More than 2 million people were without power after Hurricane Beryl made landfall outside Houston as a category 1 storm at about 4am on Monday.
Beryl had been downgraded to a tropical storm later Monday morning.
Before making landfall in Texas, the storm had already carved a path through the Caribbean as a category 5 hurricane, where it killed 11 people. It continued on to Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula as a category 2, temporarily dropped in intensity to a tropical storm but again strengthened to a hurricane over the weekend.
The storm, which approached Texas with sustained winds of 75mph (120km/h), was moving north-west at 10mph and made landfall near Matagorda, a coastal town about 95 miles south of Houston, according to the US National Weather Service (NWS).
A tornado watch was in place for an area covering more than 7 million people, according to the Storm Prediction Center. The storm is expected to weaken to a tropical storm and then to a depression as it moves inland along eastern Texas, into the Mississippi Valley and then the Ohio Valley.
“Beryl’s moving inland but this is not the end of the story yet,” said Jack Beven, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center.
Besides power outages, among Beryl’s early impacts was the inundation of parts of coastal Texas, where residents had boarded up windows and beach towns were ordered to evacuate. There are already widespread power outages, according to CenterPoint Energy.
The police department in Rosenberg, Texas, about 50 miles inland, wrote on X that crews were conducting water rescues while navigating downed trees.
Texas officials said they were concerned that few people headed warnings to leave ahead of the storm’s arrival.
Storm surge continues even on the backside of hurricane #Beryl here at Sargent Beach, Texas 6:45am. Main road in and out is completely cut off by surge. pic.twitter.com/8sr0Eh6Qfy
— Bryce Shelton (@BryceShelton01) July 8, 2024
Dan Patrick, the state’s lieutenant governor, said: “One of the things that kind of triggers our concern a little bit, we’ve looked at all of the roads leaving the coast and the maps are still green. So we don’t see many people leaving.” Patrick is serving as the acting governor while Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, is traveling overseas.
More than 120 counties were under disaster declaration on Sunday after statements from Patrick that Beryl was a “serious threat to Texans”.
The storm and accompanying power outages come as temperatures around coastal Texas are forecast at above 90F (32C) in the coming days, including heat indices as high as 108F (42C) on Sunday.
The National Hurricane Center has issued frequent updates as the storm approached, after Beryl caused devastation in the Caribbean as the earliest category-5 hurricane to form in the Atlantic on record.
Scientists warned Beryl’s arrival and peak strength are ominous signs in what is expected to be a hyperactive hurricane season.
Extraordinarily hot sections of the Atlantic Ocean, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, helped supercharge Beryl from a tropical depression into a category 4 storm in just two days, before it strengthened further to a maximum category 5 event.
The Caribbean Sea, the region where Beryl has caused devastation, has already reached peak temperature about three months early, which is “absolutely crazy” according to Brian McNoldy, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.
Hotter water provides fuel for hurricanes, while extra moisture in the air helps unleash larger rain events, and both of these things are being caused by the climate crisis, resulting in fiercer, faster-developing storms. Last year was the hottest for the oceans, globally, ever recorded.
“Beryl would be pretty astounding to happen anyway, but for it to form in June is completely unprecedented,” McNoldy said. “It’s just remarkable to see sea temperatures this warm.”
A hurricane season stretching until November is expected to deliver eight to 13 hurricanes, much more than the usual seven, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“Beryl is a worrying omen for the rest of the season,” McNoldy said. “This won’t be the last of these storms.”
In Texas on Sunday, the port of Corpus Christi was closed because of expected gale-force winds. And other ports along the state’s coast, principally serving the oil industry, also started to close or restrict vessel traffic.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has a launch site on South Padre island, said via a Nasa post on YouTube that cranes had lowered and the Ship 31 rocket had been rolled back to the production site in preparation for the storm’s arrival.
According to NOAA, 109 tropical systems have made landfall in Texas since 1850. The most recent was Hurricane Nicholas, a category 1 hurricane, which killed two people and caused $1bn in damage.
Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston area in 2017.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
