As Hurricane Harvey grows stronger, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott calls for evacuations

 CORPUS CHRISTI, Tex. — Hurricane Harvey, packing 110 mile-per-hour winds, is on track to be the strongest hurricane to strike the United States in 12 years and to deliver a devastating combination of storm surge, wind and flooding to South Texas.

The storm is expected to make landfall late Friday night or Saturday morning near this city of 320,000 and then stall for several days, inundating the Gulf Coast with what forecasters predict will be “catastrophic flooding.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday afternoon urged citizens to evacuate immediately from low-lying and coastal areas in the final hours before the storm comes ashore. People may think they can ride out the initial storm surge, he said, but “what you don’t know and what nobody else knows right now is the magnitude of flooding that will be coming.”

Abbott said he’d sent a request to President Trump to declare a major federal disaster in Texas.

Earlier in the day, William B. “Brock” Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, issued a blunt warning in an interview on MSNBC: “Let’s set the expectations: Texas is about to have a very significant disaster.”
People rush to buy plywood at Lowes in Corpus Christi, Tex., as Hurricane Harvey approaches on Friday. (Courtney Sacco/Corpus Christi Caller-Times/AP)

City officials here in Corpus Christi insisted they’re ready for the worst.

“Game on,” said Mayor Joe McComb at a news conference. “We’re looking forward to having a very good positive result from this storm. We’ll get through this, we’ll be better for it because the community has been pulling together.”

The first outer bands of Harvey reached the South Texas coast on Friday morning. At 2 p.m. EDT, Harvey was 85 miles east-southeast of this city. The National Hurricane Center reported that the storm could intensity further, and if it did, would be poised to be the first Category 3 hurricane to hit the United States since Wilma in 2005.

The storm is continuing to evolve, and observers at radar stations and in hurricane hunter airplanes reported Friday that Harvey had developed two concentric eyewalls in recent hours. As the core of the storm changes shape, the intensity of maximum winds could drop, but the wind field would expand in diameter.

[Complete coverage: Hurricane Harvey]

Already, several hundred miles of the Texas Gulf Coast are under hurricane and storm surge warnings. After battering the coast, Harvey is expected to stall for days and potentially drift back offshore, which would enable it to feed continuously off the hot Gulf waters and remain a tropical storm.

Forecasters warn that Harvey will likely deliver historic amounts of rain — some models show mind-boggling accumulations in feet rather than inches. Flooding is likely in and around Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city and the headquarters of the U.S. oil and gas industry.