Texas hunkers down as Hurricane Beryl hits coast

Houston, United States – AFP

Hurricane Beryl made landfall Monday in the southern US state of Texas, where some residents were evacuated over warnings of flooding and power outages.

The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Beryl hit the town of Matagorda with wind speeds of 80 miles (130 kilometers) per hour.

“Life-threatening storm surge and strong winds are occurring with considerable flash and urban flooding expected,” the NHC warned in its latest bulletin on Monday.

The National Weather Service issued a tornado alert for parts of Texas including Houston, which is home to 2.3 million people.

“We have to take Beryl very, very seriously. Our worst enemy is complacency,” said Houston Mayor John Whitmire.

The mayor said he wanted residents in Houston “to know the conditions that you go to sleep under tonight will not be the same that you wake up to in the morning.”

Several areas of the Texas coast were under hurricane and storm warnings on Sunday. Matagorda lies roughly midway between the port city of Corpus Christi and Galveston Island, where Beryl had been expected to make landfall.

The NHC said rainfall of up to 15 inches (38 centimeters) was expected in parts of Texas, warning that it could cause flash flooding in some areas.

Authorities in Nueces County, home to Corpus Christi, asked tourists to leave the city, while neighboring Refugio County — yet to fully recover from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 — issued a mandatory evacuation order on Saturday.

The city of Galveston, southeast of Houston, issued a voluntary evacuation order for some areas, with videos on social media showing lines of cars heading out of town.