No, Hurricane Irma is not expected to hit Houston

Hurricane Irma
(Image credit: National Weather Service)

Hurricane Irma is currently a Category 2 storm but expected to escalate as high as Category 5 before making landfall early next week. As of Saturday, the "extremely dangerous" hurricane is still over the Atlantic Ocean and moving toward the Caribbean, particularly the Leewards Islands. Irma could hit the Eastern Seaboard, but it is too soon to make that prediction with confidence.

Contrary to a faked weather prediction map widely shared on social media this week, Irma is not expected to reach Houston or other areas already suffering catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Harvey. Here is the fake map:

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.