New Orleans bracing for Tropical Storm Nate amid drainage concerns

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu declared a state of emergency on Thursday, urging residents not to panic, but rather to make preparations.

“To the citizens of New Orleans, there is no reason to panic, but there is reason to prepare,” Landrieu said, according to the Times-Picayune. The mayor also said the city has been in contact with Gov. John Bel Edwards and the Federal Emergency Management Agency as it makes preparations.

The National Hurricane Center issued the first hurricane and storm surge watch advisories in the U.S. associated with Nate late in the evening, which included parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. New Orleans was mentioned specifically.

Forecasts predict between 3 and 6 inches of rain associated with the storm, the Advocate reported.

While on alert, New Orleans, which was devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, was ultimately spared from the other hurricanes to sweep through the Gulf Coast region over the past few months. However, the city did experience flooding during the summer, which revealed problems with the drainage system.

Though efforts have been made to make repairs, only 108 of 120 pumps in the city’s drainage system are fully operational, the mayor’s office reported Thursday.

New Orleans Councilman Jason Williams noted that this does not leave the city in an ideal situation. “We’re not where we want to be with our pumping capacity, but we’re better than we were,” he said, according to the Advocate.

The Sewerage and Water Board “and its contractors continue to work around the clock to repair all power and pumps to stabilize and strengthen the City’s drainage system,” the mayor’s office said in its update Thursday.

Nate, which has been tied to at least 22 deaths in Central America, is expected to become at least a Category 1 hurricane as it breaks away from Honduras and moves over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Forecasters predict landfall over the U.S. by Sunday morning.

Regardless of Nate’s strength once it makes landfall, forecasters believe it will weaken back into a tropical storm relatively quickly and unlike the remnants of Hurricane Harvey, which sat and dumped rain on parts of Texas and Louisiana, will move quickly up the interior eastern U.S., bringing rain to places that have been experiencing drought conditions. The remnants of the impending hurricane are then expected to veer east toward Pennsylvania and even Washington, D.C., according to the latest NHC forecast cone.