Tropical storm Beryl strengthened to again became a hurricane late on Sunday as it neared southern Texas, where its outer bands lashed the coast with rain and intensifying winds.
The hurricane was projected to come ashore early on Monday in the middle of the Texas coast around Matagorda Bay, an area about 100 miles (161km) south of Houston, but officials cautioned the path could still change.
The hurricane has sustained winds of 75mph (120km/h), according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami, and was moving north-west at 10mph (16km/h).
Beryl was already inundating parts of Texas as coastal residents boarded up windows, left beach towns under evacuation orders and prepared for the storm that has already cut a deadly path through parts of Mexico and the Caribbean.
Temperatures near the Texas coast are forecast at above 90F (32C) in the coming days, including heat indices as high as 108F (42C) on Sunday. Parts of eastern Texas were on flood watch ahead of the storm, which had maximum wind speeds of 60mph as of Sunday morning.
“Preparations should be rushed to completion in Texas,” the NHC posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday afternoon.
“One of the things that kind of trigger our concern a little bit, we’ve looked at all of the roads leaving the coast and the maps are still green,” said the Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who is serving as the state’s acting governor while governor Greg Abbott is traveling overseas. “So we don’t see many people leaving.”
Officials warned the storm would cause power outages and flooding and also expressed worry that not enough coastal residents and beach vacationers in Beryl’s path were heeding warnings to leave.
More than 120 counties were under disaster declaration on Sunday, following statements from Patrick that Beryl was a “serious threat to Texans”.
The US NHC has been issuing frequent updates as the storm approaches, after Hurricane Beryl hit the Caribbean causing devastation as the earliest category 5 hurricane to form in the Atlantic on record. The climate crisis continues to fuel hurricanes and an above average season is projected to be in store this summer.
“Anybody living within this storm surge watch area, if you live in the storm surge evacuation zone, please start making preparations in case you are asked to evacuate by local officials,” National Hurricane Center director Michael Brennan told the Houston Chronicle. “Get ready to potentially leave your home, especially in those barrier islands.”
On Sunday, the port of Corpus Christi was closed because of gale force winds expected and other ports along the Texas coast, principally serving the oil industry, also started to close or restrict vessel traffic.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has its launch site Starbase on South Padre island, said via a Nasa post on Instagram that cranes had lowered and Ship 31 had been rolled back to the production site in preparation for the storm’s arrival.
Over the past week, Beryl has smashed into the south-east Caribbean as a category 4 hurricane, killing 10, wrecking buildings and displacing hundreds of people before coming ashore again in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula as a category 2 hurricane, then moving north-west across excessively warm sea waters as a tropical storm.
Once Texas has been drenched, the storm is expected to disperse as a post-tropical cyclone, bringing rain and flooding to the US midwest and upper midwest.
“The fastest rate of intensification is likely to occur right before landfall, and the latest intensity forecast still shows Beryl becoming a hurricane again in 24 hours, with some additional intensification possible right up until landfall,” the hurricane center said.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), 109 tropical systems have made landfall in Texas since 1850. The most recent was Hurricane Nicholas, a category 1 hurricane, which killed two and resulted in $1bn in damage.
Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston area in 2017.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
