Chicago: Millions of people in the US Gulf Coast states of Texas and Louisiana braced for the arrival of Hurricane Harvey as it intensified to category two with winds whipping up to 165 kilometres an hour.
The US National Hurricane Centre (NHC) warned that Harvey was “dangerously approaching” the Texas Coast and creating a potential for “life-threatening and devastating” floods as it roared towards an area that processes some seven million barrels of oil a day.
The storm’s centre was due to make landfall late on Friday or early Saturday. Harvey was bearing northwest at 15 kilometres per hour as of 4:00 am central time (0900 GMT), but the NHC said the category one hurricane could hit land as a much more powerful category three, with winds of 209 kilometres per hour.
If forecasts hold, Harvey would be the strongest hurricane to hit the US mainland in 12 years. “For anyone who has not already evacuated, please hurry to do so,” the city of Portland, Texas declared on its website in capital letters.
The storm was threatening one-third of the US refining capacity, forcing several energy companies to take precautions and evacuate personnel from oil and gas platforms in the heart of the US “Refinery Row.”
One oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico was evacuated on Thursday, as well as 39 manned oil and natural gas production platforms, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
Those evacuations represented an estimated 9.5 per cent of oil production and 14.7 per cent of natural gas production in the Gulf, the Bureau said.
The storm was expected to dump as much as 35 inches of rain in some parts of Texas. Dangerous storm surges were also forecast to reach between six and 12 feet above ground level in the worst-hit regions.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued disaster declarations in 30 counties, saying the preemptive move would allow the state “to quickly deploy resources for the emergency response effort”.
Officials in Houston, the biggest city in the path of the storm, said they did not anticipate issuing evacuation orders, but expected heavy rainfall to last up to five days. City
schools cancelled classes through Monday.
“Houston will see close to 20 inches of rainfall,” officials said in a statement. “This is likely to cause dangerous flash flooding, and will cause area flooding throughout the entire Houston region.”
Corpus Christi — a major oil refining centre where the hurricane was projected to make landfall on Saturday morning — issued voluntary evacuation orders. The nearby coastal hamlets of Port Arkansas and Arkansas Pass both ordered mandatory evacuations.
A number of other municipalities in Texas also ordered evacuations.
In neighbouring Louisiana where the storm was forecast to hover for many days and could deluge flood-prone New Orleans, Governor John Bel Edwards said he spoke with the president who “offered his full support.”
“This is going to play out over the next week or so,” Edwards told a news conference, “which makes it particularly dangerous... because the longer it sits in one place the more rain that it will drop.”
Edwards issued an emergency declaration for his entire state, as hundreds of boats were made ready for potential rescues along with more than half a million sandbags to hold back flood waters.
In New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina in 2005 caused widespread flooding and killed more than 1,800 people, Mayor Mitch Landrieu told journalists that high-water rescue vehicles and boats were at the
ready.
“We just need to make sure that we’re prepared for heavy rain over the course of the next week,” Landrieu said, adding that there were no evacuations planned.
— AFP
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