Tropical Storm Nicholas Brings Heavy Rain To Texas

Tropical storm Nicholas has been downgraded from a hurricane after making landfall on the Texas coast in the US, bringing heavy rain and the risk of life-threatening flooding.

The storm was upgraded to a hurricane after reaching land at 00:30 (05:30 GMT), but has now weakened. It comes just weeks after Hurricane Ida – the fifth strongest to ever hit the US mainland – killed dozens and left more than a million Louisiana residents without power.

According to PowerOutage.us., over 500,000 power outages have been reported in Texas while President Joe Biden declared an emergency in Louisiana.

Nicholas is carrying maximum sustained winds of 110km per hour according to weather officials, and is expected to hit the Texas coast and upper Louisiana with five to 10 inches of rain.

There could be rainfall of up to 20 inches across central to southern Louisiana, they said.

The US National Hurricane Centre said that Nicholas “has continued to move slowly inland and has weakened during the past few hours”.

But it warned that “life-threatening flash flooding impacts, especially in highly urbanised metropolitan areas, are possible”, and the National Weather Service called it a “life-threatening situation”.

Dozens of schools across the two states have been closed, and hundreds of flights have been cancelled or delayed at airports in the Texas cities of Corpus Christi and Houston.