Deadly hurricane hits Texas coast

? Hurricane Claudette sloshed ashore on the Texas Gulf Coast on Tuesday, peeling off roofs, knocking out power and flooding low-lying areas before its whistling wind began to let up.

At least two deaths were reported, a 33-year-old woman in Victoria, 40 miles inland from Port O’Connor, and a 13-year-old boy in Jourdanton, near San Antonio, who were hit by falling trees or limbs, authorities said. The Coast Guard had to rescue two men whose 92-foot shrimp boat sank.

Claudette became a hurricane, the first of the Atlantic storm season, early Tuesday when sustained wind around its eye reached 74 mph. By the time it hit land at midday, its sustained wind topped 80 mph and gusts of 88 mph were recorded at Wadsworth, site of the South Texas Project nuclear power plant.

“The windows are flexing, it’s howling and I’m wondering what … I’m doing here,” Ed Conaway said at the power plant, just north of where Claudette’s eye made landfall.

An Air Force hurricane hunter plane recorded wind of almost 98 mph northeast of the storm’s eye just before landfall, according to the National Hurricane Center, which estimated sustained wind likely was 86 mph when Claudette crossed the coastline.

Claudette began losing its punch after reaching Texas and was downgraded late Tuesday afternoon to a tropical storm, with sustained wind down to 70 mph.

At 9 p.m. CDT, the storm’s center was about 70 miles south-southwest of San Antonio. All weather warnings for the Texas coast were discontinued.

Gov. Rick Perry signed a disaster relief proclamation to help speed state and federal response and authorized the National Guard to help with rescue and recovery.

During the storm, Gary Lawrence watched as the wind toppled the roof over gasoline pumps at the Shell Food Mart where he works just east of Carancahua Bay, between Palacios and Port Lavaca.

“It was real gradual then it went down,” he said, speaking through the store’s broken front window. “Then a little while later something else flew in and broke the window.”

Gary Ragusin pulls one of his posters out of the wreckage of his Port O'Conner, Texas, home. Hurricane Claudette passed through Port O'Conner and much of the Texas coast Tuesday, but it was downgraded later in the day to a tropical storm, with sustained wind down to 70 mph.

Palacios, a fishing community of 4,500 bordered by rice fields and grazing pastures, was without power Tuesday. The roof at the municipal airport was damaged and a shed covering golf carts at a golf course blew apart, some of its sheet metal wrapping around a palm tree.

At Bayfront RV Park, on the shore of Matagorda Bay, three trailers were flattened and two others were overturned. Nobody was inside them, said Jack Linney, who was securing his boat nearby.

“We’ve got a lot of cleanup to do,” Matagorda County Judge Greg Westmoreland said.

Claudette developed a week ago in the Caribbean, brushing Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula before entering the Gulf of Mexico.