Hurricane Ida battered Cuba with roof-ripping force on Friday as it churned toward a weekend U.S. landfall along the Louisiana coast, prompting evacuations of flood-prone New Orleans neighborhoods and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
By late on Friday, Ida was packing sustained winds of up to 80 miles per hour (129 kph), according to the National Weather Service, which expected the storm to intensify significantly before coming ashore as a major hurricane in southeastern Louisiana on Sunday afternoon or evening.
