Irma the next big disaster?

Published 9:09 am Friday, September 1, 2017

Even as thousands of Texans remain displaced from the flooding that followed Hurricane Harvey, there’s another big storm out there that forecasters say bears watching.

Hurricane Irma became a Category 3 hurricane late Thursday afternoon, according to the National Weather Center. At the time, it was located 3,000 miles southeast of Miami.

“Irma is forecast to become a major hurricane by tonight and is expected to be an extremely dangerous hurricane for the next several days,” the Hurricane Center warned in a bulletin.

Forecasters said it is too soon to tell if the storm poses any threat to the United States, but it is expected to be five or six days before it touches land in the Caribbean Sea.