Tropical storm Fay inundates Texas
HOUSTON (AP) – Tropical Storm Fay ran aground on the Gulf Coast with high tides and tornadoes Saturday, quickly weakening but inundating some areas with nearly a foot of rain. As the storm’s remnants slowly moved west, officials worried substantial rain could fall around San Antonio, which suffered severe flooding earlier this summer.
Street flooding, coastal erosion and scattered power outages were reported in southeastern Texas, but Fay caused no deaths or serious injuries.
“We were worried about Galveston, other counties along the coast,” said Russ Lecklider, a controller with the state’s Emergency Operations Center in Austin.
“There were some evacuations on Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula, but not large numbers of people.
“We got off very easy in the coastal areas.”
Brazoria, Matagorda and Wharton counties had 5 to 8 inches of rain, and Freeport and West Columbia in Brazoria County reported nearly a foot of rain.
“The rain was so heavy you couldn’t even see out of the house,” said Edward Guajardo in the city of Wharton, about 60 miles southwest of Houston.
The storm’s influence also extended eastward along the Gulf Coast, with 3.61 inches of rain at Pascagoula, Miss.; 1.03 at Mobile, Ala., and 0.74 of an inch at Boothville, La.
The storm had stalled off shore all day Friday and threatened to become a weak hurricane, but it never gathered enough strength.
When it came ashore early Saturday southwest of Houston it had sustained wind approaching 60 mph. The minimum for a hurricane is 74 mph.
Tide gauges at Freeport showed the storm surge at 41/2 feet above normal tide level early Saturday. In coastal areas, the surge usually is the most destructive part of a tropical storm or hurricane.
Tornadoes were reported later Saturday in Wharton County. One destroyed a mobile home at Boling, and another damaged a home and a truck at Hungerford, said Matt Moreland, a forecaster with the National Weather Service’s Houston-Galveston office. Another tornado was reported in Fort Bend County.
In Wharton, Guajardo planned to stay at a hotel Saturday night because the rain had flooded his house.
“This is the third time I get flooded out,” said the 60-year-old retired mining company worker. “This has been the worst.”
After passing the coast, the storm’s remnants headed toward San Antonio at about 7 mph.
“San Antonio, the Hill County, South Central Texas could see 5 to 10 inches of rain,” Moreland said. “We could have some serious rainfall and flooding problems over there.”
Lecklider said state emergency management officials were worried about what Fay could do to the area of San Antonio and south-central Texas, which is still recovering from flooding in July.
“Our concern is that it stalls and that area gets 10 to 15 inches of rain,” Lecklider said.
Moreland said Fay’s remnants would probably linger in the state through at least Monday.
The storm came on the same weekend as the great Galveston storm of 1900, when some 6,000 people were killed. That hurricane remains the deadliest natural disaster in the nation’s history.
Fay was the first tropical storm to threaten Texas since June 2001, when remnants of Allison dumped up to 3 feet of rain on the Houston area, killing 22 and causing an estimated $5 billion in damage.
The last hurricane in Texas was Bret, which packed 140 mph wind in August 1999 when it came ashore in a sparsely populated area of Kenedy County. It was blamed for four highway deaths and scattered damage.
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On the Net:
National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/