By JEFF MARTIN, JOHN MONE and STACEY PLAISANCE

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) — Hurricane Laura rapidly gained strength on Wednesday, forecast to become an “extremely powerful Category 4 hurricane” when it strikes Texas and Louisiana. Officials implored coastal residents to flee before it’s too late.

Satellite images show Laura’s remarkable intensification into “a formidable hurricane” that can smash homes and sink entire communities with a storm surge reaching as high as 20 feet (6.10 meters), the National Hurricane Center said.

“Some areas, when they wake up Thursday morning, they’re not going to believe what happened,” said Stacy Stewart, a senior hurricane specialist.

“We could see storm surge heights more than 15 feet in some areas,” Stewart said. “What doesn’t get blown down by the wind could easily get knocked down by the rising ocean waters pushing well inland.”

Laura grew nearly 70% in power in just 24 hours to reach Category 3 status, with maximum sustained winds around 125 mph (205 kph) on Wednesday morning. It was about 225 miles (365 kilometers) out from Lake Charles, Louisiana, moving northwest at 16 mph (26 kph).

“This is shaping up to be just a tremendous storm,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said on The Weather Channel Wednesday morning.

Top winds of 145 mph (233 kmh) are now predicted before landfall, pushing water onto more than 450 miles (724 kilometers) of coast from Texas to Mississippi.

“Heed the advice of your local authorities. If they tell you to go, go! Your life depends on it today,” said Joel Cline, tropical program coordinator at the National Weather Service. “It’s a serious day and you need to listen to them.”

Hurricane warnings were issued from San Luis Pass, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana, and reached inland for 200 miles (322 kilometers). Storm surge warnings were in effect from Freeport, Texas, to the mouth of the Mississippi River.

A Category 4 hurricane can cause damage so catastrophic that power outages may last for months in places, and wide areas could be uninhabitable for weeks or months, posing a new disaster relief challenge for a government already straining to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

“We need to be concerned about the federal capacity to respond to a major hurricane disaster, particularly in light of failings that are all too obvious in the public health area,” said Kathleen Tierney, former director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado. “I really worry: Who’s minding the store?”

In the largest U.S. evacuation during this pandemic era, more than half a million people were ordered Tuesday to flee from their homes near the Texas-Louisiana state line, including the Texas cities of Beaumont, Galveston and Port Arthur, and the low-lying Calcasieu and Cameron parishes in southwestern Louisiana, where forecasters said storm surge topped by waves could submerge whole communities.

A National Weather Service meteorologist in Lake Charles, Louisiana — in the bullseye of Laura’s projected path — took to Facebook Live to deliver an urgent warning for people living south of Interstate 10 in southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas. “Your life will be in immediate and grave danger beginning this evening if you do not evacuate,” Donald Jones said.

Laura also is expected to quickly dump massive rainfall as it moves inland, causing widespread flash flooding in states far from the coast. Flash flood watches were issued for much of Arkansas, and forecasters said heavy rainfall could move to parts of Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky late Friday, Laura is so powerful that it’s expected to become a tropical storm again, menacing the northeastern United States, once it reaches the Atlantic Ocean.

Urging people in southwest Louisiana to evacuate before it’s too late, Edwards said they need to reach wherever they intend to ride out the storm by noon Wednesday, before high winds make highway travel unsafe. In Galveston and Port Arthur, many people boarded buses to Austin and other inland cities.

“If you decide to stay, you’re staying on your own,” Port Arthur Mayor Thurman Bartie said.

Officials urged people to stay with relatives or in hotel rooms to avoid spreading the virus that causes COVID-19. Buses were stocked with protective equipment and disinfectant, and they would carry fewer passengers to keep people apart, Texas officials said.

Even before dawn Wednesday, officials in Austin said the city had run out of free hotel rooms to offer evacuees and had begun directing families fleeing the storm to a shelter nearly 200 miles farther north.

“Everyone’s recent memory is Harvey. We want them to evacuate,” said Bryce Bencivengo, a spokesman for the Austin’s homeland security and emergency management office.

Becky Clements, 56, evacuated from Lake Charles after hearing that it could suffer a direct hit, almost exactly 15 years after Hurricane Rita destroyed the city. She and her family found an AirBnb hundreds of miles inland.

“The devastation afterward in our town and that whole corner of the state was just awful,” Clements said. “Whole communities were washed away, never to exist again. … So knowing how devastating the storms are, there was no way we were going to stay for this.”

Clements, a church educator, said she fears for her office, which is in a trailer following recent construction.

“I very much anticipate that my office will be gone when I get back. It will be scattered throughout that field.”

The hurricane also threatens a center of the U.S. energy industry. The government said 84% of Gulf oil production and an estimated 61% of natural gas production were shut down, including Valero and Total refineries in Port Arthur, and Citgo’s plant in Lake Charles. Nearly 300 platforms have been evacuated. Consumers are unlikely to see big price hikes however, because the pandemic has decimated demand for fuel.

“If Laura moves further west toward Houston, there will be a much bigger gasoline supply problem,” Oil analyst Andrew Lipow said, since refineries usually take two to three weeks to resume full operations.

Laura closed in on the U.S. after killing nearly two dozen people on the island of Hispaniola, including 20 in Haiti and three in the Dominican Republic, where it knocked out power and caused intense flooding. It’s just days before the Aug. 29 anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which breached the levees in New Orleans, flattened much of the Mississippi coast and killed as many as 1,800 people in 2005. Hurricane Rita followed Katrina weeks later, striking southwest Louisiana as a Category 3 storm.

