Hundreds of thousands of people on the US Gulf Coast were urged to flee the path of Hurricane Harvey Friday as Texas and Louisiana braced for "catastrophic" flooding from the powerful category two storm barreling in to shore. Roaring towards land with winds whipping up to 110 miles (175 kilometers) an hour, the category two hurricane is predicted to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday as a much more powerful category three storm.
If National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecasts hold, Harvey would be the strongest storm to hit the US mainland in 12 years, packing winds of 130 miles per hour and creating the potential for "life-threatening and devastating" floods in an area that processes some seven million barrels of oil a day.
Local television footage showed supermarket aisles plucked bare, highways clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic, and long lines snaking outside gas stations as the country's top emergency official urged coastal dwellers to get to safety. "Texas is about to have a very significant disaster," Brock Long, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told CNN. "Their window to evacuate is rapidly coming to a close," he said.
Corpus Christi - a major oil refining center where the hurricane was projected to make landfall Saturday morning - has issued voluntary evacuation orders, while the evacuation was made mandatory in the nearby coastal hamlets of Port Arkansas and Arkansas Pass. "For anyone who has not already evacuated, please hurry to do so," the city of Portland, Texas warned on its website in capital letters.
Many residents were bent on sitting the storm out, however, like in Corpus Christi were people were seen packing sandbags to protect their homes from flooding. Officials in Houston, the biggest city in the path of the storm, canceled school classes through Monday although officials said they did not anticipate an evacuation at this stage.
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