Category 4 Harvey hits Texas
Coast goes empty; wind, rains enter
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas late Friday, blustering across the Gulf Coast with strong winds and torrential rain from the fiercest hurricane to hit the U.S. in more than a decade.
The National Hurricane Center said the eye of the Category 4 storm made landfall about 10 p.m. about
30 miles northeast of Corpus Christi between Port Aransas and Port O’Connor, carrying with it 130 mph sustained winds and flooding rains.
Tens of thousands of
people had fled ahead of the storm. The area in Harvey’s path included oil refineries, chemical plants and floodprone Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned that the storm system could create “a very major disaster,” and forecasts drew fearful comparisons to Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest storms ever to strike the U.S.
Soon after the outer bands of Harvey reached the south Texas coast, Abbott on Friday afternoon urged people to immediately evacuate low-lying and coastal areas. He sent a written request to President Donald Trump asking for a major-disaster declaration in Texas.
“The storm surge, coupled with the deluge of rain, could easily lead to billions of dollars of property damage and almost certainly loss of life,” Abbott wrote. “It is not hyperbole to say that if the forecast verifies, Texas is about to experience one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the state.”
White House officials said Friday that the declaration was under consideration and that Trump planned to visit Texas early next week. The president was expected to receive briefings about the storm over this weekend at Camp David, and he signed a federal disaster declaration for six coastal counties Friday night.
As night fell, punishing winds already had begun to cause damage in downtown Corpus Christi, the city closest to the center of the storm. In the city of 325,000 residents, a traffic light post was toppled but still lit, its wires unearthed.
Fueled by warm Gulf of Mexico waters, Harvey’s strength grew rapidly. It accelerated from a Category 1 Friday morning to a Category 4 by evening. Its transformation from an unnamed storm to a life-threatening behemoth took only 56 hours, a swift intensification, according to experts.
“We know that we’ve got millions of people who are going to feel the impact of this storm,” Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman and meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center, said earlier Friday. “We really pray that people are listening to their emergency managers and get out of harm’s way.”
Mayor Pro Tempore Patrick Rios of Rockport, where the hurricane made landfall, told KIII-TV of Corpus Christi that residents who chose not to evacuate should write their Social Security numbers on their arms “with a Sharpie pen” to make it easier for rescuers to identify them.
It was feared that the storm system would be the fiercest to hit the U.S. in 13 years and the strongest to strike Texas since 1961’s Hurricane Carla, the most powerful Texas hurricane on record.
Aside from the winds of 130 mph and storm surges of up to 12 feet, Harvey is expected to drop up to 36 inches of rain in some areas over several days. The resulting flooding, one expert said, could be “the depths of which we’ve never seen.”
At least one researcher predicted severe damage that will linger for months or longer.
“In terms of economic impact, Harvey will probably be on par with Hurricane Katrina,” said University of Miami senior hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. “The Houston area and Corpus Christi are going to be a mess for a long time.”
Making preparations for the storm were the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In a joint statement Friday, the immigration and border agencies said they would continue to operate in the affected area but they would not conduct “routine noncriminal immigration enforcement operations” at evacuation sites or assistance centers.
Home and business owners raced to nail plywood over windows and fill sandbags as the hurricane drew near. Vehicles filled the highways leaving Corpus Christi, and the traffic appeared to be flowing smoothly. In Houston, where mass evacuations can include changing major highways to one-way roads out, authorities left traffic patterns unchanged.
Federal health officials called in more than 400 doctors, nurses and other medical professionals from around the nation and planned to move two 250-bed medical units to Baton Rouge. Other federal medical units are available in Dallas.
Just hours before landfall, the governor and Houston leaders issued conflicting statements on evacuations.
After Abbott urged more people to flee, Houston authorities told people to remain in their homes and recommended no widespread evacuations. Mayor Sylvester Turner on Friday tweeted “please think twice before trying to leave Houston en masse.” The spokesman of emergency operations in Harris County was even more direct, tweeting, in capitalized letters, “Local leaders know best.”
At a convenience store in Houston’s Meyerland neighborhood, at least 12 cars lined up for fuel. Brent Borgstedte said it was the fourth gas station he had visited to try to fill up his son’s car. The 55-yearold insurance agent shrugged off Harvey’s risks.
“I don’t think anybody is really that worried about it. I’ve lived here my whole life,” he said. “I’ve been through several hurricanes.”
STORMY GAMUT
Scientists warned that Harvey could inundate counties more than 100 miles inland and stir up dangerous surf as far away as Alabama and the Florida panhandle, 700 miles from the landfall.
It may also spawn tornadoes, forecasters warned. Even after weakening, the system might spin out into the Gulf, regain strength and hit Houston again on Wednesday as a tropical storm, forecasters said.
All seven Texas counties on the coast from Corpus Christi to the western end of Galveston Island ordered mandatory evacuations from low-lying areas. Four counties ordered full evacuations and warned that there was no guarantee that people who stayed behind would be rescued if the need arose.
