>http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index.shtml
>
>Earl is currently 135mph, 931mb Category 4. Currently forecast to skirt the US SE coast, but the track has been adjusted slightly westward over the last few days.

The category estimate has been increasing by the day. Usually it's the other way around, they lose steam.

Katrina was not thought to be a particularly severe hurricane until it made landfall. And then all hell broke loose. As you probably remember, it wasn't so much the damage caused by wind as the flooding. The levee broke and a good part of the city went underwater. As the recruiter who brought me down to Baton Rouge to work last year, a native of New Orleans, put it, we basically live in a soup bowl. Water on all sides. You've got the Atlantic / Gulf to the south and Lake Pontcharrtain to the north. It was the lake that swamped them, not the ocean.