you re looking at new orleans as people try desperately to evacuate on saturday from the florida panhandle to louisiana, states are bracing for hurricane ida. the potentially catastrophic storm is closing in on the u.s. gulf coast. just a short time ago the national hurricane center upgraded ida to a category 4 storm. its forecast to pummel the louisiana coast today. outages among major concern. fema says it s moving supply trucks into louisiana ahead of the storm s landfall. 20,000 are on standby, and making matters worse many hospitals in the area are already maxed out due to covid-19. health officials are asking residents not to go to the hospital unless it s a dire emergency. all right. we bring in meteorologist tyler
hurricanes, and ida s going to make landfall on the same date at katrina. other than that, two separate systems. all right? you can never compare two tropical systems with each other. they all have different impacts, and the impacts from hurricane ida will be extreme. in addition to the flooding and storm surge, kim, we are looking at tornadoes down here across the lower mississippi valley as well. yeah. gosh. all right. listen, we ll check in with you a little later for more updates. tyler mullen, thanks so much. a short time ago extreme storm chaser told cnn many have been caught off guard by hurricane ida. here he is. before it was eve an storm, even a hurricane, you could tell the models were consistent showing it would be a powerful hurricane coming into the shore of louisiana. and it s quick. only a few days here. a lot of people, i was at the new orleans airport the other night. i heard a lot of people talking waiting in line for a rental car. came up fast. weren t ready f
mullen. tyler, landfall predicted in, what? 12 hours? a little less? yeah. a little less than that. so sometime late in the afternoon on sunday. you know, 5:00 in the morning yesterday, kim, we were dealing with an 80 mile-per-hour storm, and now we re dealing with 130 mile-per-hour storm. so we ve seen those winds increase by 50 miles per hour in less than 24 hours. we have a rapidly intensifying hurricane on our hands. in fact it actually has a little room to increase a little further. to further intensify. a category 4 hurricane as it approaches the coastline of louisiana, it could be a little stronger than 130 miles per hour is what i m trying to allude to. it could make landfall around grand isle larks la as a strong category 4 hurricane and gusts way higher than that. you can see it s going to spread really strong thunderstorms across the deep south here. lower mississippi valley will see heavy rainfall. a chance for tornadoes and, oh,