Hurricane Delta hit the coasts of Louisiana on Friday, October 9 in the early evening, a state already severely affected by bad weather for several months, becoming the 10th storm of the year to make landfall in the United States, a record.
Delta made landfall near the coastal town of Cameron around 6:00 p.m. local time, in Category 2 on a scale of 5, with winds of up to 155 km / h according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).
The hurricane became the 10th named storm to hit the United States this year, a figure never before seen.
Six of them affected, to varying degrees, Louisiana.
Even though its winds are less strong than the feared weather - the cold waters near the Louisiana coast have made it lose energy - Delta is crashing into an area of the American coast already badly damaged by Hurricane Laura in the end of August.
In the town of Lake Arthur.
Go Nakamura / AFP
Authorities have been calling for several days the some 75,000 residents of Lake Charles to evacuate because this city, known for its oil refineries, is on the path of the storm, less than 100 kilometers from Cameron.
Along with Delta, the NHC warned that a "
potentially fatal storm surge
" was forecast along parts of the northern Gulf of Mexico coast, from Texas to Mississippi, with swells expected to reach three meters.
Ten million people are affected by this warning.
The hurricane swept across southeastern Mexico earlier in the week, uprooting trees and downing power lines in the Yucatan Peninsula, but apparently without causing any deaths.
This storm is the 25th named in an unusually choppy Atlantic hurricane season in which several records have been broken.
Due to the exhaustion of the list of expected Latin names, meteorologists began to identify them with the Greek alphabet.
As the surface of the oceans warms, hurricanes become more powerful, according to scientists who predict an increase in the proportion of category 4 and 5 cyclones, the most destructive.