Overnight storms brought the lightning and thunder but damage for residents in the Valley was minimal, officials said Tuesday.
Unofficial rain totals put parts of Brownsville at between 2 and 3 inches of rain, Harlingen between one and two inches and McAllen at between 1 and 1.36 inches, Mike Castillo, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Brownsville, said Tuesday afternoon.
The good news was there were no reports of flooding across the Valley. The not-so-good news was there were several power outages, the worst of which occurred in San Benito.
“Especially in San Benito, we had a major power outage,” said Tom Hushen, Cameron County Emergency Management Coordinator. “In fact, the school district shut down and didn’t open up today. I’m going to say it happened about 4:30 or 4 in the morning and it lasted all the way until about 9.
“We heard that it was going to take most of the morning to get it fixed,” he added. “Apparently something may have been hit by lightning at the AEP Center and the breakers all blew and they were turning them on slowly.”
By mid-afternoon, there were only about two dozen AEP Texas customers in the Valley still without power Tuesday. Magic Valley Electric Cooperative reported 56 customers in Cameron and Hidalgo counties were without electricity.
Problems persisted in some parts of San Benito into late morning, Hushen said.
“Probably at about 9 o’clock half the city came back on, and as I’m driving through right now, it’s still got Sam Houston (Boulevard) out,” Hushen said in an interview about 10 a.m.
The prospect of flooding was in the forecast overnight, but Hushen said that proved not to be a problem.
“We’ve been out since 5 in the morning and we haven’t seen any flooding,” he said.
What rainfall there was managed to spread itself out over several hours.
“It’s always best for us when it does that,” Hushen said. “When you get three inches in 30 minutes or an hour, then we have some major flooding.”
“That helped as far as any flooding, because, obviously, with it all coming down at once you have to deal with flooding issues,” agreed Castillo. “We did get quite a bit of rain but it didn’t all fall in 20 minutes, so that was very helpful.”
Some rain will continue to fall across the Valley Wednesday and then cease. In the meantime, the aftermath of the storm system will keep temperatures on the mild side.
“The rain is kind of helping temperatures to be a little bit cooler than normal, but we’ll probably be back to normal by the weekend,” Castillo said.
“We’ll start out in the lower 80s on Wednesday, then we’ll gradually warm to the mid to upper 80s for the rest of the week, and then we’ll be in the upper 80s near 90 by the weekend,” he added.
