Share this story

(NYT) — Evacuation orders and hurricane warnings and watches were posted for parts of Texas on Saturday as Tropical Storm Beryl approached the state’s shores on the Gulf of Mexico after flattening islands and killing at least 12 people in Grenada, Jamaica and Venezuela days earlier.

The storm made landfall Friday in Mexico as a Category 2 hurricane. Beryl, which then weakened to a tropical storm, was expected to become a hurricane before reaching the Texas coast as soon as late Sunday.

ADVERTISING

Hurricane warnings were in effect for the Texas coast, from Baffin Bay, about 40 miles south of Corpus Christi, north toward Sargent, about 160 miles up the shoreline from the bay.

On Saturday afternoon, the Office of Emergency Management for Refugio County, Texas, a shoreline area with a population of about 6,600, issued a mandatory evacuation order, and Port Aransas, a city about 20 miles east of Corpus Christi, issued a mandatory visitor evacuation.

Dan Patrick, who is serving as acting governor of Texas while Gov. Greg Abbott travels abroad, on Saturday added 81 counties to the state’s Hurricane Beryl Disaster Declaration, bringing the total number of counties under the declaration to 121.

The declaration, which enables state resources to assist in local preparation and recovery efforts, is commonly made after an extreme event but can be made if a disaster is imminent.

Forecasters predicted that Beryl would hit Mexico twice. It crossed the Yucatan Peninsula on Friday, and then, after traversing the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend, it was expected to reach the coast of the northern state of Tamaulipas, where a hurricane watch was in effect.

Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Saturday that when the hurricane makes landfall in Texas it could bring storm surge of up to 5 feet above ground level off the Gulf of Mexico in Matagorda Bay, where Matagorda County officials issued a voluntary evacuation order late Friday.

A sea wall built in 1903 would do little to protect Galveston Island from sea surge, Judge Mark Henry, Galveston County’s top executive, said Saturday.

“That’s the only protection at this moment, and it’s obviously not much,” he said. “We’re anticipating some potential coastal flooding, and there’s not a lot we can do to stop it or prepare for it, we just have to respond to it as it happens.”

Farther south, officials in the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi were distributing thousands of sandbags to help people prepare for potential flooding.

In Mexico, no injuries, deaths or major flooding had been reported as of Friday evening, Laura Velázquez Alzúa, Mexico’s coordinator of civil protection, said at a news conference.

The storm had dumped 6 to 10 inches of rain in Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan by early Friday, bringing wind gusts as high as 135 mph.

In Quintana Roo, power had been restored to most areas Saturday after outages affected 20% of the population.