HURRICANE DELTA UPDATE - Louisiana is bracing for a hurricane for the sixth time of the unprecedented 2020 hurricane season. Forecasters say Hurricane Delta should make landfall in the state sometime Friday afternoon and could bring winds of well over 100 miles per hour. Yesterday emergency officials ordered evacuations for several southern Louisiana parishes as Category 4 Hurricane Laura devastated Lake Charles in late August. Some parish officials further north have recommended voluntary evacuations as the storm is expected to maintain hurricane status as it makes its way through Louisiana. During yesterday’s press briefing Governor John Bel Edwards pointed out that while the immediate concern is along Louisiana’s coastal region, people further north should also get prepared for severe weather.
"We're not just speaking to Louisiana residents to the coastal area of our state," Edwards said. "We're speaking to everybody in the state of Louisiana today. In fact we don't expect the hurricane to become a tropical storm until just about the time it exits northeast Louisiana."
Edwards urged everyone living in South Louisiana, to be prepared and in place for weathering the storm by Thursday evening. As for how long it will take Hurricane Delta to move through the state, Ben Schott, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in New Orleans gave this estimate.
"It's going to be a fast-moving storm so with it's speed right now as it makes landfall and moves through the state, somewhere maybe even greater than 15 miles-per-hour," Schott explained. "We may only see impacts for a window of about 12 to maybe 15 hours before it works its way through."
For weather updates you can text Hurricane Delta to this number 67283 to get the latest storm information, AND to help get prepared there’s the website: www.getagameplan.org.
For hurricane tracking and forecasts : weather.gov/NewOrleans
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