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Blowing winds of up to 90 miles per hour, Hanna, the first hurricane of the season, made landfall on Padre Island late Saturday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The storm, which landed 15 miles north of Port Mansfield, is causing flooding along the coast and the energy provider for the region was reporting more than 40,000 electric outages on Saturday evening. The National Weather Service warned that the hurricane will continue to push across South Texas during the night, causing heavy rain in the area.

Less than an hour before hurricane Hanna’s landing, Gov. Greg Abbott called for residents not to forget the already existing threat of COVID-19 in the face of the natural disaster.

“Any hurricane is an enormous challenge,” Abbott said in a news conference on Saturday afternoon. “This challenge is complicated and made even more severe seeing that it is sweeping through an area that is the most challenged area in the state for COVID-19.”

Hanna was projected to directly impact a wide area of the Texas coast near Corpus Christi. Parts of the Rio Grande Valley are also expected to experience flooding. According to the National Weather Service in Corpus Christi, the hurricane should make landfall by early evening on Saturday, near Baffin Bay.

Abbott announced that the emergency response will include 17 COVID-19 mobile testing teams focused on shelters and 100 medical personal provided by the Texas National Guard. For people that leave the area, the American Red Cross will be providing hotel vouchers in San Antonio’s Freeman Coliseum. The governor also issued a disaster declaration for 32 counties and a federal emergency disaster declaration request.

“We will be responding in the way that we typically respond to hurricanes, but on top of that we will respond to the COVID challenges,” Abbott said.

One of those challenges could be how to handle an emergency in COVID-19 hot spots, such as nursing homes.

“We worked very close with all of the nursing homes through the testing and the cleaning. We know exactly where they are, how many residents they have,” said Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd. “If we need to evacuate a nursing home at this point, we still have all the resources that we’ve had in every hurricane season to do that. The difference will be that we will be wearing more P.P.E. than we’ve had in the past.”

The National Hurricane Center previously issued a hurricane warning for a section of the Texas coast from Port Mansfield to Mesquite Bay — an area that includes Corpus Christi Bay, Aransas Bay and Padre Island.

The agency also issued a warning of storm surge for a wider area, including the coast from Port Mansfield to Sargent. Looking to assist, Abbott had already dispatched emergency resources to the Coastal Bend region and to the Rio Grande Valley, where the governor is simultaneously sending more than 1,000 medical personnel to help fight the novel coronavirus, which has devastated South Texas.

Source:texastribune.org/