Hurricane Ida barrels down on Louisiana after slamming Cuba
- Officials in flood-prone New Orleans ordered residents to evacuate communities outside the city’s levee system
- On Friday, Ida smashed into Cuba’s small Isle of Youth, toppling trees and tearing roofs from dwellings
Hurricane Ida churned toward the US Gulf coast on Saturday, forecast to gather strength in coming hours and prompting evacuations of flood-prone New Orleans neighbourhoods and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
Forecasters said it could make US landfall as a dangerous Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, generating winds nearing 225kph, heavy downpours and a tidal surge that could plunge much of the Louisiana shoreline under several feet of water.
Ida battered Cuba on Friday and by early Saturday it was carrying top winds of around 129kph as it headed northwest, the National Hurricane Center said. The NHC expected the storm to intensify rapidly before coming ashore by late Sunday.
Flooding from Ida’s storm surge – high water driven by the hurricane’s winds – could reach between 3 to 4.5 metres around the mouth of the Mississippi River, with lower levels extending east along the adjacent coastlines of Mississippi and Alabama, the NHC said.
Scattered tornadoes, widespread power outages and inland flooding from torrential rain across the region were also expected.