Texans Bracing for Flooding as Tropical Storm Soaks Gulf Coast

Tropical Storm Arlene, the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, soaked much of the Texas Gulf Coast with rain Saturday, but barely had enough wind to justify its title.

A tropical storm warning was posted for the Texas coast from Brownsville northeastward to Matagorda, and a coastal flood watch extended from Matagorda to Port Arthur at the Louisiana state line.

The storm was expected to push slowly toward the South Texas shore during the night. Arlene’s center was expected to land between Brownsville and Baffin Bay, which is about 25 miles south of Corpus Christi.

“It doesn’t look real potent,” said Richard Hagan, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service’s Brownsville office.

Arlene had been a tropical depression that soaked Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula with heavy rain for two days. But early Saturday, its maximum sustained wind speed reached 39 m.p.h., the threshold for giving it the title of tropical storm, said the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Fla.

During the afternoon, Arlene had wind blowing at a sustained speed of only 40 m.p.h.

Little wind damage was expected.

But flooding was possible as Arlene sent bands of showers and thunderstorms onshore, and the low-lying Rio Grande Valley and the Coastal Bend of Corpus Christi already have been rain-soaked for the past few weeks.

“There’s hardly a spot that doesn’t have standing water on it in the valley, or at least the ground is saturated,” Hagan said. “It wouldn’t take a whole lot of rain to begin to cause some flooding problems.”

Grain and cotton farmers, only a few weeks away from harvest, worried that standing water would hurt their best potential crops in years.