Hurricane Harvey was on the verge of reaching Texas on Friday, bringing fierce winds and torrential rain to a wide swath of the state’s Gulf Coast and prompting tens of thousands of residents fleeing inland in hopes of escaping its wrath.
The National Hurricane Center said the eyewall of the dangerous Category 4 storm reached the Texas coast Friday evening, suggesting that the eye of the storm would soon make landfall.
With time running out, residents fled Friday from the path of the increasingly menacing-looking hurricane as it took aim at an area of Texas that includes oil refineries, chemical plants and dangerously flood-prone Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned that the monster system would be “a very major disaster,” and the forecasts drew fearful comparisons to Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest ever to strike the US
“We know that we’ve got millions of people who are going to feel the impact of this storm,” said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman and meteorologist for the National Hurricane Center. “We really pray that people are listening to their emergency managers and get out of harm’s way.”
As night fell, punishing winds had already begun to cause damage in downtown Corpus Christi, the city closest to the center of the storm. A trash can lid skipped across a parking lot behind hotels on the seawall. In the city of 325,000 residents, a traffic light post was toppled but still lit, its wires unearthed.
Fueled by warm Gulf of Mexico waters, Harvey grew rapidly, accelerating from a Category 1 early in the morning to a Category 4 by evening. Its transformation from an unnamed storm to a life-threatening behemoth took only 56 hours, an incredibly fast intensification.
If it does not lose significant strength, the system will come ashore as the fiercest hurricane to hit the US in 13 years and the strongest to strike Texas since 1961’s Hurricane Carla, the most powerful Texas hurricane on record.
Aside from the winds of 130 mph (201 kph) and storm surges up to 12 feet (4 meters), Harvey was expected to drop prodigious amounts of rain — up to 3 feet. The resulting flooding, one expert said, could be “the depths of which we’ve never seen.”
Galveston-based storm surge expert Hal Needham said forecasts indicated that it was “becoming more and more likely that something really bad is going to happen.”
At least one researcher predicted heavy damage that would linger for months or longer.
“In terms of economic impact, Harvey will probably be on par with Hurricane Katrina,” said University of Miami senior hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. “The Houston area and Corpus Christi are going to be a mess for a long time.”
Before the storm arrived, home and business owners raced to nail plywood over windows and fill sandbags. Steady traffic filled the highways leaving Corpus Christi, but there were no apparent jams. In Houston, where mass evacuations can include changing major highways to a one-way vehicle flow, authorities left traffic patterns unchanged.