BEAUMONT, Texas — Humberto, the first hurricane to hit the U.S. in two years, sneaked up on south Texas and Louisiana overnight and crashed ashore Thursday with heavy rains and 85 mph winds, killing at least one person.
The system rapidly became a Category 1 hurricane, then weakened to a tropical storm by midmorning and bore into central Louisiana. Roads were flooded and power was knocked out, but the greatest concern was heavy rain falling in areas already inundated by a wet summer.
Humberto wasn’t even a tropical storm until Wednesday afternoon, strengthening from a tropical depression with 35 mph winds to a hurricane with 85 mph winds in just 18 hours, senior hurricane specialist James Franklin said at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
“To put this development in perspective — no tropical cyclone in the historical record has ever reached this intensity at a faster rate near landfall. It would be nice to know, someday, why this happened,” Franklin said.
Edward Petty, 50, was clearing debris in front of his Beaumont home and said he was surprised by the quick turn.
“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.”
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.
The Category 1 storm struck about 5 miles east of High Island, near the eastern tip of the Texas coast.
About 100,000 customers were without power in Beaumont and Port Arthur, Entergy Texas spokeswoman Debi Derrick said. In Louisiana, the storm flooded highways and knocked out power to about 13,000 homes and businesses.
One location blacked out in Texas was Jefferson County’s Emergency Operations Center in Beaumont, where winds reached 75 to 80 mph, said Michael White, the county’s assistant emergency management coordinator. Officials there tracked the storm with laptops.
Along Port Arthur’s refinery row, three plants run by Valero Energy Corp., Motiva and Total SA — with a combined capacity of 850,000 barrels of crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons a day — were idled until power was restored, spokesmen for the companies said. The plants themselves were not damaged, but gasoline futures rose slightly after the production problems were reported.
One man died in southeast Texas when the carport at his home collapsed on him, Bridge City Police Chief Steve Faircloth said. The town is between Port Arthur and Orange.
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