Louisiana residents prepare as Tropical Storm Francine is expected to hit their coast as a hurricane

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Tropical Storm Francine strengthened in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday and was forecast to make landfall as a hurricane this week in Louisiana, where evacuation orders were quickly issued in some coastal communities and residents began filling sandbags in preparation for heavy rains and widespread flooding. Francine, the sixth named storm of the hurricane season, was expected to become a hurricane by Monday night or Tuesday morning, U.

S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said. The storm, expected to make landfall Wednesday night in Louisiana, was already being felt in Mexico, where rains closed schools as the storm gathered strength in the Gulf.

“We’re going to have a very dangerous situation developing by the time we get into Wednesday for portions of the north-central Gulf Coast, primarily along the coast of Louisiana, where we’re going to see the potential for life-threatening storm surge inundation and hurricane-force winds,” said Michael Brennan, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Francine is taking aim at a stretch of coastline that has yet to fully recover since hurricanes Laura and Delta decimated Lake Charles , Louisiana, in 2020, followed a year later by Hurricane Ida. Over the weekend, a 22-story building in Lake Charles that had become a symbol of the destruction was imploded after sitting vacant for nearly four years, its windows shattered and covered in shredded tarps. The storm surge pushed by Francine coul.