The Houston area saw heavy rain for much of the afternoon Saturday and early Sunday morning, causing various high-water locations and impassable roads all over the greater Houston area.
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Floodwaters throughout Texas caused transportation delays, and the Houston Chronicle reported that emergency personnel responded to 29 weather-related rescues in the area. Another round of Texas flooding-with another several inches of rain-may be on the way later this week, just in time to create a soggy Halloween in the Lone Star State.
As expected we saw widespread rain across all of Southwest Louisiana today, but it was not as bad as it could have been.
Patricia made landfall Friday along Mexico’s Pacific Coast as a Category 5 storm.
Relentless showers soaking Texas began finally clearing Sunday as unsafe flood warnings expired and the remnants of Hurricane Patricia continued dissolving into a steady but manageable drizzle.
The San Antonio Fire Department chief says a man who was swept into a flooded drainage ditch amid drenching rains has been found safe. “For the most part, they heeded our warnings”, Sanchez said.
On Saturday, a Union Pacific freight train derailed before dawn Saturday near Corsicana, about 50 miles south of Dallas, because a creek overflowed and washed away the tracks, said Jeff DeGraff, a railroad spokesman.
Coastal tides briefly increased to 3-5ft above normal Sunday afternoon across portions of Cameron and Vermilion Parishes, but the water has receded a few thanks to mostly northeasterly winds through late Sunday afternoon. A voluntary evacuation was ordered for residents of the Bolivar Peninsula in Galveston County.
More than 20,000 were without power in the greater New Orleans area. Locomotives and rail cars were pushed on their sides, and a two-person crew was forced to swim to safety. As the Trinity River approached flood stage, a flood gate on nearby White Rock Lake opened to release water and keep it from overflowing.
About 100 flights were canceled on Saturday at Dallas/Fort Worth global Airport, one of the country’s busiest air hubs, according to tracking service FlightAware.
As the storms moved eastward early on Sunday, cities in the state’s flood-prone Gulf of Mexico region including Houston, the state’s second-most populous metropolitan area with 6.1 million people, braced for potential floods.
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Also, there were no reports of injuries from Mexico’s Jalisco state where Hurricane Patricia came ashore as the strongest storm ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.
