Claudette’s Surprising Force Jars Gulf Coast

Hurricane Claudette raked Texas on Tuesday with a ferocity that stunned coastal communities, damaging thousands of homes with 100-mph gusts, tossing boats into trees and forcing the helicopter rescue of two fishermen whose boat sank in the Gulf of Mexico.

The 300-mile-wide storm is the first hurricane to strike the United States in what is predicted to be an active Atlantic storm season. It descended about noon Tuesday at Matagorda Bay, Texas, a lazy stretch of the Gulf Coast where cow pastures meet fishing villages.

Hovering offshore, Claudette took a turn to the west, giving it time to blow through half a dozen tiny seaside communities, including this town of 4,500 people 110 miles northeast of Corpus Christi.

At least two deaths were reported, a 33-year-old woman in Victoria and a 13-year-old boy in Jourdanton, near San Antonio, who were both struck by falling tree limbs, authorities said. Federal and state officials said it was too early to form even a preliminary damage estimate.

In Austin, Gov. Rick Perry signed a proclamation speeding the arrival of state and federal aid and authorizing the National Guard to assist communities.

By nightfall, the skies were clear. The seagulls and crickets, eerily absent and silent all day, were back. Claudette had been downgraded to a tropical storm and was about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio on Tuesday night. The storm was expected to weaken quickly. But the damage was done.

In Galveston, large chunks of a pier were picked up and deposited on the main road to the mainland. In Surfside Beach, every home was destroyed or damaged to some degree, and dozens of people had to be rescued from rising water in trucks and swamp buggies. At Egret Island, eight-foot tidal swells reunited two Gulf bays that had been divided by a substantial strip of land and a causeway for as long as anyone can remember.

“They are one now,” said Matagorda County Judge Greg Westmoreland, who also serves as the county’s emergency management director.

And in tiny Matagorda, where one tin roof was lifted in the air and impaled on a towering tree, shrimper George Armstrong, 66, tried to guard his two boats while riding out the storm in his pickup truck. He ran home to get a cup of coffee about 2 p.m., and when he returned, one of his boats, the Lisa D, was in someone’s backyard.

“It’s bad,” he said as he stared at the boat, trying to devise a way to get it back in the water. “Everything’s bad. The whole town is bad.”

At Sabine Pass, near the Louisiana border, two fishermen heading out for the beginning of Texas’ shrimping season issued a mayday call early Tuesday and shot off two flares. Less than three hours later their boat sank, and the U.S. Coast Guard found the two men floating in the Gulf, wearing orange life jackets and covered with diesel fuel. The men were taken to a hospital and were expected to recover. Their two dogs drowned.

In Palacios, Jeannie Stahlecker, 51, was inside the Baptist camp where she works and lives, watching the storm gain power over the Gulf with her son Cody, 10.

“He was freaking out, and I just kept telling him to calm down. We got in the closet and did a lot of praying. A lot of praying,” she said Tuesday evening, standing amid scraps of lumber and palm trees that had been tossed about by the storm. “Then I smelled fresh lumber, like wood being sawed. I heard a big crack. I said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ We ran out, and my roof flew off. It’s just gone.”

Stahlecker’s housing unit at the camp was destroyed, along with much of the rest of the 13-building compound, including its tabernacle, which was reduced to a crumpled mass of corrugated metal and wood. The second floor of a dormitory, where 400 youth campers had been housed just a day earlier, was wiped away with what seemed surgical precision.

Stahlecker was among thousands of Gulf Coast residents who were caught off guard by Claudette’s strength.

Though sheriff’s deputies and volunteer firefighters went door to door advising coastal residents to leave, under Texas law they could not force people to evacuate their homes. Many stayed behind and came to regret that decision. Across the coast, officials had to rescue dozens of people, including a woman in labor and two people who were reportedly trapped inside the rubble of a collapsed home.

In Bay City, north of Palacios, officials swarmed over maps and weather reports in an effort to rescue one man in Sargent, another tiny coastal community. The man had called authorities several times to report that his floor had rotted away and water was beginning to seep inside. Still, the man said he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to leave his trailer home.

“Tell him this: It’s now or never,” Chief Sheriff’s Deputy R. Wayne Frieda told a dispatcher. “Either ride it out or come out with us now.”

A hurricane has not struck Texas since 1999, and that one, named Bret, landed in a largely unpopulated area near Brownsville. The recent lapse in large storms, along with the arrival of new residents unaccustomed to coping with harsh coastal weather, has bred a complacency, Frieda said.

“Every year we have one scare after another, but people’s ignorance never goes away,” he said. “People think it’s never going to happen. And then -- boom -- it does.”

Stahlecker readily acknowledged that she was unprepared for the storm.

“We were just going to ride it out,” she said, holding an armful of framed family photographs that she salvaged from the collapsed building. “I’ve been through plenty of storms here, and they just blow and blow and nothing happens. I figured this would be the same thing. Nobody was expecting this.”

Exhausted law enforcement officials worked late into the night Tuesday, though most had slept for just an hour or two the night before. All of them appeared to be safe, including two Matagorda County sheriff’s deputies whose squad cars’ rear windows were sucked out by the storm as they attempted to ride it out next to a school in Blessing.

The officers were not available for comment.

“They’re back out on patrol,” said Sheriff James D. Mitchell, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat perched on his head. “We put a little plastic over the windows and they went back to work.”

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Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.