Texas braced for Tropical Storm Beryl on Saturday as it approached the state’s shores on the Gulf of Mexico, as some areas issued evacuation orders and hurricane warnings and watches were posted for the state’s southern coast.
The storm made landfall on Friday in Mexico as a Category 2 hurricane. Beryl, which then weakened to a tropical storm, was expected to become a hurricane before reaching the Texas coast as soon as late Sunday.
Hurricane warnings were in effect for the Texas coast, from Baffin Bay, about 40 miles south of Corpus Christi, north toward Sargent, about 160 miles up the shoreline from the bay.
On Saturday afternoon, the Office of Emergency Management for Refugio County, Texas, a shoreline area with a population of about 6,600, issued a mandatory evacuation order and Port Aransas, a city about 20 miles east of Corpus Christi, Texas, issued a mandatory visitor evacuation.
Dan Patrick, who is serving as acting governor of Texas while Gov. Greg Abbott travels abroad, on Saturday added 81 counties to the state’s Hurricane Beryl Disaster Declaration, bringing the total number of counties under the declaration to 121.
The declaration, which enables state resources to assist in local preparation and recovery efforts, is commonly made after an extreme event but can be made if a disaster is imminent.
In the past week, the storm flattened islands and killed 12 people in Grenada, Jamaica and Venezuela.
Here are key things to know about the storm:
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Beryl began crossing the Gulf of Mexico early Saturday, maintaining maximum sustained winds of 60 miles per hour with higher gusts, the National Weather Service said.
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Five to 15 inches of rainfall was expected in parts of the Texas Gulf Coast beginning late Sunday. Storm surge could raise water levels by as much as two to five feet.
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The Weather Service issued a hurricane watch and a storm surge watch on Saturday for the southern Texas coast, from the mouth of the Rio Grande to San Luis Pass on Galveston Island, about 50 miles south of Houston.
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Mexico’s meteorological service issued a tropical storm warning for the northeastern coast of Mexico from Barra el Mezquital to the mouth of the Rio Grande, the Weather Service said.
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Although Beryl weakened slightly as it crossed the Yucatán Peninsula, the storm is expected to regain strength over the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend.
The storm has left destruction in its wake.
Forecasters predicted that Beryl would hit Mexico twice. It crossed the Yucatán Peninsula on Friday, and then, after traversing the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend, it was expected to reach the coast of the northern state of Tamaulipas, where a hurricane watch was in effect.
Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Saturday that when the hurricane makes landfall in Texas it could bring storm surge of up to five feet above ground level off the Gulf of Mexico in Matagorda Bay, where Matagorda County officials issued a voluntary evacuation order late on Friday.
A sea wall built in 1903 would do little to protect Galveston Island from sea surge, Judge Mark Henry, Galveston County’s top executive, said on Saturday.
“That’s the only protection at this moment, and it’s obviously not much,” he said. “We’re anticipating some potential coastal flooding, and there’s not a lot we can do to stop it or prepare for it, we just have to respond to it as it happens.”
Farther south, officials in the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi were distributing thousands of sandbags to help people prepare for potential flooding.
In Mexico, no injuries, deaths or major flooding had been reported as of Friday evening, Laura Velázquez Alzúa, Mexico’s coordinator of civil protection, said at a news conference.
The storm had dumped six to 10 inches of rain in Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán by early Friday, bringing wind gusts as high as 135 m.p.h. In Quintana Roo, power had been restored to most areas on Saturday after outages affected 20 percent of the population.
Earlier in the week, at least 12 people were killed as the storm lashed parts of Grenada, Venezuela, then Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.
Beryl made landfall on Monday in Grenada, where officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on Carriacou and Petite Martinique, home to 9,000 to 10,000 people in total, had been damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main health facility.
Beryl killed three people and destroyed 400 homes in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro said at a news conference on Thursday. The storm left flooded towns, homes engulfed in landslides and damaged schools and bridges, he said at another news conference.
In Jamaica, the storm was the strongest to approach the island in over a decade. About 40 percent of the customers of the country’s main power provider were without electricity on Saturday, the company said.
This hurricane season is expected to be busy.
Forecasters have warned that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season could be much more active than usual.
In late May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted 17 to 25 named storms this year, an “above-normal” number and a prediction in line with more than a dozen forecasts earlier in the year from experts at universities, private companies and government agencies. Hurricane seasons produce 14 named storms, on average.
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