Severe Storm Update

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:02:40]All right, y'all. We are back live. Thank you for bearing with us as storms move through the Coastal Bend. Currently, there is a severe thunderstorm warning until 1:15 for Rockport.

[00:04:58]There you go.

[00:04:58]>> All right, we're going to talk about the severe thunderstorm. And yeah, what a crazy Saturday, y'all. I'm chief meteorologist Carly Smith, and we are tracking this storm. We've been tracking it all morning. Meteorologist Hope Bolan got on well before the storms >> were moving in.

[00:05:16]>> We're gonna talk about the severe >> and so then the storm hit Corpus Christie and boom, the power at the station went out again and we still you can see where we have missing radar data, but we've got the radar back up.

[00:05:30]So, thank you for bearing with us.

[00:05:32]Honestly, probably a more entertaining Facebook Live when I got on my phone.

[00:05:36]Um, I hope you enjoyed that crazy behind the scenes that happens when things are going wrong. Um, I hope it was entertaining but also helpful. If it wasn't helpful, I apologize. I will say the comments were some of the most helpful things. Even though there was craziness going on all around me as as we lost power, y'all were sending in storm reports and that was the most helpful thing and I want to let you know that I truly truly appreciate that. Um, it does look like we just lost radar again. I don't really know why. Maybe the radar is just being slow, but um, it could just be the Corpus radar because it looks like all of our other radars are still moving.

[00:06:21]Um, lots of fun. But here is a look at the last 30 minutes. I think that we've had internet roughly about that much time. And you can see the storm is at its worst right now in the Rockport area. So let's end that. That's storm relative velocity. Here is actual velocity. There were reports of 70 mph winds within this storm. I do have wind speeds I can pull up. That's the severe thunderstorm warning information. There is currently a severe thunderstorm warning until 1 or until let's see windshield watch warning. So there we go. The severe thunderstorm warning is currently until 1:15. Tree damage.

[00:07:04]Rockport has a lot of beautiful trees, but they do fall easily, especially since our soil is saturated. Uh damage is likely to mobile homes, roofs, outuildings, and so forth. uh Rockport, Portoanzis, Lamar, Bayside, Palm Harbor, Klegro, Holiday Beach, Copeno Village, and Fulton, all under the severe thunderstorm warning. But what I could tell you looking at this radar for anyone watching from the Rockport area, the worst of the wind is moving out. So, it is going this way towards Seadrift.

[00:07:31]Seadrift, you're going to be next.

[00:07:33]Pertoteranis, it is leaving you as well. Everything is moving to the northeast.

[00:07:42]So, right here we've got our severe thunderstorm warning that is moving in.

[00:07:50]Law enforcement did report trees that were down. They were reported in Portland. Uh so, the Portland area had trees down, power outages, and all of the above. Expect considerable tree damage um in that area. Rockport area still hitting you pretty hard, but moving out. Moving out. This is now moving toward the Ranis wildlife area.

[00:08:13]And if you know anyone that was camping or visiting in that area, please alert them. Sea drift, it's moving to you.

[00:08:20]It's on southern Rafiio County line as well. Here's a look at the current radar with all of the lightning. Lightning uh has been a big talker lately. It's been arguably causing more issues than even the wind. We've had 1,000 lightning strikes, over a thousand lightning strikes in the last 15 minutes and counting.

[00:08:42]And yeah, so the best news I've got for you is the storm is moving out, but it was pretty gnarly there for a second.

[00:08:50]And I hope everyone is safe. If you do have storm reports, please send them our way and we will try to feature them on the news coming up at 6 o'clock. I will be on at 6 o'clock. Meteorologist Hope Boland will be back at 10 p.m. and then I'll be back on First Edition tomorrow morning as we cover these storms together. Uh good news is let's take a look at futurecast. Uh and then we'll take a look at some of the video that we've seen.

[00:09:18]>> Holiday Beach, Seadrift, Oswell, all under the severe thunderstorm warning that was just updated by the National Weather Service. So here's futurecast.

