For parts of southern and eastern Texas, it's raining again. Just like it did yesterday and just like it is forecast to do tomorrow. For residents accustomed to glaring sunshine and 90-degree heat at this time of year, the onslaught of stormy precipitation has come as a gloomy shock.
But more than just putting a major damper on early-summer plans, this week's soaking has been yet another gut punch of devastating weather in a year full of ruinous conditions for the Lone Star State.
For business owners trying to survive, the sense of helplessness has felt incessant.
"Really, it's all rolling over from 2020 even," Conner Fuller, 32, of Kirbyville, about two hours northeast of Houston and near the Louisiana border, told AccuWeather. "We had Hurricane Laura hit and then six weeks later Hurricane Delta hit, which was the grand opening for our cigar lounge. Then it's all kind of rolled together between tornadoes, floods, freezes, and everything else."
Fuller is the owner of numerous businesses, including the War Wagon Cigar Lounge and Fuller's Photography. His fully mobile cigar lounge travels around the state to events, festivals and parties.
Meanwhile, his photography business specializes in a variety of services that have all been dampened first by the coronavirus and then, more recently, by the onslaught of bad weather.
"Numbers were down because people weren’t sure if they should get out and have pictures taken in public," he said. Now that customers have begun booking sessions for high school graduations and family portraits again, he continued, "it’s been hard to find a day when it’s not raining. Or the ground is completely saturated where we can’t photograph."
For the cigar lounge, events like the Lumberton Food Truck Festival and other local trade days have been canceled due to the bad weather, forcing Fuller to readjust how he prepares for the leaner months of business.
While his businesses may not be directly dependent on the weather, the effects of the past year have set him back in a plethora of ways.
This upcoming Fourth of July, Fuller is hoping to unveil the grand opening of the Copper Bullet Lodge, a gun range he will be operating.
"But with the gun range, we can’t even prepare right now for [the] opening because the ground is so wet," he said. "We can’t move the earth to be able to build the berms," he said, referring to what are essentially man-made hills fashioned out of soil that can be eight to 12 feet in height and used to create shooting lanes. He said other safety precautions were being impacted by the effects of the ongoing wet weather.
Over the period from May 1 through June 3, some places in Texas have been inundated with three, four, even as much as nearly seven times the amount of rain that normally falls during that time-frame.
McAllen, Texas, for instance typically picks up 2.3 inches of rain over that period. This year, it's seen 14.7 inches. And Victoria, Texas, on average gets 5.6 inches during the May 1 through June 3 period. This year, a whopping 23.5 inches has come down there.
Fuller's businesses are certainly affected by weather impacts, but few livelihoods are as directly influenced by the weather as the crop farmers.
Dale Murden is the president of Texas Citrus Mutual, a trade group that represents the interests of citrus growers in the state. He told AccuWeather that the herky-jerky nature of recent weather has left growers reeling.
"We need the rains to go ahead and stop," he said during a phone call with AccuWeather. "A little rain is a good thing, but enough is enough," he declared. "This is too much. It's feast or famine around here, and we’ve had anything from around 10 inches to 20 inches down here in the valley in the last three weeks."
Murden is talking about the Rio Grande Valley, which is the southernmost point in Texas, situated along the border with Mexico. He specifically pointed to the plight of watermelon growers, who have been trying to harvest crops. In the past week, he drove down from central Texas to the valley and saw plenty of crops standing in pooled water.
"They won’t tolerate that much longer if it keeps up," he said. "It could be a different story by this time next week."
In February, Murden told AccuWeather that the state's devastating freeze arrived just as citrus farmers were halfway through harvesting grapefruit and just starting to harvest the late Valencia orange.
Coupled with the severe weather, drought and now flooding that has occurred since the freeze, Murden could only estimate how devastating this year could be for farmers.
"Strictly citrus speaking, several hundred million" dollars in revenue could be lost, he said. "If you add up all the valley agriculture down here, it’d be in the billions -- between fruits and vegetables and other crops that might be harmed," Murden continued.
"The weird thing about the weather is that we went from droughts to June floods to hurricanes to drought to freeze back to drought and now to May floods," he said with exhaustion, rattling off the list of weather woes Texans have had to put up with over the last year-and-a-half. "It’s been a wild 18-month ride."
All of this has struck ahead of hurricane season, a daunting dynamic for residents in the southeastern portion of the state like Fuller and Murden.
