Hurricane Harvey: Storm Slams Southern Texas as Residents Flee
August 27, 2017 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Beware of flooding, the governor warns.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Saturday said that his primary concern remains “dramatic flooding” in the wake of the storm.
Speaking at atelevised news conference in Austin, Governor Abbott said state and other agencies remained active in search and rescue efforts. “We don’t have any information right now that we can confirm” about fatalities, he said.
He warned Texans to be vigilant and to stay away from rising water, noting that it can be far deeper, with swifter currents, than it may appear.
“Turn around, don’t drown. Don’t risk your life,” he said. “The most important thing all Texans can do is to put your life and the protection of your life first and foremost.”
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Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
He said agencies were focused on supporting evacuees from Corpus Christi and elsewhere, and on getting supplies, such as food, water and ice, to areas that needed it. — JOHANNA BARR in New York
Hundreds of thousands are without power.
The storm remained a hurricane well after landfall, and conditions, including tornado warnings, made it difficult for the authorities to begin even preliminary damage assessments.
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More than 250,000 customers were without electricity early Saturday, a figure that was likely to increase. Corpus Christi urged people who were still in the city to boil water.
Images and videos on social media showed substantial damage to buildings, including roofs and walls pulled away. Power lines were toppled, and phone service was down.
Dawn in Rockport, #Texas. Landscape is smashed, stripped, and scrubbed in #Hurricane #HARVEY‘s wake. A monstrous cyclone. pic.twitter.com/8tX6gwxC7O
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Josh Morgerman (@iCyclone)
Aug. 26, 2017
Early rainfall totals were staggering. The National Hurricane Center said that an automated rain gauge near Victoria, a city of about 68,000 in the path of the storm, had recorded more than 16 inches in 24 hours.
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Eric Gay/Associated Press
As rains picked up in Houston before daybreak on Saturday, the lights began to blink and, in some areas, go out. The city’s roads, largely quiet since Friday evening, were almost entirely empty. — ALAN BLINDER in Houston
Rockport, in the storm’s path, took a direct hit.
Rockport, a coastal city of about 10,000 that was in the hurricane’s path when it came ashore. Charles J. Wax, Rockport’s mayor, said that conditions were too dangerous on Saturday morning to deploy emergency officials across the city, but that an initial review, as the storm’s eye passed overnight, showed “widespread damage.”
We are stuck in the town of Rockport all roads are blocked due to high water debris .#txwx #hurricaneharvey2017 pic.twitter.com/UOTx6MuZWJ
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Jeff Piotrowski (@Jeff_Piotrowski)
Aug. 26, 2017
“Homes and businesses completely destroyed, lives disrupted,” said Mr. Wax, who said that a Fairfield Inn and Suites had sustained heavy damage. “We do not know if there is any loss of life, but that may be because we haven’t been able to assess.”
“We took a Category 4 storm right on the nose,” said Mr. Wax, who had issued a mandatory evacuation order. — ALAN BLINDER in Houston
A vast field now resembles a lake.
In the ranchlands a few miles outside Rockport on Saturday morning, there was heavy flooding. Acres of flat fields resembled lakes. A herd of cattle wandered slowly through the water, as if crossing a low river. Horses stood still, braving wind and rain. — MANNY FERNANDEZ in Rockport, Tex.
A rural area outside Rockport pic.twitter.com/CCYxVQarRk
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Manny Fernandez (@mannyNYT)
Aug. 26, 2017
‘Maybe it won’t be that bad.’
Houston residents woke to light rain and an overcast sky. At a Walmart north of downtown, a few people came in for last-minute supplies. But some shelves had been emptied by hurricane-wary residents the night before. Employees said they would close the store at noon.
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Juan Cruz, 52, wheeled a cart out the door. He’d noticed that rain from the night before had caused his roof to leak, and he’d bought a tarp to cover it, hoping to stay dry if things got worse. Mr. Cruz, a mechanic, said he lived through Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and remembered the devastation. The storm killed his neighbors, flooded roads and tore up bridges, he said.
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“Maybe it won’t be that bad,” he said. “It depends on God.” — JULIE TURKEWITZ in Houston
In a sturdy hotel, some find a haven.
Near the Corpus Christi airport, a Holiday Inn lobby was ablaze with lights and electricity on Saturday morning, and Chuck Berry tunes played in the background. The hotel was filled with local residents who had checked in on Friday, hoping that the old sturdy building would be a safe place to ride out the hurricane.
Ultimately, it was: the power flickered, but held on. The air-conditioning was humming. The blue-lit fountain in the lobby was still churning, mimicking the sound of the rain and wind outside. Trees and scattered debris filled the parking lot, but there was no major damage to the 256-room hotel.
Raju Bhagat, who owns the hotel and several others in the Corpus Christi area, stayed there overnight, joined by some of his employees and their families.
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Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
“This is a concrete building, so nothing is going to happen here,” Mr. Bhagat said. — MANNY FERNANDEZ in Corpus Christi
Shelters were readied for evacuees.
