NEW IBERIA, LA. ? Nearly a half-million people in Louisiana and Texas were urged to clear out on Wednesday some of them for the second time in a week as a fearsome Hurricane Lili barreled toward the Gulf Coast with 140 mph winds.

“We have a real disaster in the making,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “This is going to be the worst hurricane to hit the Louisiana coast since reconnaissance data has been available.”

Resort towns boarded up, along with all 12 of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast casinos, NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, the nation’s biggest oil import terminal, and the Tabasco bottling plant near the Louisiana coast.

“I got a funny feeling,” ranch hand Wilson Miller said as he stocked up on cigarettes and sandwiches at a gasoline station near Lafayette. “When we get back it will be under water and there won’t be anything left.”

Lili was expected to come ashore this morning in Louisiana as a major, destructive hurricane, Category 4 on the five-point scale. Forecasters warned that some areas could be inundated with 6 to 10 inches of rain and a life-threatening storm surge of up to 20 feet.

About 143,000 people were urged to leave the Louisiana coast, while in Texas officials advised the 330,000 residents in two counties surrounding Beaumont and Port Arthur to head inland because of the threat of a 9-foot storm surge.

“Destination? I have no idea. But it’s going to be north,” said Glen Guidry, who stopped at a gasoline station on Interstate 10 west of Lafayette with his wife and five children.

Gail Harrington, her son, daughter, six other relatives and a dog crammed into the family’s two cars to drive as far from the coast as they could.

Northbound traffic on Highway 69 moves at a crawl as Beaumont, Tex., residents evacuate ahead of Hurricane Lili. Nearly a half million residents of Texas and Louisiana were urged to evacuate Wednesday. Lili, a Category 4 storm, is expected to make landfall in Louisiana this morning.

“We tanked it up. Wherever that gets us, we’ll go,” Harrington said at a grocery store in Delcambre, La., a small town a few miles from the water’s edge.

Hurricane-force winds which extended outward 45 miles from the center of Lili were expected to reach up to 150 miles inland. At 10 p.m. CDT, Lili was 195 miles south of New Orleans.

In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry signed a disaster declaration and corrections officials moved more than 3,000 inmates to inland lockups.

The storm forced the shutdown of Mission Control in Houston, delaying for nearly a week Wednesday’s shuttle launch 900 miles away at Cape Canaveral, Fla. It marked the first time in 41 years of manned spaceflight that bad weather in Houston delayed a Florida launch.

At Louisiana’s Avery Island, home of Tabasco hot pepper sauce, the McIlhenny Co. shut down its lone bottling plant.

“We’ll be closed as long as it takes to get our power back and let our people clean out their homes,” said executive vice president Tony Simmons. But he said hot sauce lovers need not worry: “We’re not anticipating anyone running out of Tabasco.”