HOUSTON — As Hurricane Lili gained speed and fury with each passing hour, thousands of frightened coastal residents in Texas and Louisiana fled inland Wednesday.
Unwilling to take their chances with the second major storm in a week to target the area, people from Port Arthur to Lafayette, La., paid heed to suggestions to evacuate.
Lili was expected to barrel ashore today in south-central or southwestern Louisiana. Its steady winds of 145 mph earned it a Category 4 designation — ripe with deadly and devastating potential.
Most of the Texas coast escaped serious concern. But officials in Orange and Jefferson counties spent the day overseeing evacuation efforts. Highways in East Texas were clogged with refugees in search of shelter.
Forecasters with the National Hurricane Center predicted Lili, compact and well-defined, would gradually veer to the north and make landfall this afternoon near New Iberia, La.
It will be preceded by a storm surge of 10-20 feet, they warned, as well as by numerous rain bands dumping from 6 to 10 inches on land still soggy from last week’s Tropical Storm Isidore.
Though less likely, a Texas landfall near the Golden Triangle remained a possibility. Gov. Rick Perry signed a precautionary disaster declaration late Tuesday to speed up state and federal assistance to areas likely to be affected by the storm.
“Hurricane Lili will cause a great deal of damage wherever it hits,” Perry said.
A hurricane warning covered a stretch of the Gulf Coast from east of High Island to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Tropical storm warnings went much farther, to Freeport on the west and to the Alabama coast on the east.
Unlike Isidore, a once-menacing hurricane that was reduced to a middling tropical storm by its journey across the Gulf of Mexico, Lili has grown in danger over the past 48 hours since sideswiping Jamaica and clipping Cuba’s western tip.
The air pressure in Lili’s center — one measure of a storm’s ferocity — dropped to 938 millibars by mid-day Wednesday, low enough to place it among the top 20 of the most intense storms on record. Seas near the storm were running 25 feet.
“This is going to be a very, very dangerous hurricane,” said Krissy Williams, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Florida. “This is the type of storm where everybody along the coast definitely needs to evacuate, especially if you are in low-lying areas.”
Lili’s winds reach 145 MPH
Daily Emerald
October 2, 2002
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