Tropical Storm Harvey is drifting back into the Gulf of Mexico and will meander near the upper Texas coast the next few days, bringing more torrential rainfall to the flooded Houston metro area, piling onto record-breaking, catastrophic flooding.
Every so often, the worst-case scenario comes to pass. As of Sunday afternoon, the remnants of Hurricane Harvey seem likely to exceed the worst forecasts that preceded the storm.
The sprawling and soaked Houston metro area and other deluged towns in southeast Texas braced for devastating floods and pummeling rainfall on Sunday as Tropical Storm Harvey stalled over land and drenched dogged searchers and anxious residents.
The toll that Harvey is taking on Texas is staggering. Already, it has dumped 11 trillion gallons of water over the state, says Ryan Maue with WeatherBell, a weather analytics company. And by the time it dissipates, the state will have seen 25 trillion gallons of rain, he predicts.
Oil markets were roiled on Monday after Tropical Storm Harvey wreaked havoc along the U.S. Gulf Coast over the weekend, crippling Houston and its port, and knocking out numerous refineries as well as some crude production.
The destruction that heavy rain and floods from Hurricane Harvey could inflict on Texas would add to the pile of debt owed by a federal flood insurance program that is due to expire in September, advocacy groups said.
Hurricane Harvey’s second act across southern Texas is turning into an economic catastrophe -- with damages likely to stretch into tens of billions of dollars and an unusually large share of victims lacking adequate insurance, according to early estimates.
Gov. Rick Scott dispatched 25 Florida Fish and Wildlife Conversation Commission officers, two Mobile Command Centers, eight shallow draft vessels and four patrol boats to Houston, according to a news release.
Hurricane Harvey is expected to hit the middle Texas coast late Friday night as the most intense such storm to strike the U.S. since Hurricane Wilma in 2005. But its winds, which could rank as a Category 3 or 4 storm on the Saffir Simpson Scale, are not the biggest threat Texans face.
Harvey intensified into a Category 2 hurricane early Friday and steered for the Texas coast with the potential for up to 3 feet of rain, 125 mph winds and 12-foot storm surges in what could be the fiercest hurricane to hit the United States in almost a dozen years.
A brief-but-haunting video released by NASA on Thursday night shows Hurricane Harvey’s powerful churn toward Central Texas, where the slow-moving storm is expected to throttle coastal communities with high winds and up to 25 inches of rain.
When Hurricane Harvey rips through the coastal Texas landscape, it could leave behind nearly $40 billion worth of damage, according to a new estimate from CoreLogic.
There’s a good reason why Mashable’s Andrew Freedman dubbed Hurricane Harvey—now barreling toward Texas and Louisiana—“the meteorological equivalent of a White Walker from Game of Thrones.” The storm was alive, but then appeared to die as it hovered over the Yucatan Peninsula earlier this week.
In preparation for a surge of claims following Hurricane Harvey, insurance companies are staging employees throughout Texas. The National Hurricane Center said that some portions of the state could see as much as 35 inches of rain.
Hurricane and Tropical Storm Warnings are posted along the coast of Texas as Harvey makes its way across the Gulf of Mexico, promising to drop biblical amounts of rain on parts of the state. The storm, which is expected to strengthen to a category 3 hurricane by the time it makes landfall late Friday or early Saturday, will be the first major hurricane to strike the United States in 12 years and will likely cause devastating flooding from rain and storm surge.
