Thousands of residents were continuing to evacuate as the outer bands of Hurricane Laura lashed coastal communities in Louisiana and Texas on Wednesday afternoon, with forecasters describing the storm surge from the mammoth category 4 hurricane as “unsurvivable”.
The weather system is due to hit the US Gulf Coast late on Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning, as its center increased in ferocity about 175 miles south of Lake Charles in Louisiana, with sustained wind speeds of 140mph. Hundreds of thousands of people are now under evacuation order.
The governors of Texas and Louisiana continued to urge residents along the affected coastline to leave the area as the National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned of potentially “unsurvivable” storm surges of up to 20ft from Sea Rim state park in Texas to Intracoastal City in Louisiana, a stretch of coastline over 170 miles long.
