By Juan Montoya
Hurricane Harvey veered north of the mouth of the Rio Grande late Thursday night and the Coastal Bend is bracing for the onslaught of what weather forecasters are saying might be a Category 3 hurricane packing winds of over 111 miles per hour.
Meanwhile, residents all along the Gulf Coast from Brownsville to Freeport are expecting the storm to stall and possibly return to the warm waters of the gulf after making landfall, and dump torrential rains on these cities, in some cases predicted between 20 to 30 inches.
Throughout Thursday and early Friday, residents continued to line up to collect sandbags distributed by the city and Cameron County preparing for the flooding that is expected as the storm weakens and strengthens off the coast.
And residents from Corpus Christi and Houston as well as other coastal cities packed the hurricane evacuation routes leading away from the coast.
Photographs taken from the International Space Station shows that Harvey developed quickly from a tropical storm into a full-fledged hurricane after it survived the trek across the Yucatan peninsula Wednesday and emerged into the Gulf of Mexico.
Since then, it has been fed by above-average warm waters and upper level winds that have allowed it to gather strength without deviating it to the north and away from South Texas.