Hurricane Harvey made landfall late Friday as a stronger-than-expected Category 4 storm.
At the request of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, President Donald Trump signed a presidential disaster declaration ahead of Harvey’s landfall.
Massive destruction took place in Texas cities including Rockport and Corpus Christi just after the hurricane made landfall.
It has since been downgraded to a Category 1 storm and is now moving slowly inland over south Texas.
The National Hurricane Center has warned of “catastrophic flooding” in the area over the next few days.
Hurricane Harvey slammed into the coast of Texas late Friday as a powerful Category 4 storm, exceeding previous projections and threatening “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding” across the state.
The eye of the storm made landfall at 10 p.m. local time over the northern end of San Jose Island, about 4 miles east of Rockport, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Tens of thousands of people fled the Gulf Coast as the National Weather Service in Corpus Christi warned that certain areas could be left “uninhabitable for weeks or months.”
In a tweet, the National Weather Service called the storm “about as fierce as they come!”
The National Hurricane Center upgraded the slow-moving, waterlogged storm to a Category 4 hurricane late Friday afternoon as its maximum sustained winds grew to 130 mph.
It was later downgraded to a Category 3 storm at around 1 a.m. as it made landfall for a second time at Copano Bay, before being further lowered to a Category 2 about one hour later and then a Category 1.
The hurricane is now moving slowly inland over south Texas, and the Center is warning of “catastrophic flooding” over the next few days. It is expected to become a tropical storm later Saturday, according to the National Weather Service, as it travels across the coast and up through Louisiana in coming days.
Multiple tornado and flash flood warnings are now in effect across much of south central Texas.
The National Weather Service warned that Category 4 storms can result in “catastrophic damage” to even well-built frame homes, while dwellings like mobile homes will almost certainly be destroyed.
Given the intensity of the winds ― Category 4 tops out at 156 mph ― large trees will also likely be snapped or uprooted.
The last Category 4 storm in the U.S. was Hurricane Charley, which caused $13 billion in damages when it made landfall in Florida in 2004.
In an intense livestream video, storm chaser Jeff Piotrowski said wind gusts at his location in Rockport reached 149 miles per hour Friday night and recorded debris flying past his car. At one point the roof of the building he was in appeared to collapse around him.
“To say this area is coming apart is an understatement,” he said. “It’s disintegrating.” As the storm moves inland, it was not the wind that was giving experts pause ― but the possibility of what the NHC called “life-threatening inundation.”
Harvey is projected to drop 15 to 25 inches of rain on the middle and upper Texas coast, with some areas likely to see as much as 35 inches by the middle of next week. That’s on top of coastal storm surge flooding of 6 to 12 feet, the NHC said.
“One of the things we know is that people tend to fixate on storm category,” Tricia Wachtendorf, director of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, told HuffPost in an email. “But these categories are based on wind speed.
“Residents sometimes think ‘Oh, I’ve been through higher category storms than that!’ but then are surprised by the storm surge. ... Some people further inland might think ‘we don’t live along the coast’ or ‘the storm has turned away from us’ without considering the huge impact of rains on their creeks and rivers, and rising flood waters can catch people by surprise.”
The city of Rockport suffered immense devastation after the storm made landfall Friday, with CBS reporting that people were trapped in various buildings, including a senior complex, and couldn’t be reached. A high school in Rockport reportedly sustained damage, as did a hotel. Rockport was one of several cities under a flash flood warning until the early hours of the morning.