When Hurricane Beryl entered the Gulf of Mexico, the city of Houston had little reason to believe it was about to take its first direct hit from a tropical cyclone in decades.
Initial forecasts predicted the storm would make landfall in northern Mexico, hundreds of miles away. Instead it veered sharply north and hit an unfortunate bullseye. Its center passed just west of Houston, dragging the hurricane’s violent eastern edge directly over the city’s core.
The category 1 storm flooded hundreds of homes and knocked out power for millions of people in the muggy former swamplands of the nation’s energy capital, throwing the city into days of chaos and highlighting the vulnerability of the fourth-largest U.S. city.
