07/15/2003
PALACIOS, Texas - Hurricane Claudette sloshed ashore on the mid-Texas coast Tuesday, barely a hurricane but still packing 80-plus mph winds that peeled roofs, knocked out power and left low-lying coastal areas under water.
"The windows are flexing, it's howling and I'm wondering what ... I'm doing here," said Ed Conaway at the South Texas Project, the nuclear power plant just north of where Claudette cruised up Matagorda Bay and made landfall between Port O'Connor and Palacios late Tuesday morning.
AP A car is partly submerged in floodwaters as the storm surge from Hurricane Claudette pushes into Surfside Beach, Texas. |
By the time it came ashore about 12 hours later at midday Tuesday, sustained winds topped 80 mph and gusts of 84 mph were recorded at Port Lavaca and 88 mph at Wadsworth, where Conaway was among a handful of workers keeping the power plant running to help provide electricity to a broad area of south and southeast Texas.
By midday Tuesday, the hurricane's center was west-northwest of Port O'Connor, midway between Houston and Corpus Christi, and just southeast of Victoria, moving west-northwest near 12 mph.
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D-FW forecast
Hurricane warnings were up from Baffin Bay to High Island, a 260-mile stretch of Texas coastline, and tropical storm warnings were posted from High Island to Sabine Pass on the Texas-Louisiana border.
Gary Lawrence watched as the winds toppled the roof over gasoline pumps at a Shell Food Mart where he works just east of Carancahua Bay on Texas Highway 35 between Palacios and Port Lavaca.
"It was real gradual then it went down," he said, speaking through a broken front window of his store as he was pelted by rain. "Then a little while later something else flew in and broke the window."
Palacios, a coastal fishing community of 4,500 bordered by rice fields and grazing pastures, was without power Tuesday. The roof at the municipal airport was damaged and a shed covering golf carts at a golf course blew apart, some of its metal wrapping around a palm tree.
At Bayfront RV Park, directly on the shore of Matagorda Bay, three trailers were flattened and two others were overturned.
"I went around and checked all of them and there is nobody inside," Jack Linney, who was securing his boat nearby, said.
"We do have a lot of tree damage, roof damage too," Matagorda County Judge Greg Westmoreland said. "We've got a lot of cleanup to do."
Dale Porter, 52, owner of the Ace Hardware in Palacios already was doing that Tuesday, sweeping away debris from broken windows and a damaged ceiling so he could be back in business quickly.
"If I've got to get a calculator with a hand crank on it, we'll do it," he said. "We won't let our customers down."
No serious injuries were reported along the 350-mile Texas coast, which for several hours was entirely under hurricane watches or warnings.
The Coast Guard had to rescue two men from Houma, La., after their 92-foot shrimp boat sank about five miles off Sabine Pass at the extreme eastern edge of the hurricane warning area. They were taken by helicopter to a hospital in Beaumont but had no apparent injuries, Coast Guard spokesman Andrew Kendrick said.
Once the storm fueled by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico made landfall, it began losing its punch although it was expected to remain a rainmaker as it swept west across South Texas and headed into northern Mexico.
At Sargent and Surfside Beach, cars were overturned and stairways on the beachfront homes built on stilts were swept away by the waves and tidal surge.
At Galveston, waves crashed over the 17-foot seawall that guards the city from the gulf and debris littered Seawall Boulevard.
With the storm moving on, oil and natural gas companies quickly began sending workers back to Gulf of Mexico production platforms and drilling rigs that had been evacuated in the previous days.
Some 45 miles inland from Galveston in Houston, rain left highways wet but there were no reports of serious flooding. In June 2001, 22 people were killed and $5 billion in damage from Tropical Storm Allison, which dumped up to 36 inches of rain. Claudette, however, was not expected to rival that storm.
At the peak of the storm Tuesday morning, some flights in and out of the nation's fourth-largest city were delayed or canceled.
In Austin, Gov. Rick Perry signed a disaster relief proclamation to help speed state and federal response and authorized use of Texas National Guard soldiers and equipment to assist in rescue and recovery.
The Department of Public Safety was helping with traffic management and more than two dozen emergency shelters were opened.
The Texas Department of Health warned people to not eat food that had been in contact with flood water and also warned of dangers from snakes and other wildlife that might have sought shelter in trees, homes and vehicles.
The Matagorda Bay area is no stranger to hurricanes. Port O'Connor was destroyed by a strong hurricane in 1919 and again by the Category 4 monster Carla in 1961. Hurricane Celia struck on July 30, 1970, the last major hurricane to hit the region.
Claudette had defied predictions, heading north of where forecasters initially anticipated before it took a western turn late Monday.
Claudette had developed a week ago in the Caribbean, brushing Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and Mexico's Yucatan peninsula before entering the Gulf, where it has slowed down and gradually intensified.
It's the first hurricane to strike Texas since 1999, when Bret slammed into a largely unpopulated stretch between Corpus Christi and Brownsville.
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dallas/tsw/stories/071503dntexstorm_hp.8c65195c.html
