The Texas-Louisiana border area got its share of the tropical storms’ punches with 2007 declared as the ‘Hurricane Year‘. It was on Thursday, the shock-struck upper Texas coast about 30 miles (48 km) east of Galveston was left with one person killed, and more than 100,000 customers cut off from power supply – with the fast-forming Hurricane Humberto also forcing three refineries to shut down.
The intensity at which the tropical storm hit the land has left both the Texas-Louisiana border-dwellers and forecasters puzzled, with no tropical cyclone reaching this intensity at faster rate near landfall in the historical record!
The hurricane, predicted to hit land as a tropical storm, suddenly gained strength to form a powerful hurricane with a speed of 85-mile-per-hour (137-kph), making it the fastest on record.
Puzzled with the transformation, forecaster James Franklin at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said
It would be nice to know someday why this happened.
Never happening before, the storm went from 30 knots (35 mph/55 kph) to 75 knots (86 mph/138 kph) in just 18 hours!
Killing one, and leaving several shocked, the storm’s winds had fallen to 35 mph (55 kph) after crossing central Louisiana – flooding a number of highways heading eastward.
