, the most of any natural disaster in US history.
Texas Gov Greg Abbott declared 23 counties in his state a disaster area Sunday.
“It is incredibly important for anybody who could be in the path of these storms to constantly heed local warnings about what could happen in your community,” Abbott said at a press conference Sunday.
“Understand this is very swift-moving. and there could be rising water very quickly.”
Additional reporting by Kate Sheehy and AP
