Beta bears down on Texas
Slow-moving tropical storm brings plenty of rain, surge to wary residents
GULF COAST — Jo Dove and Adam Maubach watched Sunday night as water crept up from the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway toward their Surfside Beach home. Then it began creeping up from the Gulf side of the island, too.
It inched up the stairs leading to their front door. A duck paddled through their yard, diving underwater looking for fish, as the water continued to climb. It made it up five steps — halfway to the top.
“Hopefully it doesn’t get worse tonight,” Maubach said Monday.
The entire Houston region (and beyond) was hoping the same as Tropical Storm Beta crawled toward the Texas coast on Monday, generating high winds and some coastal flooding.
The storm carried the slowmoving scary factor of Hurricane Harvey, but it wasn’t forecast to have such extreme levels of rain. Beta didn’t have the 150 mph winds of last month’s Hurricane Laura, either, prompting residents to be ready, cautiously optimistic and simply accepting of the fact that anything can happen in 2020.
“Past experience has taught me never to think everything is going to be OK,” said Samantha Humphrey, a Chambers County spokesperson who arrived at the county’s emergency operations center at 7:30 a.m. with her pillow and extra blankets. “There’s also the sense of this is the new normal, I guess, to always have some kind of disaster looming.”
Tropical Storm Beta is the 23rd named storm of an especially active Atlantic hurricane season — so active that officials had to pull out the Greek alphabet.
It was forecast to reach the Matagorda Bay area overnight. It could stall for a while along the coast or just inland before being nudged east-northeast.
It’s expected to reach the Houston area as a tropical depression and be gone by Wednesday night, continuing through Louisiana and ultimately dissipating in the lower Mississippi Valley area on Friday, according to the National Hurricane Center’s Monday afternoon updates.
Winds are no longer a top concern. Instead, forecasters are focused on the potential for flash flooding caused by a combination of rain and storm surge, the latter already being felt by coastal communities.
In Surfside Beach, 500 feet of sand dunes installed just a few days ago had been washed back on the beach. Workers would have to reform the dunes, said Bob Petty, a local business owner of a restaurant, trailer park and a beach rental company.
The Strand Historic District in Galveston, which sits on the bay side of the island and is typically ground zero for the island’s floods, began to take water Monday morning after high tide. Some roads on the West End of the island and Jamaica Beach were impassable.
But by late afternoon, the waters had receded in the Strand Historic District.
According to the National Weather Service’s Houston/Galveston office, the worst of this high-tide flooding might have already occurred. But there will still be some flooding during the next few days.
“Each successive high tide is a little bit lower than the last,” Dan Reilly, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service's Houston/Galveston office, said during a presentation Monday afternoon. “So gradual improvement as far as the pure coastal flooding is concerned, but we will have lingering coastal flooding really for at least the next two or three days.”
His bigger concern is the combination of high tides and locally heavy rains. Coastal counties are forecast to receive 5 to 10 inches of rain. Moving inland — roughly north of the U.S. 59 to U.S. 90 route connecting Wharton to Houston to Dayton — communities could see 2 to 4 inches of rain. Higher amounts up to 15 inches could occur anywhere a heavy rain band sets up.
“It’s still uncertain exactly when and where the heavier bands of rain will occur,” Reilly said.
Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 29 counties on Monday. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo activated the county’s emergency operations center to Level 3, signaling officials are prepared to make water rescues and handle other potential impacts of Tropical Storm Beta if it produces dangerous flooding.
“We could get 4 to 8 inches, and if it’s spread out, we’ll be OK,” Hidalgo said during a news conference. “But if we get 4 to 5 inches very quickly, in one band, that could lead to bigger issues in that particular area.”
Still, Beta is not likely to be another Hurricane Harvey, which inundated communities with 35 inches to 60 inches of rain.
Harvey made landfall near Rockport as a Category 4 storm. It was a more organized storm, giving it a longer life and more frequent bands of rain.
There was also more moisture in the air with Harvey, which provided more water to shower down as rain. Beta is sucking in dry air, so the atmosphere is not as moist. A recent cold front has helped stymie Beta, too.
Henry Mayes, 73, was among those devastated by Harvey. His home in Hankamer flooded, and Mayes and his wife, Alma, are still working month by month to get it back together. The storm destroyed his wife’s beloved 40-yearold piano.
They were sightseeing, so to speak, on Monday as Beta neared the coast. They watched the water along the Chambers County coastline rise. And even as a handful of roads began to flood, they held out hope. Beta was just a tropical storm, not a hurricane. And hadn’t they been through enough this year?
“2020’s been bad,” Mayes said. Over in Surfside Beach, ensconced in a yellow-gray house on stilts, Teresa and Jeff Loock spent Sunday night playing Cards Against Humanity with a few other holdouts.
“The only thing I’m worried about is losing power,” said Teresa Loock, remembering the sticky aftermath of other storms, battling the Texas heat and humidity without air conditioning.
But they had a surefire way to make the storm tolerable.
“We’ve got rum,” said Jeff Loock with a chuckle. “We’ve got tequila.”