[00:09:26]We're going to move it out. And so once these storms move out, we're pretty pretty chill until we possibly get into early Sunday morning. Some pop-up storms could be on the coast. Let's take a look at this futurecast as well, just to compare. Storms moving out now as we speak. So by 1:30, this is pretty accurate, too. They'll be all to our north. And then this this storm stabilized our atmosphere, which is good news because our severe weather risk was arguably going to be worse if we had pop-up storms in the afternoon because those would have hail. These storms had hail, but they were very small. And look, I think it stabilizes our atmosphere enough where Sunday is beautiful. So, if you were at the beach today and you want a nice beach day, go Sunday. Also, the storms are moving out.

[00:10:12]You can return to the beach. But please, please, please, if you left tarps or canopies behind, try to find them. Try to clean them up. Try to throw them away properly because that is a horrible, horrible thing to do is is to leave that behind um for somebody else to pick up.

[00:10:29]I know it's chaotic in the moment, but if you can go back, I'm sure everyone will appreciate it. So, let's go over to uh these are are your rainfall reports right now. So you can see some of the heaviest rain actually fell in Kennedy County. So Kennedy County is where we saw some of the heaviest rain and um the mouse is not working on my end.

[00:11:08]Okay. Uh so this is our rainfall. You can see the storms moving through. We're on the back end. A lot of the heavy rain is on top of what fell in Kennedy County yesterday as well. So, it's really added up quickly. But now, I've got a director behind the scenes, and I will have him uh pull up some video of the storms as they were moving through. What part of town was this?

[00:11:29]>> This is as the storms were moving through across town. You can see that would be a nightmare to That was a beautiful lightning strike. That would be a nightmare to be on the road at that time. Look at that lightning strike.

[00:11:43]That's why we have power issues and things like that. Lightning striking and causing all kinds of issues. But this is cloud to ground lightning. That is some of the worst lightning that you can deal with. Um but that is awesome video. You can see all the brake lights coming on as well. But um yeah, driving in the rain, a couple of important things to remember, you know, is to always slow down, keep extra distance between you and the car ahead of you. Try your best to keep, you know, the steering wheel as straight as possible because uh you don't want to be changing lanes all dramatically as you're driving in the rain and you want to do so as safe as possible. But yeah, that visibility dropping very dramatically there uh as as our our photographer was driving through the storms um people going very slow which is good but it can be very very dangerous. Now here is next uh the Portoanis our coastal parks beach camera after the storm. So, if you're watching the live stream before our power went out, um Porter Ranzis was looking very clean. There were people all out on the beach and the parking lot, it wasn't full, but there were a lot of cars. Now, the beach is cleared out and we are seeing still one car there, but conditions are going to start to improve. Yes, you see water there on the beach, but the storms are moving out of Porto Ranzis now and so that will help conditions really start to improve here shortly. and the wind already starting to look a little bit lighter.

[00:13:15]But let's go back to Max and uh then we can take a look. Actually, there's one more thing, Matt. If you'll scroll all the way down, um there's an a outage maps. That one is tides. Go up a little bit. Uh there it is. And so, um for some reason it pops up in in West Texas. You'll have to um I usually control it in the V-Mix software. Yeah. Yeah. And then if you zoom in, you can kind of see all the power outages we're dealing with here where it looks like Aranis County has some of the worst. Rafiio County. Um, so Rockport area, Portan, not Porto Ranis, but Aranis County, north of Rockport is where some of the most power outages are. There's Portland has a thousand plus, there were reports of trees down in the Portland area. Matt, if you'll go over on the left side where it says view by location, you can then just see the county view and that just makes it a little bit more organized, um, per se. So you see Newasis County has roughly 2,000 to 10,000 people without power. Uh San Patricio County has 1,00 to 2500 people without power with the Portland area being where most of that is concentrated. And then you have 1,00 1 to 10,000 people without power in our surrounding counties. So Newasis County and San Patricio County along the coast.

[00:14:49]So Portland, Aranis Pass, and so forth.

[00:14:51]That's where some of the worst power hits went. Um, we also have Drive Texas.

