Hurricane Delta, which lashed Mexico's Caribbean coast earlier this week, has regained strength and is headed towards the United States early Thursday.
Widespread outages were reported after it hit the Yucatan peninsula in southeast Mexico as a Category 2 storm, uprooting trees and ripping down power lines.
The region escaped a major destruction with no death reports so far. The storm which weakened to Category 1 as it headed out into the Gulf of Mexico, regained its Category 2 status after it churned towards the US Gulf coast.
According to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC), Delta was packing maximum sustained winds of 100 miles (155kms) per hour and moving at about 17 mph (28kph) about 485 miles (780kms) off the coast of Louisiana.
The NHC issued a hurricane watch for parts of the coast from High Island, Texas, eastward to Grand Isle and Louisiana. A storm surge watch has also been issued from High Island to the Alabama-Florida border.
Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency in Louisiana, allowing the state to begin its preparations.
Earlier this year Hurricane Laura made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 4 storm and left 15 people dead, hundreds of thousands without power and destroyed more than 10,000 homes in southwest Louisiana.
