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Year's First Major Hurricane Strengthens

Posted on: Sunday, 31 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Tropical Storm Grace weakened and was downgraded to a depression Sunday as it blew onto the Texas central coast with locally heavy rain that threatened to cause flooding.

Meanwhile, the year's first major hurricane grew even stronger far out in the Atlantic, with sustained winds of 135 mph. That made Hurricane Fabian a dangerous Category 4 hurricane, but it remained several days from landfall.

As Grace reached Texas, officials of several coastal counties recommended voluntary evacuations of low-lying areas.

"It won't stop raining," said John Simsen, a spokesman for the Galveston County Office of Emergency Management. "It is not causing any flooding now, but it will be an issue tomorrow and the next day I guarantee."

The National Hurricane Center discontinued its tropical storm warnings for the coast by late morning. The warnings had been in effect along a 200-mile stretch of Texas coast from Corpus Christi to High Island, midway between Galveston and Port Arthur.

"One of the toughest things to forecast is whether it will develop an eye. In this case, it never got that organized," National Weather Service meteorologist Bill Read said Sunday. "That's the primary reason it never gained any more strength."

Rain from Grace started falling across parts of eastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana late Saturday. Up to 6 inches of rain was measured by midday in some areas of Texas, meteorologists said.

Read said the storm could dump as much as 12 inches of rain in places because its forward motion was expected to slow to 5 mph as it moves across south-central Texas.

"That's when you really start to worry about the same areas getting rained on over and over again," he said. "We're still very concerned that for a large chunk of Texas that excessive rain for the next 12 up to 48 hours is going to cause flooding."

A thunderstorm hit Lake Charles, La., early Sunday but tides, not rain, were the biggest concern, said Dick Gremillion, head of Calcasieu Parish's emergency preparedness department.

Grace's maximum sustained wind had decreased Sunday to about 35 mph, below the 39 mph threshold for tropical storms.

Fabian, meanwhile, was gaining strength but remained far from land - about 500 miles east of the Northern Leeward Islands by 5 p.m. EDT. Its speed had shot up from 75 mph Friday to 135 mph Sunday, the weather service reported.

Fabian, the third hurricane of the Atlantic season, was expected to curve northward and head somewhere between Puerto Rico and Bermuda over the next five days.

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On the Net:

National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

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