Storm slams Texas coast with downpours, 60 mph winds

Tropical Storm Bill has made landfall on the Texas coast along Matagorda Island northeast of Corpus Christi.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami says the storm had maximum sustained winds of 60 mph Tuesday morning as it came ashore about 90 miles southwest of Houston.

Officials in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas are concerned the rain delivered by Bill could renew widespread flooding, which killed more than 30 people in the region last month.

Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon says May was the wettest month on record for Texas, with an average rainfall of nearly 9 inches.

Beverley Schoore's Houston neighborhood is still littered with debris from the last round. Her own home came within inches of being flooded when water reached the doorstep.

She's worried she won't be so lucky this time. "We're shell shocked and we're nervous because it could happen again," she told CBS News. "We just don't know."

The National Weather Service says average rainfall through Wednesday evening for portions of Texas will be 3 to 6 inches but there could be as much as 12 inches in some isolated areas.

"After landfall Tropical Storm Bill will weaken and cause wrap-around moisture that will continue to deliver rain to areas west and southwest of Houston throughout the afternoon," said Meteorologist Chita Johnson of CBS affiliate KHOU. "We could also be tracking strong storms with some isolated tornadoes."

Indeed, Meteorologist Stephen Corfidi with the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, said that tornadoes are possible along the storm's edge.

School districts in Galveston and much of the eastern part of the state have already canceled Tuesday's classes, reports CBS News correspondent Omar Villafranca.

The Houston Independent School District is closing schools and offices as a precaution. District officials say heavy rain could make driving dangerous on Tuesday afternoon. Schools and offices are expected to re-open at their regular times Wednesday.

According to projections by the National Weather Service, parts of North Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma could get up to 9 inches of rain over the next five days, and Missouri could get more than 7. After last month's historic rains and floods, the forecast was expected to complicate ongoing flood-containment efforts.

"If we get that much rain in that time, there's probably going to be a resurgence of flooding along these rivers," said Kurt Van Speybroeck, meteorologist for the weather service in Fort Worth.

Memorial Day weekend storms brought widespread flooding to Oklahoma and Texas, killing more than 30 people. At one point last month, 11 inches of rain fell in some parts of the Houston area, resulting in flooding that damaged thousands of homes and other structures and forced motorists to abandon at least 2,500 vehicles across Houston.

Lilian Price, whose Texas home of nearly 50 years got 18 inches of water in the flooding for the first time, told CBS News she and others are ready for more.

"When nature decides to do its thing, it does it," Price said. "You just sit there and look out the window and watch it."

An estimated 35 trillion gallons of rain fell on Texas in May, enough rain to create what researchers call a "brown ocean" -- soil so saturated with water that it may actually feed into the new storm system.

"So when we see these storms moving over this very wet soil, that environment is mimicking the ocean and providing ample moisture to perhaps either sustain that storm or perhaps even intensify it," said Dr. Marshall Shepherd with the University of Georgia.

More than 10 inches of rain fell over a 30-day period across nearly the entire central and eastern portions of Texas - from the Panhandle south to the Mexico border. Isolated areas received 15 to more than 20 inches.

Those wet conditions could help strengthen the storm, according to Marshall Shepherd, director of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia.

While tropical storms usually gather power from the warm waters of the ocean and then weaken once they move over land, NASA-funded research has shown some storms can actually strengthen over land by drawing from the evaporation of abundant soil moisture, Shepherd said. The phenomenon is known as the "brown ocean" effect.

"All the things a hurricane likes over the ocean is what we have over land right now," said Shepherd, one of the principals who conducted the research.

In:
• Oklahoma
• Texas