Hurricane Nate was the costliest natural disaster in Costa Rican history. An unusually fast-moving tropical cyclone, it caused severe flooding in Central America, leading to widespread destruction and casualties, during early October 2017, before making landfall on the US Gulf Coast. The fourteenth named storm and ninth hurricane of the hyperactive 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, Nate originated from a broad area of low pressure over the southwestern Caribbean on October 3. The disturbance moved northwest, organizing into a tropical depression the next day and attaining tropical storm intensity early on October 5. The storm moved ashore the coastline of Nicaragua thereafter. Little change in strength occurred as the system continued into Honduras, and Nate began steady intensification over the warm waters of the northwestern Caribbean Sea shortly thereafter. It attained hurricane strength while moving through the Yucatán Channel early on October 7, attaining peak winds of 90 mph (150 km/h) in the central Gulf of Mexico later that day. Early on the next day, Nate made landfall near the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana. After crossing the marshland of the Mississippi Delta, it made its second U.S. landfall near Biloxi, Mississippi early on October 8, causing a storm surge to flood the ground floor of coastal casinos and buildings, as well as causing rip currents, hurricane-force winds, and beach erosion.