U.S. Gulf coast warned about possible tropical cyclone

The National Hurricane Center warned on Thursday that a low-pressure system moving northwest through the Gulf of Mexico has a strong chance of becoming a tropical cyclone in the next two days.

"This system has a high chance … 70 percent … of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 48 hours … Interests along the entire northern Gulf of Mexico coast should monitor the progress of this disturbance," the center said, according to Reuters.

As the system passed over the central part of the Gulf, it was producing a large area of clouds, thunderstorms and strong winds. Some oil companies had already begun evacuating employees from oil platforms in the Gulf, Reuters reports.

If the system develops into a tropical storm it will be called Lee, and computer models suggest that it could pass over the coasts of Texas and Louisiana. Lee would be the 12th named storm of the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Katia continued to move out in the Atlantic, but forecasters said it is too early to raise any concerns.

"It's got a lot of ocean to go. There's no way at this point to say if it will make any impacts, let alone when it might make them," Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman at the National Hurricane Center, told MSNBC on Wednesday. "There's a reason we don't do forecasts more than five days in advance — the information just isn't good. The error beyond that just isn't acceptable."

By 11 a.m. eastern on Thursday, Katia was about 1,050 miles east of the Leeward Islands with maximum sustained winds of almost 75 mph. The storm is forecast to turn north in a couple of days, putting it on a course that would keep it away from the Caribbean islands.

The east coast of the United States is still dealing with damage left by Hurricane Irene. The New York Times reports that by Wednesday night, emergency crews had completed makeshift roads to all the towns in Vermont that were isolated after massive floods earlier in the week.