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CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas: Hurricane Dolly slammed onto South Padre Island, Texas, near the Mexico border, on Wednesday, pounding the region with rain and powerful winds.
The storm crossed the island about 56 kilometres northeast of Brownsville, Texas, as a category two hurricane with higher sustained winds of 160 kilometres per hour, the National Hurricane Centre said.
But Dolly lost some punch as it interacted with the cooler land mass after leaving the Gulf of Mexico, downgrading to a category one storm with 150 kilometres per hour winds soon after making landfall.
"It's not going to be a picnic on Padre Island," NHC director Bill Read told CNN, referring to the long, narrow barrier island along the Texas coast that is dotted with resort communities.
As pounding rain and strong winds battered the US-Mexico coast, authorities worried whether levees could sustain the flood waters.
Bracing for as many as 38 centimetres of rain, residents boarded up windows and piled up sandbags and thousands fled for safer ground.
Texas Governor Rick Perry issued disaster declarations in 14 counties across the southern portion of the state, and hundreds of National Guard troops and other emergency crews were deployed in advance of the storm.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said federal authorities were helping with hurricane preparations.
"We've been identifying resources and pre-positioning supplies in case they are needed after the landfall," she told reporters in Washington.
As a category two storm on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale, Dolly has higher sustained winds of 160 kilometres per hour.
As the storm made landfall, the NHC warned that isolated tornadoes could hit South Texas and there could be "widespread flooding across portions of south Texas and northeast Mexico."
The hurricane warning applied to the coast of Texas from Brownsville to Corpus Christi and for the northeastern coast of Mexico from Rio San Fernando northward to the US border.
The first hurricane of the season in the gulf prompted some oil companies to evacuate personnel from their offshore rigs, but by Wednesday the storm looked set to bypass the major oil producing areas in the Gulf.
However, concerns were raised about the ability of levees to withstand the floodwaters, which could go as high as one metre in southern Texas's Cameron County, officials told the local Brownsville Herald.
"I ask that any residents that live near the levee in Cameron County to please move away from the river levees near the Rio Grande River. We believe those will be breached if the path continues," said Johnny Cavazos, emergency management coordinator for the county.
Authorities called for the evacuation of more than 23,000 people from coastal areas in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, Governor Eugenio Hernandez said.
"Coastal storm surge flooding of six to eight feet (1.8 to 2.4 metres) above normal tide levels along with large and dangerous battering waves can be expected near and to the north of where the centre makes landfall," the NHC said.
The NHC has forecast an especially active 2008 weather season, saying there could be up to nine hurricanes and 12 tropical storms in the Atlantic region. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through the end of November.
About 35 million people live in the most hurricane-prone US region, the southeastern coastline running from the states of North Carolina to Texas, according to the US Census Bureau. - AFP/de
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