South Padre Island, Texas – South Texas braced Wednesday for Tropical Storm Erin to bring torrential downpours to a state that already has had one of its rainiest summers on record.
As the storm’s outermost bands of rain touched the Texas coast, homeowners perused hardware stores in the Rio Grande Valley for supplies to board up their houses.
“They know the drill; they’re familiar with it,” said Ruben Dimas, assistant store manager at a Home Depot in Harlingen.
Gov. Rick Perry ordered emergency vehicles and personnel, including National Guard troops, to the Harlingen and Corpus Christi areas.
Out in the gulf, Shell Oil Co. evacuated 188 people from facilities in the storm’s path.
Erin formed late Tuesday as the fifth depression of the Atlantic hurricane season and was upgraded to a tropical storm Wednesday when its maximum sustained speed hit 40 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.
Erin’s center was expected to be very near the Texas coast this morning, the center said. Erin was probably too close to land to gain enough wind speed to become a hurricane, but the center said late Wednesday that it could strengthen slightly before landfall.
Isolated tornadoes also were possible along the middle Texas Gulf Coast today.
Meanwhile, a hurricane watch was issued late Wednesday for a portion of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean as Tropical Storm Dean gained strength. The watch, in effect for St. Lucia, Martinique, Guadeloupe and its dependencies, Saba and St. Eustatius, was issued by local governments.
Late Wednesday, Dean was about 625 miles east of Barbados and was expected to become a hurricane sometime today.
In the Pacific, Flossie was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm after sideswiping Hawaii’s Big Island with only intermittent rain and moderate winds.
It was a close call: Flossie approached the biggest and southernmost of the Hawaiian Islands with winds as high as 140 mph earlier in the week, making it a Category 4 storm.
