HOUSTON, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM
Harvey whips up Texas-size deluge Millions facing ‘catastrophic’ wrath
THE WORST storm to strike the U.S. in more than a dozen years strengthened Friday as it barreled into the Texas Gulf Coast with lashing rains and screaming winds clocking in at more than 130 miles per hour.
Hurricane Harvey, upgraded to a Category 4 storm, is expected to bring catastrophic flooding and ravaging winds, officials warned. It made landfall just north of Corpus Christi around 9:45 p.m.
“Texas is about to have a very significant disaster,” said Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Brock Long.
After the initial storm surge, the massive system was expected to pretty much park itself in the region and dump biblical rains for up to a week, experts said.
“It’s unprecedented,” Dr. Marshall Shepherd, former president of the American Meteorological Society, told the Daily News Friday. “It’s going to just sit and spin and spin and dump rain for up to seven days.”
He said the hardest-hit coastal areas could get 3 to 4 feet of rain while highly populated Houston could get drenched with 2 feet.
“For Houston, even 2 feet could be catastrophic because it’s already flood-prone with lots of impervious surfaces and parking lots,” he said.
Shepherd said the fact that Harvey will possibly hold over one area for so long sets it apart from other highly damaging storms like Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005, and Sandy, which walloped New York and New Jersey in 2012.
“The difference is night and day,” he told The News. “Most of the damage associated with Sandy was from storm surge and flooding coming in from the ocean.”
Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people, wreaked havoc on the Big Easy after toppling levees.
Harvey’s sustained 130 mph winds and storm surges up to 12 feet could leave large parts of South Texas “uninhabitable for weeks or months,” the National Weather Service in Houston said.
Gusts up to 156 mph could uproot trees, rip roofs off homes and leave residents without power for days.
Officials told the Caller-Times that 10 injuries, mostly due to various roof collapses, were reported in the coastal city of Rockport. Several buildings, including the city’s courthouse, sustained damage during the initial brunt of the storm.
Hundreds of thousands of homes were without power in the Corpus Christi area.
Gov. Greg Abbott warned that the storm was shaping up to be “more dangerous” than previous hurricanes because of the potential for widespread flooding.
Thousands evacuated Friday from areas in the slow-moving storm’s projected path, a swath of Texas that includes Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city.
The rush to escape the impending menace left gas stations without fuel and caused extensive traffic jams that tied up many of the state’s coastal highways.
Despite the warnings, many residents defied mandatory evacuation orders, staying behind to ride out the storm with the help of food, fuel and sandbags.
“We know that we’ve got millions of people who are going to feel the impact of this storm,” said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman and meteorologist for the National Hurricane Center. “We really pray that people are listening to their emergency managers and get out of harm’s way.”
Many in Texas appeared to be heeding the warnings of officials in areas such as Corpus Christi and the Bolivar Peninsula near Galveston, where many homes were destroyed by the storm surge of Hurricane Ike in 2008.
The town of Port Lavaca, population 12,200, looked like a ghost town Friday, with the windows of every business boarded up.
The storm also stranded about 20,000 passengers on three cruise ships in the Gulf of Mexico after the port of Galveston was closed.
Two were rerouted to New Orleans and a third will remain in Cozumel, Mexico.
With forecasts growing increasingly dire, White House officials said President Trump was “actively engaged” in the response effort and weighing a trip to Texas next week.
They confirmed he spoke to both Abbott and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards. Trump later tweeted that he would sign a federal disaster declaration requested by the Lone Star State that “unleashes the full force of government help!”
The storm could be the first major test of Trump’s abilities as commander-in-chief in handling a natural disaster.
Earlier, he tweeted a photo of a morning briefing with Long and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
“This is a serious storm, as you’ve seen from the reporting,” Thomas Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, said at a press briefing Friday. “This could remain a dangerous storm for several days, and certainly we don’t want to lose any life.”
Even before Harvey gained steam, questions were raised about Trump’s preparedness for such a possibly catastrophic event.
There are several key vacancies in the Trump administration, including the helm of the weather monitoring National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA and the Coast Guard, is also without a long-term leader after Trump named Kelly chief of staff.
Gov. Cuomo said Friday that he also spoke with both Abbott and Edwards and offered assistance.
“New York knows first-hand the dangers of Mother Nature’s anger. We have felt the damage that extreme weather can cause time and time again, and we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Louisiana and Texas as they prepare for Hurricane Harvey,” Cuomo said in a statement.