BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Tropical Storm Francine was strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico earlier today, drenching coastal Mexico and Texas on its way to hit Louisiana as a hurricane on Wednesday night. "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 US National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Heavy rain was already falling in northeastern Mexico and deep South Texas, where some places could get up to 12 inches (30 centimeters) into tonight, Brennan said. This afternoon, the hurricane center said the storm was becoming stronger and better organized. 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 could reach as much as 10 feet (3 meters) along a stretch of Louisiana coastline from Cameron to Port Fourchon and into Vermilion Bay, forecasters said. And if the current track holds, the storm could blow northward up the Mississ.