Alex petered out, but history shows what storms can do

Only a few hours before Hurricane Alex made landfall on Wednesday to make landfall, Guillermina Rebollo leaned over her shopping cart in a last-minute review of the items she might need.

But despite all the warnings, she said she wasn’t worried. Having lived through Hurricane Beulah in 1967, this storm seemed more hype than harm, she said.

“The media likes to scare people. This one won’t be anything big,” said Rebollo, who was shopping with her sister. “We are not scared. We just like to be prepared.”

Preparation is exactly the point, says Barry Goldsmith, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Brownsville.

“We are not going to hype up anything,” he says. “We do not want people to fear, we want them to be prepared and aware.”

Rebollo was somewhat right about Alex – there was not much destruction, although Brownsville did experience flooding. The hurricane made landfall farther south than expected, and the Rio Grande Valley didn’t get the brunt of the storm.

Still, Alex was only the “first ballgame of the season,” Goldsmith says. “This hurricane should serve as a wake-up call.”

Odds are up

Indeed, odds favor more hurricanes, he says. That’s because the right elements are at play. The water temperatures in the Caribbean, Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico are warmer and closer to what they usually would be in mid-July to August. La Niña also has created the low wind sheer necessary to spawn hurricanes, and current atmospheric patterns support their formation, Goldsmith explained.

Before the Atlantic hurricane season began, weather experts said they expected it to be a busy one. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in late May predicted as many as 23 named tropical storms, including up to seven major hurricanes. Three to seven of these could reach a Category 3 or higher, meaning they would bring sustained winds of at least 111 mph, according to the forecast.

Alex was the first June hurricane in the Atlantic since 1995, according to the Associated Press. While it was not uncommon for a storm to develop so early in the summer, it was unusual for it to move toward South Texas, said John Nielsen-Gammon, state climatologist at Texas A&M University.

“Usually when (storms form in June) they move to the north and northeast,” he said. It may not happen again for a decade, he said.

For Brownsville to be in the direct line of a hurricane at all is not common. Goldsmith says it has happened roughly every 40 years.

Looking back

Reviewing local hurricane history puts recent storms in perspective, he says.

"All hurricanes are bad – it is just a matter of which are ... worse," he says.

Since 1865, 63 hurricanes have struck the Texas coast, 12 of which have been major storms, according to the National Weather Service.

Two of the most memorable are Hurricane Beulah, which struck in 1967 just north of where the Rio Grande flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and Hurricane Dolly, which in 2008 made landfall near South Padre Island.

For longtime residents of the Rio Grande Valley and Deep South Texas, Beulah was the big one, affecting people from Cameron to Zapata County, according to the National Weather Service. The Brownsville Airport recorded hurricane-force winds for some eight hours straight, with a peak at 109 mph – before its measuring device was bent and became inoperable. One ship in port reported winds of 136 mph.

Across South Padre Island and into Port Isabel, Beulah’s storm surge reached 5 to 8 feet, according to the weather service. In Harlingen, some homes were flooded up to their rooftops.

Hurricane Dolly, on the other hand, caused more damage -- more than $1 billion worth, making it the fourth most destructive Texas storm on record in dollars and centers, according to the National Weather Service.

Frequent gusts with hurricane force pummeled an area stretching from South Padre Island through Laguna Vista and Port Isabel, Rio Hondo, Harlingen and San Benito.

Catalina Sanchez remembers losing electricity at her Los Fresnos home for about a week. Her food went bad and the sweltering heat was almost unbearable.

“No, (Hurricane Alex) was nothing,” she said.