Texas braced for ‘catastrophic’ hurricane flooding
Texas was braced for life-threatening storm surges on Saturday, after Hurricane Harvey made landfall, battering the coast with winds of up to 130 miles an hour. State governor Greg Abbott warned of “a very major disaster” and the US National Hurricane Center forecast “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding”.

Harvey hit the coast between Port Aransas and Port O’Connor, said the NHC, which has predicted up to 40 inches of rain in parts of the state by Wednesday, and storm surges of up to 13 feet. Some buildings in Rockport had collapsed or sustained significant damage. A high school, hotel, senior housing complex and other buildings in the town of 10,000 suffered structural damage, according to emergency officials and local media. Some were being used as shelters. Harvey later made a second landfall on the northeastern shore of Copano Bay, the NHC said. On Saturday morning Harvey gradually weakened and was downgraded by the NHC from category 4 to a category 2, still sustaining winds of 110mph. Officials in Texas said emergency crews could not get out in many places due to high winds in the hours after Harvey’s arrival.The area has one of the greatest concentrations of energy infrastructure in the US, with refineries, oil export terminals and pipelines likely to be affected by the storm. On Friday evening, several hours after Mr Abbott told a news conference that he had made a formal request for Donald Trump to declare the storm a major disaster, triggering additional federal funding and assistance, the president tweeted: “At the request of the Governor of Texas, I have signed the Disaster Proclamation, which unleashes the full force of government help!”
Mr Abbott warned that people between Corpus Christi and Houston - especially in low-lying areas - should strongly consider evacuation. “We can tell already at this stage: this is going to be a very major disaster,” he said. He added that the worst of the flooding could come days after the initial surge. “If you wait until you realise how serious this condition is, you are likely to find that it’s too late.”
The White House said the president continued to closely monitor the hurricane “and the preparedness and response efforts of state, local, and federal officials.” The NHC said: “A storm surge warning means there is a danger of life-threatening inundation, from rising water moving inland from the coastline, during the next 36 hours.”Oil companies have been evacuating some facilities, but the path of the storm is expected to pass to the west of most of the production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, and many remained in operation. ExxonMobil said it had shut its Hoover and Galveston 209 platforms, but its Baytown and Beaumont refineries were still running as normal. Royal Dutch Shell said it had shut its Perdido and Enchilada Salsa facilities, but other platforms were still in operation. BP said its four principal platforms in the gulf were still producing, although two were exporting at reduced rates because a connecting pipeline system had been shut down. Valero Energy, the largest independent refiner in the US, said its Corpus Christi and Three Rivers refineries had been “shut down in a safe, controlled manner”, but its other facilities along the gulf coast continued to operate. The storm is also likely to halt ships carrying merchandise into Houston, the eighth-largest container port in the US. Port officials closed container terminals at noon on Friday, while Union Pacific, a freight railroad, curtailed service along the Texas coast as it shunted cars to higher land.
As energy futures markets closed for the weekend, traders weighed the extent to which falling demand, from flooding and industry shutdowns, would offset the impact of lower fuel production. Nymex October West Texas Intermediate crude settled up 0.9% to $47.87 a barrel on Friday, while Nymex September gasoline rose 0.2% to $1.6666 a gallon, capping a 2.6 increase over the previous week. Nymex natural gas for September delivery at the Henry hub in Louisiana fell 1.9% on Friday to $2.892 per million British thermal units. Futures exchanges reopen on Sunday night, US time. Breanne Dougherty, a gas analyst at Société Générale, said: “Given that Hurricane Harvey is making landfall over the weekend, this could lead to a very active trading day on Monday.” She estimated that with power outages, business closures and less activity at liquefied natural gas export plant, gas demand could decline between 1.5bn-2bn cubic feet per day during the storm.
Source: Ed Crooks & Gregory Meyer for the Financial Times
