The 2019 hurricane season has barely begun, and a troubling storm is already brewing. Heavy rains paralyzed New Orleans on Wednesday, with as much as ten inches falling in just a few hours, and the National Weather Service declared a “flash flood emergency.” This is just the beginning of what could be a truly awful week of weather.

NWS

On Wednesday morning, the National Hurricane Center issued a storm surge watch and a tropical storm watch for coastal Louisiana, forecasting the ongoing thunderstorms to eventually develop into a hurricane which would be named Barry and make landfall sometime on Saturday. The National Weather Service (NWS) office in New Orleans has begun circulating hurricane preparedness tips, and the NWS’ Twitter account said—in a since-deleted tweet—that the approaching storm “gets us thinking about what we can be doing TODAY to get ready for the big one.”

The storm’s timing is unique: In 168 years of hurricane records, a July hurricane in Louisiana has only happened three times, and all of those occurrences have been within the past 40 years. There’s a growing body of research that shows that as the Gulf of Mexico waters warm because of climate change, early-season hurricanes like proto-Barry could become more common. (Right now, water temperatures in the Gulf are at near-record levels, more typical of peak hurricane season.)

More concerning than the storm’s early timing, however, is its bad timing. The Mississippi River has been continuously flooding southern Louisiana since January 6, the longest flood in recorded history for the river in this region. Spring floods aren’t supposed to last until mid-July, and after 185 days of high water, it’s unclear Louisiana could handle any more. A potential worst-case scenario could prove disastrous for Louisiana, and shows how unprepared we are for the scary new era of overlapping climate disasters.

In Louisiana, there are two types of levees: those that protect the coast from an ocean storm surge, and those that are designed to keep the Mississippi River in its current course. Katrina caused a failure of the storm surge levees. This week, the river levees—which were first built after the historic 1927 flood—are being put to the test for the first time in modern history.