Laura strengthens into ‘extremely dangerous’ Category 4

DELCAMBRE, La. (AP) — Laura strengthened Wednesday into a menacing Category 4 hurricane, raising fears of a 20-foot storm surge that forecasters said would be “unsurvivable” and capable of sinking entire communities. Authorities implored coastal residents of Texas and Louisiana to evacuate and worried that not enough had fled.

The storm grew nearly 70% in power in just 24 hours to a size the National Hurricane Center called “extremely dangerous.” Drawing energy from the warm Gulf of Mexico waters, the system was on track to arrive late Wednesday or early Thursday as the most powerful hurricane to strike the U.S. so far this year.

“It looks like it’s in full beast mode,” said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. “Which is not what you want to see if you’re in its way.”

One major Louisiana highway already had standing water as Laura’s outer bands moved ashore. Winds began picking up as shoppers rushed into a grocery store in low-lying Delcambre, filling carts with chips and beer. Austin Domingues, 26, said his wife would likely evacuate, but he planned to stay put at his father’s farm, where the house is 14 feet off the ground.

The National Hurricane Center kept raising its estimate of Laura’s storm surge, from 10 feet just a couple of days ago to twice that size — a height that forecasters said would be especially deadly.

A Category 4 hurricane can cause damage so catastrophic that power outages may last for months in places, and wide areas could be uninhabitable for weeks or months. The threat of such devastation posed a new disaster-relief challenge for a government already straining to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

By Wednesday afternoon, Laura had maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (225 kph) as it churned about 200 miles (320 kilometers) from Lake Charles, Louisiana, moving northwest at 16 mph (26 kph). Forecasters predict winds will reach at least 145 mph winds but may weaken ever so slightly before landfall.

In the largest U.S. evacuation during this pandemic era, more than half a million people were ordered to flee from their homes near the Texas-Louisiana state line, including the Texas cities of Beaumont, Galveston and Port Arthur, and the low-lying Calcasieu and Cameron parishes in southwestern Louisiana, where forecasters said storm surge topped by waves could submerge entire towns.

Laura closed in on the U.S. after killing nearly two dozen people on the island of Hispaniola, including 20 in Haiti and three in the Dominican Republic, where it knocked out power and caused intense flooding.

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