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Martin reported from Marietta, Georgia, and Plaisance from Stephensville, Louisiana. Associated Press contributors include Paul Weber in Austin, Texas; Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland; Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge; Louisiana; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama; Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas; Julie Walker in New York, and Sophia Tulp in Atlanta, Georgia.

By MIKE HOUSEHOLDER and SCOTT BAUER

KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — A Black man shot multiple times, apparently in the back, by police in Wisconsin is paralyzed from the waist down and has “eight holes” in his body, the father of victim Jacob Blake said.

The shooting in broad daylight on Sunday by police in Kenosha, captured on cellphone video that quickly spread on social media, ignited new protests over racial injustice in several cities. It comes three months after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police set off demonstrations around the United States and touched off a wider reckoning on race.

Blake’s father, also named Jacob Blake, told the Chicago Sun-Times in a story published Tuesday that he didn’t know if his 29-year-old son’s paralysis would be permanent. The older man was traveling from North Carolina to be with his son, who is being treated in a Milwaukee hospital.

“I want to put my hand on my son’s cheek and kiss him on his forehead, and then I’ll be OK,” the father told the newspaper. “I’ll kiss him with my mask. The first thing I want to do is touch my son.”

Blake’s father said that he learned Sunday night that officers had shot his son eight times and shortly thereafter he watched the video, which appears to show his son being shot in the back.

Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney representing the family, said three of Blake’s sons — aged 3, 5 and 8 — were in the car at the time of the shooting. Crump scheduled a Tuesday afternoon news conference in Kenosha with Blake’s family members to address the shooting.

The father has not returned multiple messages left by The Associated Press.

He is slated to speak at a March on Washington commemoration on Friday organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton. His father and the victim’s grandfather, Jacob Blake Sr., was a prominent minister and civil rights leader in the Chicago area who helped organize a march and spoke in support of a comprehensive housing law in Evanston, Illinois, days after the 1968 slaying of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The officers were placed on administrative leave, which is standard practice in such cases. Authorities released no details about them and did not immediately respond to requests for their service records.

Since the shooting, anger has spilled into the streets of Kenosha and other cities, including Los Angeles, Wisconsin’s capital of Madison and in Minneapolis, the epicenter of the Black Lives Matter movement this summer following Floyd’s death.

Hundreds of protesters defied an 8 p.m. curfew Monday night, massing in downtown Kenosha. Some set fire to buildings, cars and dumpsters, threw bottles and shot fireworks and then clashed with officers in riot gear, including 125 members of the Wisconsin National Guard, who deployed tear gas as they guarded the courthouse.

A city block was cordoned off Tuesday, so officials could survey damage. Several storefronts were badly damaged. Smoke filled the air and visibility was low as firefighters used water cannons on still smoldering buildings.

“Nobody deserves this,” said Pat Oertle, owner of Computer Adventure. Computers were stolen, and the store was “destroyed,” she said.

“This accomplishes nothing,” Oertle said. “This is not justice that they’re looking for.”

Earlier on Monday, when Kenosha Mayor John Antarmian moved a news conference from a park to inside the public safety building, a crowd rushed to the building and a door was snapped off its hinges before police in riot gear pepper-sprayed the crowd.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, both Republicans, called on Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to do more to quell the unrest. Steil said he would request federal assistance if necessary.

A Wisconsin state lawmaker said Evers and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, encouraged violence with their comments after the shooting.

“They did not call for peace. They did not encourage calm,” Republican state Sen. Howard Marklein said. “They did encourage people to jump to conclusions and take negative action.”

Evers’ spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Evers was quick to condemn the shooting in Kenosha and on Monday called on the Republican-controlled Legislature to take up a package of police reform bills in a special session next week. But Republicans showed no interest in doing that.

In Madison, about 500 protesters marched to the state Capitol on Monday night, and some broke windows, stole from stores and sprayed graffiti along the way. Police used tear gas and pepper spray on the crowds and six people were arrested, according to Madison police.

In Minneapolis, 11 were arrested after breaking windows at the county jail on Monday night. One police officer suffered a broken hand in an altercation with demonstrators, the sheriff’s department said.

Police in Kenosha, a city of about 100,000 in between Milwaukee and Chicago, said they were responding to a call about a domestic dispute when they encountered Blake on Sunday.

The man who said he made the cellphone video, 22-year-old Raysean White, said he saw Blake scuffling with three officers and heard them yell, “Drop the knife! Drop the knife!” before the gunfire erupted. He said he didn’t see a knife in Blake’s hands.

In the footage, Blake walks from the sidewalk around the front of his SUV to his driver-side door as officers follow him with their guns pointed and shout at him. As Blake opens the door and leans into the SUV, an officer grabs his shirt from behind and opens fire while Blake has his back turned. Seven shots can be heard, though it isn’t clear how many struck Blake or how many officers fired.

Police did not say whether Blake was armed or why police opened fire, they released no details on the domestic dispute, and they did not immediately disclose the race of the three officers at the scene.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is leading the investigation into the shooting, which is expected to take several weeks.

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Bauer reported from Madison, Wisconsin. Associated Press reporters Todd Richmond in Madison, Wisconsin, Jeff Baenen in Minneapolis, Aaron Morrison in New York, and Tammy Webber in Fenton, Michigan, contributed.