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Tropical Storm Hermine Comes Ashore in Northeastern Mexico Near Texas
Tropical Storm Hermine weakened as it advanced across southern and central Texas with heavy rain after making landfall in northeastern Mexico, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The storm was about 65 miles (104 kilometers) west- southwest of Austin at 4 p.m. local time, moving toward the north at 18 miles per hour, the center said in a website advisory.
“Hermine is expected to become a tropical depression tonight,” the agency said.
Work at coastal refineries went on as usual today, while Houston-based Continental Airlines Inc. reported flight delays and cancellations at regional airports.
The lack of major Gulf storms along with forecasts for mild weather sent natural gas futures lower for the third time in four days in New York. Natural gas for October delivery fell 8.7 cents, or 2.2 percent, to settle at $3.852 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Valero Energy Corp.’s Corpus Christi East and West refineries, with a combined capacity of 315,000 barrels a day, were unaffected by the storm, Bill Day, a company spokesman, said yesterday in an e-mail.
Citgo Petroleum Corp. said its Corpus Christi refinery was also unaffected. Katie Stavinoha, a spokeswoman for Flint Hills Resources LLC’s Corpus Christi refinery, declined to comment.
Winds Drop
The storm’s sustained winds dropped to 40 mph from near hurricane-force after it crossed the coast about 40 miles south of Brownsville late yesterday. It may bring as much as 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain from the middle Texas coast northward through central Texas, with isolated areas getting as much as a 10 inches.
“The heavy rainfall could cause life-threatening flash floods,” the center said. The rain is expected to spread into Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri over the next few days.
Continental today canceled about 30 departures by its Continental Express and Continental Connection commuter partners, along with “a couple” of main jet flights, said Mary Clark, a spokeswoman for the carrier. The flights were between Continental’s Houston hub and other cities affected by the storm.
Hurricane and storm watches for coastal areas of Texas and Mexico were dropped by midday.
Hermine, the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, made landfall near where Hurricane Alex came ashore from the Gulf of Mexico in June. Alex was the year’s first hurricane.
The hurricane center is also monitoring the remnants of Tropical Storm Gaston in the northern Leeward Islands. The agency says the system has just a 20 percent chance of re- forming into a tropical cyclone over the next 48 hours.
A low-pressure area about 300 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands has a 10 percent chance of cyclone formation, while a larger one between the Cape Verde Islands and the west coast of Africa is given 20 percent odds, the center said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Aaron Clark in New York at aclark27@bloomberg.net; Jeremy van Loon in Berlin at jvanloon@bloomberg.net.
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