[00:15:00]And if you scroll down, yeah, and then zoom in to the Coastal Bend, then there you're going to see those blue dots, those are indicating heavy rainfall fell in the area and there may be some flooding. Uh, so street flooding. I will say Cross Town, maybe not that part, but Padre Island where I believe it turns into technically North Padre Island Drive, um, where you're north of Cross Town, that area does have roadways that go underground and not underground like a tunnel, but like you're below ground level where the bridge is going over you. And so that area can have some flooding issues.

[00:15:41]where the new bridge was built during the construction. There were there were flooding issues in that area pretty often. But these are just areas that Drive Texas is showing flooding as possible. If you on the right side in the bar, if you scroll down, um if it will let you if it will >> maybe is there a rolly bar on that mouse?

[00:16:10]Oh, it's not doing anything. Um, the cameras. Oh, cameras and traffic at the bottom.

[00:16:22]Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If we just click some of those cameras, um, the rain is moving out, but you'll see how soggy the roads are. Traffic seems to be flowing pretty smoothly, but lots of spray coming off vehicles uh now as we speak. But let's go back to radar and and I'm going to switch back over to my Mac computer. And so right now on the radar you do see the storms moving out of the area. That was our radar. That was from yesterday. That was our radar estimated rainfall totals. We So we'll reset. We'll give one more update because the storms are now moving out of the coastal bin. Seadrift and Port Lvaka are next on the map for getting some of the strongest winds. There is a severe thunderstorm warning for Aranis County until 200 p.m. Uh but the worst of the winds, let's take a look at those. The worst of the winds are now north or northeast of Rockport. And so that's going to be the rural part of Aranis County where the wildlife refuge center is and Copeno Bay. Okay, here are my urgent reports.

[00:17:34]Send a message, tag anyone uh in the Seadrift area, but also Madagorta Bay.

[00:17:40]That is a very popular fishing bay. It is Memorial Day weekend. If you know anyone in the in the San Antonio Bay, the strong winds already arriving, but if you know anyone that happens to be in Madagorta Bay, this is headed that way within the next hour or so. So, they still have time to take their boat to shore, get it back on land, and be safe.

[00:18:02]Whereas, you know, San Antonio Bay, it's already arriving. But Madagorta Bay, if you know anyone fishing in that area, the storm is tracking that way. We can put a storm track on it. And this will be the last thing I do before I end this live update. But this storm is moving 40 miles an hour to the northeast.

[00:18:21]And I'll put it where I see the strongest wind.

[00:18:34]>> And so this gives you an idea of when it's approaching Madagorta Bay. So you see Palashes on the back side of the bay. It'll get there by 2:21. It'll be closer to Magnolia Beach and Olivia and uh the club Elcampo Club community there around 2:00, 1:50 to 2:00. Sea drift, it's going to be there around 128. So, in about 10 minutes, your wind is really going to pick up. But that, I believe, is going to do it for this live update as now the worst of the wind is moving out of the coastal bin area. I hope everyone stayed safe. Please keep sending in your storm reports. Here's one more look at um we're going to take one last look at the beach camera that is at the white cap entrance uh there on the screen. It does look like people are returning to the beach. Uh and tents have been reput up. Do you see any tents on the ground like just destroyed?

[00:19:31]>> None there.

[00:19:32]>> And tents I mean canopies. But um conditions are soggy on the beach obviously. I did see some down canopies right on the left side, I think, of that view. Um, so again, it's always best to if you have to get out fast, if you can go back and pick up your canopy, that would be the best thing to do. But I know storms can get crazy. But yeah, really soggy conditions. Drainage ditches are full there on Padre Island.

[00:20:01]But um, overall, we have no flood warnings at this time. it. We have one severe thunderstorm warning that is moving out of Aranzis County. And I think that's going to do it for this live update. So, I am going to end it.

[00:20:15]Thank you for bearing with us through all the craziness and the power outages and the internet outages. And um we will be back with more updates tonight at 6 o'clock. Please send in your damage reports uh as well. We may send a reporter out. Let us know if you're comfortable with that, too. Goodbye, y'all.