July 24, 2008	Thursday	Rajab 20, 1429

CORPUS CHRISTI (Texas), July 23: Hurricane Dolly slammed onto South Padre Island, Texas, near the Mexico border, on Wednesday as a powerful category two storm, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

At 1800 GMT, the eye of the storm crossed the island about 35 miles northeast of Brownsville, Texas, the centre said.

“It’s not going to be a picnic on Padre Island,” NHC director Bill Read told CNN, referring to the long, narrow barrier island along the Texas coast that is dotted with resort communities.

As pounding rain and strong winds battered the US-Mexico coast, authorities worried whether levees could sustain the flood waters.

Bracing for as many as 15 inches of rain, residents boarded up windows and piled up sandbags and thousands fled for safer ground.

Texas Governor Rick Perry issued disaster declarations in 14 counties across the southern portion of the state, and hundreds of National Guard troops and other emergency crews were deployed in advance of the storm.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said federal authorities were helping with hurricane preparations.

“We’ve been identifying resources and pre-positioning supplies in case they are needed after the landfall,” she told reporters in Washington.

As a category two storm on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale, Dolly has higher sustained winds of 160 kilometres per hour.

As the storm made landfall, the NHC warned that isolated tornadoes could hit South Texas and there could be “widespread flooding across portions of south Texas and northeast Mexico.” The hurricane warning applied to the coast of Texas from Brownsville to Corpus Christi and for the northeastern coast of Mexico from Rio San Fernando northward to the US border.

The first hurricane of the season in the gulf prompted some oil companies to evacuate personnel from their offshore rigs, but by early Wednesday the storm looked set to bypass the major oil producing areas in the Gulf.

However, concerns were raised about the ability of levees to withstand the floodwaters, which could go as high as three feet in southern Texas’s Cameron County, officials told the local Brownsville Herald.

“I ask that any residents that live near the levee in Cameron County to please move away from the river levees near the Rio Grande River.

We believe those will be breached if the path continues,” said Johnny Cavazos, emergency management coordinator for the county.—AFP