Hurricane Harvey wreaks havoc in Texas

CORPUS CHRISTI, United States: Hurricane Harvey left a trail of devastation on Saturday after the most powerful storm to hit the US mainland in over a decade slammed into Texas, destroying homes, severing power supplies and forcing tens of thousands of residents to flee.

Harvey roared ashore late on Friday, first pummeling the town of Rockport as a category four hurricane, packing sustained winds of 130 miles per hour.

The category 4 storm weakened as it made landfall, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, and by 5am on Saturday morning Harvey had dropped to category 1 with sustaining winds of 90mph. But it had already deposited more than 9in (22.8cm) of rain and experts said its heaviest rainfall was yet to come.

A few hours later it made a second landfall just north of Rockport as a Category Three hurricane, with winds of 125 mph, the National Hurricane Centre said.

Over the next hours Harvey lost strength as it moved inland over south Texas and eventually dropped to a still-dangerous Category One storm, with winds of 75 miles per hour.

Although the NHC said Harvey was likely to become a tropical storm later in the day, experts said that a vast area of Texas would face potentially devastating floods over the coming days while some communities were hit by localised tornados.

Emergency services were struggling to make headway as rains continued to lash down while the coast guard was responding to May Day calls from tugboats caught out at sea.

President Donald Trump, aware of the damage to George W. Bush presidency’s for his tardy response to Hurricane Katrina, said he was closely monitoring the relief efforts and urged everyone to "Be Safe"!

"There’s widespread devastation. We had businesses and homes that are completely destroyed, and certainly a number of lives that have been disrupted significantly," said CJ Wax, the mayor of Rockport.

"We have cross-functional teams that are out trying to assess the damage and determine what is needed to begin the recovery process, but it is still tropical storm-force winds and blinding rain," he told MSNBC.

Rockport’s local airport was among the places to suffer major damage, with a light aircraft crushed by a building collapse. Homes were also burnt to the ground as power cables caught fire.