Hurricane Claudette Lashes Texas Coast
Posted on: Tuesday, 15 July 2003, 06:00 CDT
Hurricane Claudette lashed the Texas Gulf Coast with heavy wind and rain Tuesday, pounding the beaches with high waves and chasing some people to higher ground inland.
The thick wall of clouds and wind surrounding the storm's eye touched the coast by late morning. Three to 4 inches of rain had fallen in the Houston area, about 100 miles northeast of Port O'Connor and 45 miles inland. At Galveston, at the storm's northern edge, waves crashed over the 17-foot seawall that guards the city from the gulf.
Roofs were blown from some beachfront homes, traffic lights were toppled and palm trees bent in the wind. Electricity flickered.
At Port Lavaca, Leslie Pfiel waited his turn to fill his pickup with gasoline at one of few places in town with power.
"I don't think we're leaving unless things get worse," he said. "But if they get worse, we can't leave anyway."
No injuries had been reported.
The hurricane's eye was expected to make landfall in the area of Port O'Connor, a fishing hub 110 miles southwest of Houston that is bordered by grazing land and rice fields. The village of vacation homes and shrimpers was destroyed by a strong hurricane in 1919 and again by the Category 4 monster Carla in 1961.
A steady stream of pickup trucks drove out of town, towing boats and packed with belongings as residents and vacationers took the only road away from the Gulf of Mexico.
Charlie Keller, who had been fishing with friends from San Antonio, said they had hoped Claudette would veer elsewhere but "we just decided it was best to get back to town." He said they had boarded up the house where they were staying and packed up early Tuesday morning.
Claudette, upgraded from a tropical storm during the night, had maximum sustained wind blowing at 75 mph.
At 10 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Claudette's center was 30 miles east of Port O'Connor, moving west-northwest at about 11 mph, and the eye wall, the region of dense clouds surrounding the eye with the strongest wind, had started moving ashore, the National Hurricane Center said in Miami.
The entire Texas coastline was under some sort of advisory, with a hurricane warning stretching from Baffin Bay in South Texas to High Island east of Galveston toward the Louisiana line. Tropical storm-force wind also lashed lashing parts of the Louisiana coast.
Flooding from a storm surge 3 to 5 feet above normal tide levels also was likely in the warning area, along with 5 to 8 inches of rain.
Galveston County emergency management officials had urged residents of the west end of the Bolivar Peninsula to consider leaving in anticipation of the storm, since tides above 4 feet would cut off evacuation routes.
"We are a little bit more under the gun," Galveston Mayor Roger Quiroga said.
Major oil companies had evacuated hundreds of workers from drilling and production platforms in the Gulf and shut down oil and gas production as the storm approached and gathered strength.
Claudette developed Tuesday in the Caribbean, brushing Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and Mexico's Yucatan peninsula before entering the Gulf of Mexico.
The last hurricane to strike Texas was in 1999, when Bret slammed into a largely unpopulated stretch between Corpus Christi and Brownsville.
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On the Net:
National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov
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