ATLANTA — Residents of Louisiana and Mississippi hunkered down Friday for the long, slow, nasty onslaught of Tropical Storm Lee, which was puttering north toward the Gulf Coast, gaining strength and threatening to bring high winds, flooding and tornadoes to the region throughout the Labor Day weekend.
The weather system, originally classified as Tropical Depression 13, was upgraded to a tropical storm Friday afternoon once sustained winds were measured above 39 mph. It is expected to gain strength and could develop into a Category 1 hurricane.
The National Hurricane Center warned that the storm could dump 10 to 15 inches of rain across southern Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, with some areas receiving 20 inches.
In the New Orleans area, officials posted online a list of streets prone to flooding and put swift-water rescue teams on standby.
“It’s not a time to panic,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at a news conference. “It’s time to prepare for what could occur.”
The city’s levee system infamously failed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, putting much of the city underwater. On Monday, Katrina’s sixth anniversary, The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that an upcoming Army Corps of Engineers report would give the levee system a “near-failing grade,” despite a $10 billion post-Katrina rebuilding job.
But a prominent flood expert and member of a board overseeing part of the system said Friday he was confident the levees would hold.
The “near-failing grade” referred to the fact that the levee system, though improved, would be overtopped in the case of a 500-year storm, which would have a 0.2 percent chance of occurring in any year.
And Lee is simply not that kind of storm, said John M. Barry, author of “Rising Tide,” the acclaimed book about the great Mississippi flood of 1927, and vice president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East.
“There will be a lot of rainfall — a lot,” Barry said. “But that’s a very different problem than a hurricane sweeping over the levees, threatening to breach them.”
Federal officials issued a tropical-storm warning covering a stretch of coast from Pascagoula, Miss., to the Sabine Pass of Texas. State officials in Louisiana and Mississippi declared states of emergency, and voluntary evacuations were issued for some low-lying areas.
Alex Sosnowski, a senior meteorologist at , wrote Friday that the storm “has the potential to be the next billion-dollar disaster for the U.S., by way of epic flooding.”
The storm had affected oil and gas production. By early afternoon Friday, evacuations had taken place at 27 percent of the 617 manned platforms in the gulf, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.
