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Hurricane Claudette Roars Ashore in Texas

Posted on: Tuesday, 15 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

Hurricane Claudette roared onto the Texas Gulf Coast and headed inland with wind and heavy rain Tuesday, pounding beaches with high waves and chasing some people to higher ground.

The storm's broad eye crossed the shore late in the morning, surrounded by wind blowing at around 80 mph.

Three to 4 inches of rain had fallen in the Houston area, about 100 miles northeast of Port O'Connor and 45 miles inland, but only drizzle was falling there by late morning. At Galveston, waves crashed over the 17-foot seawall that guards the city from the gulf.

No injuries had been reported.

Roofs were blown from some beachfront homes, traffic lights were toppled and palm trees bent in the wind. Electricity flickered.

"I wanted to board up the windows, but I think it's too late for that," Rusty Clark said at Port Alto, about 15 miles north of Port O'Connor, as trees around his house bowed in the wind.

At 2 p.m. EDT, the center of the hurricane had passed the Port O'Connor area and was about 15 miles south of Victoria, the National Hurricane Center said in Miami.

Claudette, upgraded from a tropical storm during the night, had maximum sustained wind blowing at 80 mph, although that was expected to decrease since the storm was over land. The hurricane was moving toward the west-northwest at about 12 mph and was expected to continue that way for the next 24 hours. Its current path would take it across southern Texas and eventually into northen Mexico.

A hurricane warning remained in effect along the Texas coast from Baffin Bay in South Texas to High Island, just northeast of Galveston. A tropical storm warning was in effect from High Island to Sabine Pass, at the Louisiana state line.

Port O'Connor, a village of vacation homes and shrimpers 110 miles southwest of Houston, is bordered by grazing land and rice fields. It was destroyed by a strong hurricane in 1919 and again by Category 4 Carla in 1961.

Galveston County emergency management officials had urged residents of the west end of the Bolivar Peninsula to consider leaving in anticipation of the storm, because 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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