On Wednesday, the hurricane made landfall near Gulf Shores, uprooting trees, cutting power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across the area, and bringing what the US National Hurricane Centre (NHC) calls "catastrophic and life-threatening" flooding.
First, the NHC graded the weather event, given its maximum wind speeds of 169 kilometres per hour (105 miles per hour), as a Category 2 hurricane, but later downgraded it to a tropical storm, as the maximum wind speed dropped to 113 kilometres per hour (70 miles per hour).