State Of Emergency Declared Across Southeastern US As Hurricane Nate Looms
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Oct 7, 2017
After battering Honduras and Nicaragua with 80 mph winds and torrential rains that caused an estimated $250 million in damage, Hurricane Nate is rapidly advancing toward the US Gulf Coast and is expected to make landfall late Saturday in southeastern Louisiana, not far from where Hurricane Katrina landed in 2005. Experts expect that, once it’s course, the storm will have caused as much as $1 billion in damages across the US and Central America, far short of the tens of billions of dollars of destruction wrought by Irma and Harvey.
The storm, packing winds of 85 mph and moving at a speed of 22 mph, is expected to reach category 2 strength before it makes landfall – the third storm to hit the US mainland in six weeks. As a category 2, it’s expected to be weaker than Katrina was when it made landfall as a category 3 in 2005. As of 8 am ET, the storm was 245 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River, the National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory. The quick-moving storm was expected to make landfall around Plaquemine Parish in Louisiana, southeast of New Orleans, just like Katrina did.
Fortunately for residents of New Orleans, Nate’s similarities to Katrina end there. Nate is expected to cause only a fraction of the damage that Katrina wrought (though it wouldn’t be the first time this season that forecasters underestimated a Hurricane’s potential for devastation). Katrina brought a 24- to 28-foot (7.3- to 8.5-meter) storm surge with it that killed 1,800 people and flooded New Orleans. Nate’s surge is forecast to reach four to seven feet.
Like Irma and Harvey before it, meteorologists are amazed by Nate’s speed as it sprinted north-northwest away from Honduras at 22 mph, according to the NHC.
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