BARRELS INTO TEXAS
Coast residents feel fury of Cat 4 storm
A 70-mile-wide wall of hurricane-force winds roared into south Texas late last night as tens of thousands of Lone Star State residents fled Hurricane Harvey’s path in anticipation of widespread flooding and destruction that is expected to rock the Gulf Coast for days.
The first major hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. since Wilma in 2005, Harvey packed a wallop when it made landfall at 11 p.m. with 130 mph winds and threatened to pummel the shoreline with large destructive waves, dump up to 3 feet of rain and cause “catastrophic flooding.”
Gloria Galloway and her daughter left their Corpus Christi home yesterday as Harvey gained steam in the Gulf, reaching a Category 4 storm late last night.
“I’m just hoping I have a house when I get back,” Galloway told the Herald. “Four is disastrous. We can deal with a 1, maybe a 2, not a 4. I don’t know what’s going to happen when we get back.”
Galloway said her family is “trying to be positive” and acknowledged “there’s nothing we can do but hope.”
Gov. Greg Abbott said the storm would be “a very major disaster.”
Its destructive path took aim at a wide swath of coast that includes oil refineries, chemical plants and dangerously floodprone Houston — the nation’s fourth-largest city.
Before the storm arrived, home and business owners raced to nail plywood over windows and fill sandbags. Steady traffic filled the highways leaving Corpus Christi, but there were no apparent jams. In Houston, where mass evacuations can include changing major highways to a one-way vehicle flow, authorities left traffic patterns unchanged.
John Cronin, a Saugus architect who is in Texas for work, told the Herald he is hunkering down for the worst of the storm about 20 miles north of Houston.
“We went to multiple grocery stores. The worst of it, bottled water was gone from everywhere. And batteries for flashlights. We’re loading up as much ice as possible,” said Cronin, 62.
“There’s a lot of anxiety, not knowing how bad it’s going to get,” he added. “In this area, people are pretty much staying put, not evacuating. We seem to be relatively better off than others who are on the coast.”
The 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 there was no guarantee of rescue for people staying behind.
Voluntary evacuations have been 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.
Fueled by warm Gulf of Mexico waters, Harvey grew rapidly, accelerating from a Category 1 early in the morning to a Category 4. Its transformation from an unnamed storm to a life-threatening behemoth took only 56 hours, an incredibly fast intensification.
At least one researcher predicted heavy damage that would 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.”
Scientists warned that Harvey could swamp counties more than 100 miles inland and stir up dangerous surf as far away as Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, 700 miles from the projected landfall.
Harvey may also spawn tornadoes. Even after weakening, the system might spin out into the Gulf and regain strength before hitting Houston a second time Wednesday as a tropical storm, forecasters said.