As thousands of coastal residents were ordered to evacuate on Friday, and others chose to leave on their own, inland cities welcomed an influx of evacuees on Friday.
Gov. Greg Abbott said the state government was preparing to assist up to 41,000 evacuees. As many as 54 shelters would be open, officials said, with the potential for that number to grow.
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Dallas opened a shelter for up to 500 people, and was ready to open two more if needed, officials there said.
.@DallasCERT working hard to set up sleeping areas pic.twitter.com/MSCoCoulS6
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City of Dallas (@CityOfDallas)
Aug. 25, 2017
“We are prepared to handle much more than we are right now,” said Rocky Vaz, director of the Dallas Office of Emergency Management.
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Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
In Austin, the American Red Cross scheduled an “urgent shelter volunteer training” session on Friday as officials prepared for more evacuees to arrive.
We need shelter volunteers! Come get trained today at 10, noon, 2 or 4pm. #harvey https://t.co/mRytM9Zk7S
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Central TX Red Cross (@CenTexRedCross)
Aug. 25, 2017
And in San Antonio, more than 150 people were being housed at a former elementary school as of Friday morning, according to the local news station KSAT-TV. Many of those seeking shelter had arrived by bus.
San Antonio was also bracing for a possible uptick in homeless pets, and was offering incentives for people to help clear space in local animal shelters.
We need shelter volunteers! Come get trained today at 10, noon, 2 or 4pm. #harvey https://t.co/mRytM9Zk7S
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Central TX Red Cross (@CenTexRedCross)
Aug. 25, 2017
On Friday afternoon, Mr. Abbott urged those in the storm’s path to flee to safety as soon as possible, warning that continued flooding after initial storm surges may close off escape routes. “You may find it is too late to be able to evacuate,” he said. — MITCH SMITH in Chicago and DAVE MONTGOMERY in Houston
There were lines, but no price increase, at gas pumps.
In years past, major hurricanes caused immediate spikes in oil and gasoline prices, but as hard as Hurricane Harvey has hit the region’s refineries, the impact at the pump has so far been muted.
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Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press
The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in Texas was $2.17 a gallon on Sunday morning, up only 2 cents from the beginning of the week, according to the AAA motor club, below the national average of $2.36 a gallon, also up 2 cents this week. The reason is a glut of oil and gasoline in storage, due to a frenzy of drilling in shale fields across the country, but especially in Texas, in recent years.
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However, it may take days before the full impact of the storm is known. Roughly a million barrels a day of refining capacity has been shut down on the Gulf Coast, and nearly a quarter of Gulf offshore production has been shut in. The Corpus Christi shipping terminals responsible for importing and exporting oil and refined products are also closed, and if the ship channel between Port Aransas and Aransas Pass is badly damaged it could take weeks for production to resume. — CLIFFORD KRAUSS in Houston
Predictions are plentiful. Why are some wrong?
One of the terms thrown around when a hurricane is approaching land is models — what do the models say will happen? Hurricane computer models turn the complex factors that govern storms into forecasts. There are a number of leading hurricane models, and their forecasts often conflict. The discrepancies are evident in what are known as “spaghetti models”: maps that show the results of multiple models and multiple data runs in what can be a tangled mess.
Some models in the case of Hurricane Harvey show stunningly high levels of rainfall in coming days: a run on Friday from the European model forecast as much as 60 inches of rainfall. J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia, warned against focusing on the most extreme examples presented by any single model or run.
“That’s one isolated run,” he said. “What we tend to do as meteorologists is look at what’s known as an ensemble,” or a blending of the runs to filter out what could be outliers. Focusing on one line in the spaghetti plot is a bad idea without greater context; “that might be the worst model in the batch,” he said.
Dr. Shepherd said that models have, in general, gotten better in recent years at forecasting the track of a storm, but have not done as well at predicting a storm’s intensity.
In the case of Harvey, he said, “they’ve all been pretty consistent with the messaging,” despite varying forecasts of rainfall amounts. “This thing is going to stall out” and dump prodigious amounts of water over Houston and much of the coast. And Houston has historically been a place that is easy to flood and hard to drain. — JOHN SCHWARTZ
The storm has rerouted some cruise ships.
Cruise ships carrying thousands of passengers and crew have been ordered to steer clear of the Port of Galveston. The port, which is less than 200 miles northeast of where the hurricane made landfall late Friday, was closed until the weather clears.
Carnival Cruise Line diverted three ships scheduled to arrive at the port this weekend. Rather than docking in Galveston on Saturday, Carnival Valor and Carnival Freedom were to stop in New Orleans to pick up fuel, water and food, then stay at sea until the weather clears. The 3,666 passengers on Freedom and the 3,628 passengers on Valor will be allowed to end their cruise and disembark in New Orleans, though Carnival is encouraging them to stay on board to avoid the difficulty of traveling back to Galveston on their own. Carnival Breeze remained docked overnight in Cozumel, Mexico, and will set off for Texas in the afternoon, aiming to drop off its 4,660 passengers in Galveston on Sunday on schedule. — TIFFANY HSU in New York
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