Dane Allen and Randy Davis boarded up Beryl’s apartment on Sunday before she arrived in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
hide title
Switch title
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Beryl will make landfall along the Texas coast early Monday morning as the storm regains hurricane-force strength in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Weather Service. Rain and wind from the outer reaches of the storm battered the southeastern Texas coast on Sunday, prompting evacuation orders for beach towns.
Communities from Corpus Christi to Galveston Island to Houston are facing severe weather watches and warnings, urging residents to prepare for winds of 60 to 80 mph, power outages and flooding.
“We expect Beryl’s intensity to make landfall early Monday and people should prepare for the possibility of a Category 2 hurricane making landfall,” Eric Blake, senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, said in an advisory Sunday. “Texas The state’s coast is at risk of life-threatening storm surge inundation. Residents in these areas should follow the advice of local officials and comply with evacuation orders. ”
Beryl, the first Atlantic storm of the year to become a Category 5 hurricane, swept through the Caribbean last week, killing at least 11 people. As the storm moved toward Texas, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick placed 121 counties under the state’s Hurricane Beryl disaster declaration.
“This will be a deadly storm for anyone who steps directly onto this path,” Patrick said at a news conference Sunday afternoon. “Properties can be rebuilt, but lives cannot.”
The lieutenant governor also expressed his concern that Fourth of July holiday visitors don’t know how dangerous Beryl is. “We looked at all the roads leaving the coast and the map was still green. So we didn’t see a lot of people leaving. If you’re moving, today is the day,” he said.
Texas Department of Emergency Management Director Nim Kidd echoed Patrick’s comments, imploring the public to take the incident seriously.
“There’s going to be inland flooding, and we’ve found that this freshwater inland flooding tends to kill our citizens more than a true storm surge,” Kidd said. “So please don’t drive through the water. Turn around. Don’t drown. “
The city of Galveston closed all city facilities Monday in anticipation of the storm. The White House said Sunday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent emergency personnel and resources to coastal communities.
The record-breaking storm began as a relatively weak tropical depression in late June, but in just 48 hours, it swept through the Caribbean and Yucatan Peninsula last week. Beryl later weakened to a tropical storm but is now regaining energy as it heads toward Texas.
This is the kind of extreme weather activity scientists now expect to occur as the planet warms rapidly due to climate change.
“From a scientific perspective, this is unfortunately consistent with what we would expect as the planet warms and the oceans warm,” Andra Garner, a hurricane expert at Rowan University in New Jersey, told NPR last week. “As we warm the planet through fossil fuel emissions, we’re more likely to have warmer ocean waters that allow storms like Beryl to develop and intensify really quickly.”
Residents of the Texas Gulf Coast remember Category 4 Hurricane Harvey, which hit the region in 2017. The storm devastated the region, causing catastrophic flooding and killing at least 68 people in Texas.
