One Dead as Tropical Depression Bill Batters Texas

Though Tropical Storm Bill has been downgraded to a tropical depression, as it moves across Texas its heavy rains are flooding streets and have left at least one person dead in the state where severe weather killed about 30 people in late May.

There have been scores of traffic accidents related to Bill, the second named tropical storm of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season, which came ashore near the sport-fishing town of Matagorda on June 16 and then took a path into central Texas.

The heavy rains could cause rivers already swollen from torrential rains in late May to spill over their banks again.

A 62-year-old woman died on Wednesday when she lost control of her car on a rain-soaked highway near the central town of West, a state trooper said.

The storm is expected to bring sustained winds of near 35 mph (56 kph). Rainfall is expected to be 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 cms) over eastern Texas and eastern Oklahoma and 3 to 6 inches over western Arkansas and southern Missouri. Some areas could see as much as 12 inches (30 cms), the National Hurricane Center said.

“These rains may produce life-threatening flash floods,” it said.

Nearly 160 flights were canceled at airports in Dallas and Houston, some of the nation’s busiest, as of 10 a.m. CDT, tracking service FlightAware.com said. Houston had nearly a dozen road closures caused by high water.

The storm has prompted the National Weather Service to issue a flash flood watch for an area from the Texas coast into Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois, affecting more than 20 million people.

“It’s not fun taking your dogs out to pee during a tropical storm,” said Dallas resident Christal Neumann. “I had to coax them out the door with an umbrella.”

In Austin, Dallas and Houston, which were hit by floods in May, the owners of stores in low-lying areas deployed sandbags.

In Sealy, about 50 miles (80 kms) west of Houston, police rescued people caught in rising water.

Voluntary evacuations were called for some flood-prone areas south of Houston.

Oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico and near the coast were not impacted by the storm. Refineries and a nuclear power plant, the South Texas Nuclear Generating Station in Bay City, also operated normally.

More than 45 percent of U.S. refining capacity and half of natural gas processing capacity sits along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

(Additional reporting by Lisa Maria Garza in Dallas, Terry Wade, Kristen Hays, Erwin Seba and Anna Driver in Houston; Editing by Bill Trott)