HARVEY HEADS TO THE HEART OF TEXAS
GALVESTON, Texas — Along the southern edge of this island city on the Texas Gulf Coast, two surfers paddled out to ride the waves that raged furiously toward the beach.
They weren’t alone. On the shore, a huddle of young men moseyed around, barefoot, hoping to skimboard when the floods hit one of the main roads along Galveston’s Gulf of Mexico shoreline.
“Danger is not a factor in these parts,” William Mead, 21, of Clear Lake, Texas, said smiling as his shirt whipped in the pummeling winds.
Residents along a vast swath of the Texas coast were bracing for up to a year’s worth of rain as Hurricane Harvey strengthened into a Category 4 storm with sustained 130-mph winds and lashing rain. Forecasters said it could be the first major hurricane to hit the mainland United States in 12 years.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott requested a federal disaster declaration in advance of the worst of the storm, which he warned was expected to be a “very complex and dangerous” hurricane that could bring devastating flooding along the middle Texas coast over the weekend.
“It’s a hurricane that’s going to prove more dangerous
than many hurricanes,” Abbott said at a news conference Friday. “We are going to be dealing with immense, really record-setting flooding in multiple regions across the state of Texas.”
Corpus Christi was squarely in the brutal storm’s path for much of the day. A hurricane warning was in effect along a wide stretch of coastline from Port Mansfield to Sargent, spanning a region home to about 4 million people. An additional 12 million people, many in the major cities of Houston and San Antonio, were under a tropical storm warning.
Heavy bands of rain began pounding the coast near Galveston on Friday afternoon as a stream of vehicles flowed out of the seaside resort city.
Few people were still out on the roads as the hurricane approached, and the area fell under a tornado warning, with some drivers taking shelter in the lobbies of hotels that remained open.
The National Weather Service office in Corpus Christi cautioned that the extreme rainfall could be “devastating to catastrophic,” and that the current threat to life and property was “extreme.” Rivers and tributaries could overflow their banks and streets and parking lots become “rivers of raging water with underpasses submerged,” the weather service said.
A major hurricane poses the first major test of emergency response for the Trump administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new administrator, Brock Long, who was confirmed in June.
President Trump plans to travel to Texas next week, and the White House was considering declaration of a federal emergency. Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert told reporters at a news briefing Friday that federal officials had significantly improved their ability to respond to natural disasters since Hurricane Katrina caused widespread flooding in New Orleans in 2005.
If all the conditions for an emergency declaration were met, Bossert said, he believed the “president is going to be very aggressive in leaning forward and declaring it a disaster.”
“This is right up President Trump’s alley,” he added. “His questions were: ‘Are you doing what it takes to help the people?”
Harvey intensified in the central Gulf of Mexico on Thursday morning, reaching official Category 4 hurricane status by Friday evening. By 4 p.m. Friday, the storm was about 60 miles southeast of Corpus Christi and moving northwest at about 10 mph.
After making landfall, Harvey was expected to slow down and meander near the coastline, potentially dropping up to 35 inches of rain — about the amount of rainfall some Gulf Coast towns usually get in a year — over the next five days.
Harvey would be the first hurricane classified as at least Category 3 or above to hit the United States since Hurricane Wilma struck Florida in 2005. Last year, thousands of residents along the Florida, Georgia and South Carolina coasts evacuated as Hurricane Matthew was forecast to hit the East Coast as a Category 4 hurricane. However, the hurricane veered east and weakened to a Category 2 as it skirted along the coast.
Historically, slow-moving tropical storms and hurricanes have caused some of Texas’ most severe flooding. In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison hovered above the Houston area for days, dumping up to 30 inches of rain — as much as 80% of the area’s average annual rainfall over some neighborhoods. The last hurricane to hit the Texas coast — Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm that wreaked havoc after making landfall in Galveston in 2008 — killed at least 37 people and resulted in more than $30 billion in damage.
Abbott urged residents of low-lying and coastal areas — even residents of Houston, where Mayor Sylvester Turner has not called for evacuations — to evacuate.
“What you don’t know and what nobody else knows right now is the magnitude of flooding that will be coming,” he said.