Voluntary evacuations were urged for Corpus Christi and for the Bolivar Peninsula, a sand spit near Galveston where many homes were washed away by the storm surge of Hurricane Ike in 2008.
People in the town of Port Lavaca, population 12,200, appeared to heed the danger. The community northeast of Corpus Christi was a ghost town Friday afternoon, with every business boarded up. But at a bayside RV park, John Bellah drove up in his pickup to have a look at an RV he had been told was for sale. He and his wife planned to ride out Harvey.
“This is just going to blow through,” said Bellah, 72, who said he had been through Hurricane Rita in 2005 and Carla in 1961. He described those storms as “much worse.”
State officials said they had no count on how many people had actually left their homes.
The hurricane prompted Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to cancel appearances today at a Republican fundraiser in Nevada where one of the GOP’s most vulnerable senators, Dean Heller, is embroiled in a bitter primary.
Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who is hosting the third annual Basque Fry on a ranch near Carson City, said he talked to Pence and Cruz on Friday about the catastrophic effects the hurricane could have on Texas.
“Together, the vice president and Sen. Cruz have decided it would be most appropriate to cancel their trip to Nevada and focus their time and attention on the people affected by this storm,” Laxalt said.
The last Category 4 storm to hit the U.S. was Hurricane Charley in August 2004 in Florida. Superstorm Sandy, which pummeled New York and New Jersey in 2012, never had the high winds and had lost tropical status by the time it struck. Although it was never a major hurricane, it had devastating consequences.
Harvey’s heavy rains threatened to turn many communities into “essentially islands” and leave them isolated for days, said Melissa Munguia, deputy emergency management coordinator for Nueces County.
The rain and the storm surge could collide like a car and a train, particularly in the Galveston and Houston areas, said Needham, who works for private firm Marine Weather and Climate. “There’s absolutely nowhere for the water to go,” he said. Normally, rain runs off into Galveston Bay, but the storm surge will have the bay’s water level already high.
Harvey will be the first significant hurricane to hit Texas since Ike in September 2008 produced winds of 110 mph in the Galveston and Houston areas, inflicting $22 billion in damage.
It was taking aim at the same vicinity as Hurricane Carla, which had wind gusts estimated at 175 mph and inflicted more than $300 million in damage. That storm killed 34 people and forced about 250,000 people to evacuate.
LOUISIANA BRACES, TOO
Rain is expected to extend into Louisiana, driven by counterclockwise winds that could carry water from the Gulf of Mexico far inland. Forecasts called for as much as 15 inches in southwest Louisiana over the next week, and up to 6 inches in the New Orleans area.
Sections of New Orleans are still recovering from Aug. 5 flash floods that caught many by surprise and revealed problems with the city’s drainage system, including inoperative pumps. Those revelations led to firings and the abrupt retirement of an agency director.
“That’s just sheer severe neglect for many years, so I’m kind of glad a few people got the boot they needed to,” resident Steve Neighoff said as he hefted sandbags into his car. “I’m OK with the mayor. I don’t think he can do everything. He’s not a technician, and he has to believe what people tell him. So do we, unfortunately.”
Improvements to New Orleans’ drainage system are ongoing, but officials say the system still isn’t functioning at full capacity.
Gov. John Bel Edwards, who issued an emergency declaration Thursday in anticipation of the storm, traveled Friday to southwest Louisiana. He meet with emergency response officials in Calcasieu Parish, north of Cameron Parish.
Edwards, during a news briefing in Lake Charles, said he had spoken to Abbott on Thursday and had offered “any additional resources they need, in terms of personnel or assets.”
Edwards said the “greatest risk” for Louisiana is “complacency” given the hurricane’s uncertain path after landfall in Texas.
Rain bands from Harvey moved over Louisiana on Friday, and officials there braced for possible days of rain. Officials in Cameron Parish, on the coast at the Texas state line, ordered an evacuation south of the Intracoastal Waterway.
Livestock, as well as people, were a big concern.
“This morning [Friday] we had trucks lined up on the side of the highway, all with cow trailers and horse trailers,” said Lori Boullion, a worker at Canik’s Feed and Grocery in the Creole community.
Chief Deputy Chris Savoie of the Cameron Parish sheriff’s office said roughly 3,500 residents were covered by the evacuation order. Later Friday, a voluntary evacuation was ordered for part of neighboring Vermilion Parish, affecting an estimated 10,000 people. Information for this article was contributed by Michael Graczyk, Frank Bajak, Juan Lozano, Nomaan Merchant, Seth Borenstein, Catherine Lucey, Diana Heidgerd, Jamie Stengle, David Warren, Kevin McGill, Michael Kunzelman, Stacey Plaisance and Scott Sonner of The Associated Press; by Tim Craig, Mary Lee Grant, Joel Achenbach, Dylan Baddour, Ashley Cusick, Mark Berman, Steven Mufson and Jason Samenow of The Washington Post; and by Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times.