Hurricane Ida

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

She is one scary beast. It looks like Louisianna is in for a really bad time on the anniversary of Katrina.

At the moment she is cat 4, still explosively deepening with no signs of an eyewall replacement cycle. Radar is showing an area of sustained winds of over 140 mph, though officially they are still 130mph.

Seems there's some maintenance issues with the hurricane hunter planes, so it could be a few hours before another fly through is done. An astonishingly bad time to not have that data.

Its worrying.

Looks like they've been able to dispatch other hunters.

Latest recon flight shows she is still intensifying.

Bit of a one sided conversation this!
Shes now reached 150mph sustained, 165mph gusts. Knocking on the door of a cat 5.

Terrifying and terrible timing with ICU's full with Covid patients unable to be evacuated.

Definitely looks like she's inching towards a Cat 5

Have they said it was cat 5? I can't seem to find any information about that.

Still classified as a high end cat 4

I'm sure this has been raised before on this board, but apparently storms and hurricanes with female names lead to higher loss of life on average because they're perceived to be weaker. I find that quite fascinating. Perhaps they should all be called thinks like Hurricane Bastard

I'm in Houston.
At this time of year, everyone keeps their eyes on any news regarding storms in the Gulf of Mexico.
It was the fourth anniversary since Hurricane Harvey hit us here and it was devastating.
This one, Ida, is looking very bad. Admittedly, I haven't heard anything about it turning into a Category 5.
It's just gone past 6:30am and I'll be keeping watch on the weather stations here.
Houston gets news from their Louisiana affiliates (we are 350 miles from New Orleans). They are: click2houston.com or khou.com and the US National Weather at weather.com They all have live updates.

Thats interesting thecognoscenti

First pass through of the latest recon flights is showing cat 5 now. They are undertaking a second pass through before it is confirmed.

Looks like the first pass showed some bad data, thankfully. Still an upper end Cat 4. Central pressure 928/929 though, so she's still deepening.

It's going to so hard. I follow someone on TikTok who is a nurse in Louisiana and they're expecting to be without power for a week, they've tried to evacuate as many patients as possible but not a lot of them can actually be moved so she and other nurses are staying in the hospital for the foreseeable

I’m watching it too OP. Looks very bad - particularly since they didn’t have time to do a full evacuation.

This is a long shot but I can’t think where else to ask … does anyone remember, during Katrina, there was a guy holed up in one of the office buildings in downtown New Orleans doing a kind of liveblog type of thing? They had their own generator and supplies. It was riveting stuff. I was wondering whether they were still around at all. Anyone remember anything about that?!

I don't remember that chap Simone.

Bakewell the hospital situation does seem to look very worrying doesn't it. Wards full of covid patients and no place for them to go.

It does seem to have caught people on the hop and I'm not quite sure why. Lots of places have only had voluntary evacuation which people tend to not take seriously.

There seems to be a university in New Orleans which an hour ago suggested to its students that they could come on to campus to hunker down.
That is very late!

Yes why has there been such short notice? I haven’t seen any explanation of that. Perhaps it is just moving a lot quicker than hurricanes usually do?

BBC have not yet updated their story to reflect cat 5

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58372746

It's 08:45 there are the moment, and landfall expected this evening/overnight. Residents urged to evacuate, or if riding it out to be in their place of safety by then. Winds already high enough for storm damage any time from now onwards.

Not looking good

Yeah it's moved pretty fast and formed already a decent way into the typical range, I mean fairly close to the Gulf of Mexico already when it started whereas some form way over west, the other side of Antilles. I've been following it since August 25th and a track into Louisiana was actually predicted pretty early, the shorter notice comes with how intense and where exactly it makes landfall though (but a much wider area than just the eye will be affected)

I knew this one was trouble soon as I saw it as 'Invest 99L'

I have friends in the area refusing to evacuate (sense of duty to elderly neighbours, survivors guilt from Katrina, many factors affecting their decision) so just hope they will be ok. Their house has stood since before Betsy in 1965 and 'only' had 2ft of flooding from Katrina so everything crossed

I'm the member of a group on another social media site and there are quite a few people within that group saying they're staying put, hunkering down for it.

Others saying they've piled as much as they can into cars and were legging it out of there as fast as they could, with little to no expectation of finding their home still standing when they got back.

Horrible stuff.

I'm in the Caribbean and we were hit by Ida a few days ago when she was still a tropical storm. It's a scary situation and I really hope that as many people as possible have been able to either evacuate or make their home as safe as possible

I tend to use the national hurricane centre website which issue regular public advisories www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCPAT4+shtml/291157.shtml?

I remember Hurricane Katrina so clearly. I’m really hoping that Hurricane Ida doesn’t have that sort of impact. She must be just about to make landfall.

Philip Klotzbach @philklotzbach
#Ida is forecast to intensify to 155 mph max winds before landfall. Only 4 continental US landfalling #hurricanes on record (since 1851) have had winds that strong at landfall: Labor Day (1935), Camille (1969), Andrew (1992) & Michael (2019). All of those were Cat 5 (>156 mph).

Its looking bad.

Thanks for the thread OYBBK. It's all looking really grim.

Placemarking. I used to work in a related field and it's bringing it all back- it seems strange to be viewing it passively through the BBC news instead of proactively forecasting outcomes. You'd have hoped that there would have been progress in disaster management in the time since Katrina.

Gosh that's worrying isn't it? I hope that people who have stayed are ok, likewise people who have fled, I really hope they have a house to come back to.

I just can't imagine

I have a friend in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She lost everything during Katrina, hoping and praying she stays safe and sound this time.

Those traffic queues trying to leave New Orleans are really concerning - it's being described as 'gridlock'. Dumb question, but what will happen to those people when Ida makes landfall? What are they supposed to do if they are still stuck in traffic?