WI Hurricane Irma hits Texas?

(If this is too current, please move it to Chat, moderators. BTW, I was hesitant to post this, given that Texas, IMO, suffered way too much from Hurricane Harvey last year.)

PoD: September 2017

Due to different hurricane patterns, Irma goes between Cuba and Florida and doesn't brush Cuba's northern coast. The good news is that it doesn't hit Florida. The bad news is that it hits the Texas coast. More specifically, it hits the Rio Grande Valley (for inspiration on Irma's path ITTL, here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Cuba–Brownsville_hurricane) as a strong Category 4 or weak Category 5 and is the size of Hurricane Ike.

Effects, anyone?
 
Wonder how much rain there head been in the Rio Grande basin and how high the river was. I've recently been reading in the construction trades periodicals about a major glitch in flood plain prediction. That is coastal flood zones are predicted two ways: 1. By rain upstream inducing flooding of the river in the coastal zone. 2. Wind driven surge across the coast and up the rivers. What had not been studied was the level of flooding when both occur simultaneously. The flood coming down the river basin hosts the storm surge coming up the estuary. The two momentarily dam each other building flood levels far higher than predicted by either situation alone. This is what happened in Houston recently, the opposing surges making the commonly used 100 year flood level irrelevant & deep underwater. At the highest crest areas the water approached the usually ignored 500 year flood level. Significant areas in the Houston region thought above flooding were badly damaged.
 
It won't have the same human impact as Ike, just because there are fewer people in the Brownsville area than in Houston (~1 M versus 7 M). Also, the worst quadrant of the storm would hit Kleberg and Kenedy counties, which have almost no population.

There would be considerable economic losses on South Padre Island (which is covered in expensive condos and tourist stuff, and gets completely overwashed.)
 
(If this is too current, please move it to Chat, moderators. BTW, I was hesitant to post this, given that Texas, IMO, suffered way too much from Hurricane Harvey last year.)

The bigger issue that I see is that this is a geologic POD, which would belong in ASB.

That said, my guess would be a lot less damage than OTL overall, simply due to the lesser population of South Texas compared to South Florida. Not to mention the generally higher elevation of the region compared to Florida means less inland flooding (aside from places near rivers).
 
It won't have the same human impact as Ike, just because there are fewer people in the Brownsville area than in Houston (~1 M versus 7 M). Also, the worst quadrant of the storm would hit Kleberg and Kenedy counties, which have almost no population.

There would be considerable economic losses on South Padre Island (which is covered in expensive condos and tourist stuff, and gets completely overwashed.)

Corpus would also have some wind, rain, and surge, IMO, and it would scare everyone who just experienced Harvey (and probably aggravate the damage in the Rockport-Aransas Pass-Port Aransas triangle)...
 
The original WI I had was WI Irma had followed the same path as Ike nine years earlier; the reason I didn't go through with this was because, IMO, Houston had suffered way more than enough IOTL with Harvey...

So, WI Irma follows Ike's path and makes landfall in the same area as Ike? (Talk about a double whammy for poor Houston-Galveston-Beaumont-Port Arthur, for one thing...)
 
The thing is that Harvey was actually a really weak hurricane. It came ashore as a cat 4 but it quickly weakened to a tropical storm. What was bad was the fact that it s l o w l y meandered across Texas, dumping an entire monsoon's worth of rain on a small, densely populated area. If Irma is going at the same speed that it did IRL, it will be a catastrophic hurricane, yes, but it won't be as bad as Harvey, especially if they luck out and people are still out of town when Irma comes. If you slow Irma down so it keeps dumping even more rain over Houston...
 
I think that with Irma, if it's a Category 4/5 and headed for Houston, the authorities will order mandatory evacuations, which would be a massive mess (remember what happened with Hurricane Rita in 2005; this is part of the reason why, with Harvey, local authorities of large cities like Corpus Christi and Houston were reluctant to order mandatory evacuations; Rockport, Aransas Pass, Port Aransas, et. al. were small towns)...
 
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