(Bloomberg) -- Hurricane Francine has vaulted to a Category 2 hurricane just as it sets to make landfall on the Southern Louisiana coast, which already has been battered with heavy rains and fierce winds.
Francine’s top winds have reached 98 miles (157 kilometers) per hour, the US National Hurricane Center said in an advisory at 4 p.m. local time. Though many storms weaken slightly as they approach land, Francine is gathering power as it nears a marshy stretch of the coast about about 70 miles west of New Orleans.
The hurricane is on track to menace six Gulf Coast refineries and 22 ports, according to Bloomberg calculations. More than 15,000 customers in Louisiana already are without power, according to Poweroutage.us. And 251 flights in Houston, New Orleans and Baton Rouge have been grounded, according to FlightAware, an airline tracker.
“It will make landfall kind of in the no man’s land of Louisiana,” said Adam Douty, a meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc.
Oil and gas companies have evacuated some offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and shut in nearly 39% of oil production and 49% of gas production as a precaution. The storm is not forecast to make a direct hit on any of the region’s major natural gas export plants.
Francine will be the third hurricane to strike mainland US in 2024, making this the ninth year since 1900 that has happened by Sept. 11, Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, confirmed in an email to Bloomberg News. That’s partly because the storms that formed this year developed in the central and western parts of the Atlantic basin.
“When storms form farther west, all else being equal, they are more likely to make landfall,” Klotzbach wrote. “Given Francine’s impending Louisiana landfall, we will be six for six in all storms so far this year making landfall somewhere.”
Francine is set to pummel a broad swath of Louisiana with heavy rains, creating the risk for flash and urban flooding in the eastern part of the state, the hurricane center said. Storm surge in some areas could reach 10 feet (3 meters).
After making landfall, the storm is forecast to move across Mississippi on Thursday and head north toward Memphis. While there may be some flooding, the rains will bring relief to the Mississippi River, where low water levels have threatened to roil shipments of everything from corn to gasoline. But rains will make field work harder, delaying harvests and reducing grain quality.
Francine likely will cause $2 billion to $3 billion in damages and losses, said Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler with Enki Research. It will be the third hurricane to hit the US mainland this year.
The hurricane center is tracking three other potential tropical storms in the central Atlantic Ocean. One of the systems has been upgraded to a tropical depression and likely will be named Tropical Storm Gordon Thursday morning. It’s currently hundreds of miles west of the Cabo Verde Islands off the coast of Africa.
--With assistance from Robert Tuttle.
(Updates with speed in the first and second paragraphs and additional comment in the seventh paragraph.)
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