Hurricane Humberto soaks coastal Texas and Louisiana

In a surprise turn of weather events, we saw an unorganized area of showers and thunderstorms over the eastern Gulf of Mexico rapidly develop into a minimal hurricane during the last 48 hours. As the storm system moved west-northwest toward the southeastern Texas coast, Hurricane Humberto gained strength faster than any other tropical cyclone on record.

Humberto became a hurricane less than an hour before making landfall around 1:00 AM Central Daylight Time near High Island, Texas (northeast of Galveston) at its peak wind speed of 85 miles per hour. This is the first Atlantic Basin hurricane to make landfall in the United States since Hurricane Wilma did on October 23, 2005 at Cape Romano, Florida.

I was definitely inpressed with its rapid development. I keep a close eye on the weather regularly and when on-camera meteorologists at The Weather Channel reported on Humberto, I was thinking this came out of nowhere. Before I knew it, it was a tropical storm and when I went to bed, it was a hurricane. At first, I thought Houston would be seriously affected, but Humberto ended up staying to the southeast and making an impact on Galveston and points east. I still remember Hurricane Rita like it was just yesterday when it caused serious damage to cities such as Beaumont and Port Arthur in Texas as well as Lake Charles in southwestern Louisiana.

Humberto is now just barely a tropical depression with sustained winds of 35 miles per hour and is now well inland near Alexandria, Louisiana. Hopefully this rainmaker will move east over the drought-stricken areas of the southeastern United States, most notably Alabama.