High Island, Texas – Call it the instant hurricane.
Humberto, which grew faster than any storm on record from tropical depression to full-scale hurricane landfall, surprised the Texas-Louisiana coast early Thursday with 85-mph winds and heavy rain that knocked out power to more than 100,000 and left at least one person dead.
Meteorologists were at a loss to explain the rapid, 16-hour genesis of the first hurricane to hit the U.S. since 2005.
“Before Humberto developed, you looked at the satellite imagery the day before, and there was virtually nothing there. This really spun up out of thin air, very, very quickly,” said National Hurricane Center specialist James Franklin in Miami. “We’ve never had any tropical cyclone go from where Humberto was to where Humberto got.”
Surprising as Humberto was, forecasters said it may have been a blessing that it didn’t linger longer over warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, which could have given it time to develop into more than a minimal hurricane.
Texas coastal residents prepared for a tropical storm rainmaker that would quickly flood the ground already saturated from the wettest summer in 60 years. Although forecasts called for up to a foot of rain, Humberto produced no more than half that and generated much more wind. By late afternoon, it had weakened to tropical depression churning across the Deep South.
“We feel very fortunate and blessed it wasn’t worse,” said Beaumont resident Edward Petty, 50, who was clearing debris outside his home 50 miles northeast of High Island, near where the storm came ashore.
“It was amazing to go to sleep to a tropical storm and wake up to a hurricane,” he said. “What are you going to do? You couldn’t get up and drive away. You couldn’t run for it. You just have to hunker down.”
The only reported death was a man who died in southeastern Texas when the carport at his home collapsed, police said.
Humberto made landfall less than 50 miles from where Hurricane Rita did in 2005, and areas of southwest Louisiana not fully recovered from Rita were bracing for more misery.
“I’m in a FEMA trailer (because of Rita) and I’m on oxygen,” said Albertha Garrett, 70, who spent the night at a shelter in the Lake Charles Civic Center. “I had to come to the civic center just in case the lights would go out, because I’m alone and I’m handicapped.”
About 100,000 customers lost power in Beaumont and Port Arthur.
In Louisiana, the storm flooded highways and knocked out power to about 13,000 homes and businesses.
Along Port Arthur’s refinery row, three plants were idled until power was restored. Some of the plants could be off-line for several days, even after power is restored, because they must undergo the full restart process.
Only three other storms have grown from depression to hurricane in 18 hours – Blanche in 1969, Harvey in 1981 and Alberto in 1982 – but all of them were out at sea at the time, not about to crash ashore like Humberto.
Meanwhile, far off in the open ocean, Tropical Storm Ingrid became the ninth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season Thursday, the Hurricane Center said.
At 9 p.m. MDT, Ingrid’s center was about 840 miles east of the Lesser Antilles. The storm was moving toward the west- northwest at 6 mph and was expected to continue at that pace for the next 24 hours.
Maximum sustained winds were near 40 mph with higher gusts. A small increase in strength is possible today.
Tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 50 miles from the center.
