Watch now: Decatur native prepares for Hurricane Laura in New Orleans; 'tremendous storm' predicted

Aug. 26--DECATUR -- Decatur native Amy Wilson has lived in New Orleans for more than 25 years and has seen her share of hurricanes. She spent Wednesday hunkered down for another round, this time in the form of the powerful Hurricane Laura.

"The shelters opened last night. The hook and ladder trucks are already headed here from up north," said Wilson, a Maroa-Forsyth graduate and semi-retired social worker.

Laura strengthened Wednesday into a menacing Category 4 hurricane, raising fears that it could come ashore with a 20-foot storm surge that forecasters said would be "unsurvivable" and capable of sinking entire communities. Authorities implored coastal residents of Texas and Louisiana to flee.

The storm grew nearly 87% in power in just 24 hours to a size the National Hurricane Center called "extremely dangerous." Drawing energy from the warm Gulf of Mexico waters, the system was on track to arrive late Wednesday or early Thursday as the most powerful hurricane to strike the U.S. so far this year.

"This is shaping up to be just a tremendous storm," Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards told The Weather Channel.

The National Hurricane Center kept raising its estimate of Laura's storm surge, from 10 feet just a couple of days ago to twice that size -- a height that forecasters said would be especially deadly.

"Some areas, when they wake up Thursday morning, they're not going to believe what happened," said Stacy Stewart, a senior hurricane specialist. Whatever does not get blown down by the wind could easily be toppled by seawater pushing inland.

Landfall is projected near Lake Charles, Louisiana, and shelters were opened.

"The COVID part is going to be hard for the shelters, which tend to be packed," said Wilson.

With Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005, Wilson evacuated, but her house was on high ground and didn't get flooded. Usually she rides them out and has extra supplies and a mobile charger for her phone in case power goes out.

Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane.

A Category 4 hurricane can cause damage so catastrophic that power outages may last for months in places, and wide areas could be uninhabitable for weeks or months. The threat of such devastation posed a new disaster-relief challenge for a government already straining to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

"Heed the advice of your local authorities. If they tell you to go, go! Your life depends on it today," said Joel Cline, tropical program coordinator at the National Weather Service. "It's a serious day and you need to listen to them."

On Twitter, President Donald Trump also urged coastal residents to heed local officials. Hurricane warnings were issued from San Luis Pass, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana, and reached inland for 200 miles. Storm surge warnings were in effect from Freeport, Texas, to the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Becky Clements, 56, evacuated from Lake Charles after hearing that it could suffer a direct hit, almost exactly 15 years after Hurricane Rita destroyed the city. She and her family found an AirBnb hundreds of miles inland.

"The devastation afterward in our town and that whole corner of the state was just awful," Clements said. "Whole communities were washed away, never to exist again. ... So knowing how devastating the storms are, there was no way we were going to stay for this."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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