>
Article snippet: BILOXI, Miss. — This year’s crushing hurricanes have submerged Houston, wrecked the Florida Keys and decimated Puerto Rico, but spared the central Gulf Coast — at least until now. Hurricane Nate, the fourth to lash the United States in just over six weeks, made landfall on Saturday in southeast Louisiana, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, as a Category 1 system. It made landfall again hours later, this time near Biloxi, with roaring wind and heavy rain, and dragged in flooding that overtopped Highway 90 and poured into the bottom level of some parking garages. The storm weakened rapidly after the second landfall. The National Hurricane Center downgraded the hurricane to a tropical storm and then a tropical depression as it rapidly moved farther inland over Mississippi and Alabama. Nate’s maximum sustained winds had slowed to 35 miles an hour by 11 a.m. Eastern time, though gusts up to tropical-storm strength were still possible. Heavy rains continued to pose a threat of flooding across the Southeast, but other than pounding surf, the storm’s threat to coastal areas had largely passed. The governors of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi declared states of emergency ahead of the storm, and counties along the coast issued curfews and ordered evacuations in low-lying areas. Late Saturday night, President Trump declared an emergency in Mississippi, as he already had in Louisiana. The state authorizes officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agen... Link to the full article to read more