Officials urge Texas coastal residents to evacuate, but some aren’t fazed
As Beryl barreled toward the Texas Gulf Coast on Sunday, oil workers fled drilling platforms, tourist sites hit by earlier storms closed their ferries and state officials urged people to leave low-lying coastal areas at risk.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick warned Sunday that Beryl would be a “deadly storm” bringing heavy rain, wind and flooding. He has issued disaster declarations for 121 counties in recent days.
“It’s a serious storm, and you have to take it seriously,” he said in a news conference Sunday. “You don’t want to be in six to twelve inches of rain. You don’t want to be in a flood.”
Mr. Patrick expressed concern that people were not paying enough attention to updates on Beryl — currently a tropical storm but expected to strengthen into a Category 1 hurricane — with thousands of vacationers on the coast for the long weekend. Traffic data on Sunday afternoon showed that roads were not clogged with people evacuating. “The maps are still green,” Mr. Patrick said. “We’re not seeing many people leaving.”
Many residents were undeterred by the storm and decided to stay, hoping to survive the wind and rain.
“The ones who left are already gone,” said Alysa Jarvis, vice president of a community group in Seadrift, a coastal town of 1,000. “But I’m staying.”
Ms Jarvis said she and other residents were paying close attention to which way the storm would go as it curled north, but she wanted to stay in her waterfront home so she could run the sump pump to prevent flooding.
The Sunday brunch rush was in full swing at Bubba’s Seafood, a Cajun-style seafood restaurant in Seadrift. But the restaurant planned to close early Sunday as staff kept a close eye on rainstorms that had begun to drench the coast. Tamra Flores, a manager at the restaurant, said she and her family had put their boats in storage and put away their patio furniture. But she had no plans to evacuate.
“We’re a very small community, so a lot of our customers are people from the city who don’t go anywhere,” she said.
In Aransas Pass, a small hamlet near Corpus Christi, a voluntary evacuation notice was issued Saturday, meaning residents were urged to leave but not required to. Paulette Alvizo, 32, saw a line of cars heading inland Saturday but decided not to join them. She filled up two tanks of gas at a closed gas station Sunday morning and said she was confident she had enough water and food to ride out the storm with her husband and four children.
“This isn’t our first storm,” she said. “We’re going to get through it.”
The scenes at big-box stores along the coast reflected both preparation and nonchalance. At a Walmart in Galveston, bottled water supplies ran low as people braced for possible power outages and boil-water notices. But at a Home Depot in Corpus Christi, many shoppers skipped the sandbags and water bottles and went instead for garden supplies and patio furniture.
On Galveston Island, Cesar Laiva, 53, a construction worker, gathered his usual hurricane-preparation supplies: plywood, sandbags and screws. Mr. Laiva, who has lived on the island for 30 years, called the situation “not that bad.”
Others secured their lawn furniture, took down their umbrellas, filled their generators with gasoline, covered their windows with sheets of plywood and waited to see how bad the storm would be.
Miranda Rodriguez contributed to the reporting from Corpus Christi, Texas.
