Surprise! Hurricane Humberto Hits Texas

The third hurricane of this season struck the Texas Gulf of Mexico coastline early this morning after forming quickly offshore, bringing heavy rains and causing one death.

Hurricane Humberto made landfall shortly after midnight Central time, as a Category 1 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale with sustained winds close to 80 mph, near High Island, Texas.

The storm brought up to 15 inches of rainfall in some places, according to reports issued by the National Hurricane Center.

By this afternoon Humberto was downgraded to a tropical storm over Louisiana moving into Mississippi. The weather service warned of possible tornadoes spurned by the storm through Southern Louisiana.

Humberto was marked by its extremely rapid development into a major storm, becoming a hurricane just 12 hours after it was first reported as a tropical storm.

Risk Management Solutions catastrophe modeling firm issued a statement from Claire Souch, senior director of model management, saying that because Humberto formed within a few hours off the coast of Texas it did not have time to develop into a major storm.

While Humberto took a similar track as tropical storm Allison in 2001, it is not expected to cause as much rainfall as Allison, which stalled over Houston for three days of intense rain.

Steve Smith, senior vice president with Carvill ReAdvisory, said Humberto "intensified impressively fast" before making landfall, but wind damage is expected to be small and confined to the Port Arthur, Texas, region along with some flooding in Louisiana.

Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) issued a statement saying insurers have quickly dispatched catastrophe teams to the affected areas and that the major loss from the storm is expected to be from flooding.

One death in Texas was blamed on the storm after high winds blew down a carport, killing a man who was underneath. There were also numerous reports of power outages.

The National Hurricane Center is monitoring a tropical depression in the Atlantic, currently named Tropical Depression Eight, which is slowly heading west/northwest and is predicted to be in the vicinity of the Virgin Islands by Tuesday with tropical storm-level winds.