Late on Thursday night, hurricane watches were issued for most of the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts.
Hurricane forecasts are typically issued five days in advance once a storm has formed, but people in the path of Tropical Storm Ida, a fast-charging storm in the Gulf of Mexico, have had significantly less time to prepare for landfall. Ida passed through the Cayman Islands early Friday, less than 12 hours after forming, and could strike Louisiana, which was battered by hurricanes last year, as a Category 2 hurricane on Sunday, only three days after forecasters determined that a weather disturbance over the southern Caribbean had become a tropical depression. That designation by the National Hurricane Center triggers the forecast products associated with tropical storms and hurricanes.
