Coastal communities near Houston see storm surge, minor flooding from Hurricane Hanna

HOUSTON — Coastal communities in southeast Texas hundreds of miles from where Hurricane Hanna made landfall saw storm surge and minor flooding Saturday.

In Sargent, a small city in Matagorda County, crews dealt with ocean water rushing over construction areas and washing out some city roads on Saturday morning.

Matagorda County Precinct 6 Constable Bill Orton said roughly 12 homes had water on their bottom floors. Flooding is common in these seaside communities, where many people have vacation homes.

“I think it’s a little worse than what people expected,” Constable Orton said.

In Galveston, similar strong surf caused minor street flooding.

Austin native Rob Beckett and his family rented a home there for the weekend, and said they started hearing strong wind gusts overnight.

“It was a weird sound and it stayed that way for about five minutes just straight, just absolutely straight,” Beckett said. “We came down here as a group just to relax and have a good time, and it’s just real choppy. It’s real crazy.”

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Longtime Galveston residents Larry and Martha Lucas said they prepare for the storms and the side effects the Gulf Coast gets from other systems, even if those systems are hundreds of miles away.

Brazoria, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Matagorda, and Wharton counties are some of the 32 counties included in a disaster declaration that Governor Greg Abbott issued Saturday afternoon.

“The house is designed – it’s been through multiple hurricanes – and it was designed to move instead of break,” Martha Lucas said. “I’m glad we weren’t directly hit.”