At the Hertz car rental outside Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, arriving customers snapped up trucks and SUVs in preparation for the days of catastrophic rains projected to come.
After learning she was speaking to a journalist, one of the rental workers paused and asked, in a grim voice, “Do you think they’re telling the truth about how bad it’ll get?” Several other employees also stopped and craned their necks to listen.
Local officials and news outlets have had to bat down a viral social media message that circulated widely among Texans on Thursday warning that the storm would be far worse than officials were predicting.
“Ignore unfounded, unsourced weather predictions that have needlessly frightened Houstonians,” Mayor Turner tweeted. “Get info from trusted outlets.”
As many residents fled to safety, some paid little attention to officials’ calls to evacuate.
In Corpus Christi, Eddie Canales, 69, decided to stay alongside his neighbors. He parked his truck on high ground Friday, boarded up his ranch house’s windows, and retreated inside.
“The wind is starting to gust up,” he said, just after checking all his windows were completely shut. “We’re going to weather the storm. It’s kind of dicey, but I can al-
ways go up to the attic if it gets to flooding.”
The dire warnings ahead of Harvey’s arrival reminded Canales of Hurricane Celia, the last major storm he weathered at his grandparents’ home here in 1970.
That storm tore a path of destruction through the seaside refinery community, a tourist mecca and working-class haven. Canales recalled how ferocious winds of 160 mph damaged 90% of downtown and destroyed about a third of homes.
His grandparents’ house was spared. But when they emerged to check on his uncle nearby, they found him sheltering with neighbors, his roof torn off by storm winds.
“That’s what Celia created: Little twisters and squalls across the city,” said Canales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center. “Refinery tanks were bent like beer cans. Every single drive in theater was flattened and gone. We didn’t have electricity at my mom’s house for 11 days and there was a curfew.”
He planned to spend Friday night watching the latest season of “House of Cards,” as well as all the live drama outside.
In Galveston, a married couple, Tom Miller, 48, an IT analyst, and Ron Marcus, 55, a food service manager, both of Bartlesville, Okla., had been watching the forecast for days and seen the hurricane coming toward Texas.
They decided to beat it to Galveston — where they had been planning to catch a cruise where Miller’s niece was expecting to get married. Veterans of tornado alley, they figured they could wait out a hurricane, with its weaker-than-a-tornado winds.
“We headed out last night and drove straight through [the night] to get here,” arriving around 4 a.m. Friday morning, Miller said.
“Of course, after getting here,” Miller added sheepishly, “It’s kind of growing in intensity.”
After preemptively declaring a state of disaster for 30 Texas counties, Gov. Abbott on Thursday activated about 700 members of the state National Guard.
Mandatory evacuation orders are already in effect across seven coastal counties. Mayor Joe McComb of Corpus Christi, Texas’ eighth-largest city with a population of about 325,000, encouraged residents to leave voluntarily.
Houston’s Office of Emergency Management urged residents to stockpile enough water, food and medication for five to seven days, secure anything that could be picked up by strong winds, and park vehicles off the streets. The Houston Independent School District, the largest public school system in Texas, canceled all classes Monday on what would have been the first day of school.
Gas prices spiked as oil and gas operators shut down about 21% of oil production and 23% of natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Workers have been evacuated from four of the 10 rigs operating in the gulf, as well as from 86 production platforms, about 11% of the gulf ’s staffed platforms.
In neighboring Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency for the entire state.
“All arms of the state’s emergency preparedness and response apparatus are planning for the serious threat posed by Hurricane Harvey,” Edwards said.
Just a few inches of rain could cause severe challenges in New Orleans, which is still recovering from flooding after thunderstorms earlier this month overwhelmed the city’s drainage system. Mayor Mitch Landrieu urged residents to prepare for 5 to 10 inches of rain.
With 105 out of 120 pumps operating in the city, Landrieu said Thursday, officials were “working around the clock” to repair drainage pumps and turbines.
matt.pearce@latimes.com molly.hennessy-fiske @latimes.com Pearce reported from Galveston and special correspondent Jarvie from Atlanta. Times staff writer Lisa Mascaro contributed from Washington.