(Bloomberg) -- Tropical Storm Gordon was rapidly weakening while moving inland after making landfall just west of the Alabama-Mississippi border on Tuesday night in the U.S.

Gordon, with top winds of 40 miles (65 kilometers) per hour, was swirling toward the northwest, and the center of the storm is expected to proceed across the lower Mississippi Valley through Wednesday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in a bulletin at 5 a.m. New York time. Winds earlier reached 70 miles per hour.

While the storm threatens to cause flooding and rains along the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama this week, the potential damage may be limited as it’s predicted to weaken to a tropical depression on Wednesday. Gordon earlier prompted officials to declare a state of emergency in Louisiana and triggered evacuations from offshore oil and gas rigs.

“The impacts aren’t going to be huge based on past experience with storms like this,’’ said Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The storm isn’t intensifying and will probably just be “an amorphous blob’’ when it comes ashore, he said before it made landfall.

About 9 percent of both oil and natural gas production has been shut in across the Gulf, and crews have been taken off 54 production platforms or about 8 percent of the 687 in the region, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

The region produces about 5 percent of U.S. natural gas and 17 percent of crude oil, according to the Energy Information Administration. In addition, onshore facilities account for about 45 percent of U.S. refining capacity and 51 percent of its gas processing.

Gordon is seen having little impact on offshore energy fields, according to Matt Rogers, president of the Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Maryland.

The storm’s remains could be a problem for corn and soybean farmers in the Midwest later this week, said Don Keeney, senior agricultural meteorologist at Radiant Solutions. The crops need to dry out for harvesting.

“They do not need the rainfall right now. It’s going to be an issue for corn harvesting and beans,” Keeney said.

(Updates with details from latest NHC advisory throughout.)

--With assistance from Alex Longley, Stephen Cunningham, Sharon Cho, Sheela Tobben, Jessica Summers, Megan Durisin and Dan Murtaugh.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pratish Narayanan at pnarayanan9@bloomberg.net, Brian Wingfield, Alaric Nightingale

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