Hurricane Nate has made landfall near the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) says.
Nate's center will make landfall on the Mississippi coast within the next hour or two, according to the hurricane center's advisory issued at 10 p.m. CT (11 p.m. ET).
The hurricane center said Nate has maximum sustained winds of 85 mph. It was moving north at 20 mph.
At the 17th Street Canal between New Orleans and Metairie, La., workers from the Army Corps of Engineers lowered a set of enormous gates at the mouth of the canal. On Friday, divers checked the beds that the gates rest on to make sure that they would be able to close.
In 2005, there were no gates there or at the three other major canals in New Orleans. Katrina’s surge pushed water from Lake Pontchartrain into the canals. When levees along those canals breached, much of the city was inundated, and stayed underwater for weeks, until the breaches could be closed and the neighborhoods pumped dry. The corps later acknowledged the hurricane protection system it built was “a system in name only.”
Now the corps is building permanent pumping stations at the very end of these canals. Until then, a structure of gates and temporary pumps has been built to protect nearby neighborhoods.