And more rain is on the way. A lot of it.
The persistent deluge could produce rainfall totals up to 2 feet in spots into next week. While that total is less than the extreme figures produced during 2017's Hurricane Harvey and Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019, the memories of horrendous hurricane seasons still linger.
For Fuller and his family, he knows their escape plan would be carried out in the company truck that is equipped with a tent, solar panels and all the food, water and sleeping arrangements necessary for a last-second getaway.
"It's a really weird place to be at, mentally, because you see a storm start coming and you start wondering, ‘Am I prepared enough? Are we going to ride it out? If we are, what are we going to do with no other services around?’" Fuller said.
A hard hurricane strike could prove catastrophic, particularly for citrus growers.
Although Murden said citrus growers have been aided by the recent rain, which has eased the drought, the freeze forced farmers to prune back citrus trees and clear out the deadwood. The scaled-down trees would leave them ill-equipped to withstand the powerful winds of a hurricane.
"They could be in a very fragile state to sustain 100-mph winds, that’d be a real concern," he said. "Plus, any fruit that we hope to have on the tree could fall, and that would kind of curtail your season."
Murden has been a Texan his entire life, continuing a stretch of five generations. He remembers back to Hurricane Beulah in 1967 as one of the most devastating storms of his life, leaving floodwaters and mosquitos everywhere.
In recent years, he recalls the last couple of Junes being particularly potent in terms of flooding devastation.
Also a lifelong Texas resident, Fuller said this stretch of tumultuous weather ranks among the strangest he has ever seen.
"We’re used to crazy weather down here; it's always been crazy. The old saying is that if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes," he joked. "But it definitely seems to have ramped up in how almost eclectic it's been, from 40 degrees in April up to 90 the next day," he marveled. "It’s just been more crazy than it’s been in the past."
But more than just putting a major damper on early-summer plans, this week's soaking has been yet another gut punch of devastating weather in a year full of ruinous conditions for the Lone Star State.
For business owners trying to survive, the sense of helplessness has felt incessant.
"Really, it's all rolling over from 2020 even," Conner Fuller, 32, of Kirbyville, about two hours northeast of Houston and near the Louisiana border, told AccuWeather. "We had Hurricane Laura hit and then six weeks later Hurricane Delta hit, which was the grand opening for our cigar lounge. Then it's all kind of rolled together between tornadoes, floods, freezes, and everything else."
Fuller is the owner of numerous businesses, including the War Wagon Cigar Lounge and Fuller's Photography. His fully mobile cigar lounge travels around the state to events, festivals and parties.
Meanwhile, his photography business specializes in a variety of services that have all been dampened first by the coronavirus and then, more recently, by the onslaught of bad weather.
"Numbers were down because people weren’t sure if they should get out and have pictures taken in public," he said. Now that customers have begun booking sessions for high school graduations and family portraits again, he continued, "it’s been hard to find a day when it’s not raining. Or the ground is completely saturated where we can’t photograph."
For the cigar lounge, events like the Lumberton Food Truck Festival and other local trade days have been canceled due to the bad weather, forcing Fuller to readjust how he prepares for the leaner months of business.
While his businesses may not be directly dependent on the weather, the effects of the past year have set him back in a plethora of ways.
This upcoming Fourth of July, Fuller is hoping to unveil the grand opening of the Copper Bullet Lodge, a gun range he will be operating.
"But with the gun range, we can’t even prepare right now for [the] opening because the ground is so wet," he said. "We can’t move the earth to be able to build the berms," he said, referring to what are essentially man-made hills fashioned out of soil that can be eight to 12 feet in height and used to create shooting lanes. He said other safety precautions were being impacted by the effects of the ongoing wet weather.
Over the period from May 1 through June 3, some places in Texas have been inundated with three, four, even as much as nearly seven times the amount of rain that normally falls during that time-frame.
McAllen, Texas, for instance typically picks up 2.3 inches of rain over that period. This year, it's seen 14.7 inches. And Victoria, Texas, on average gets 5.6 inches during the May 1 through June 3 period. This year, a whopping 23.5 inches has come down there.
Fuller's businesses are certainly affected by weather impacts, but few livelihoods are as directly influenced by the weather as the crop farmers.
Dale Murden is the president of Texas Citrus Mutual, a trade group that represents the interests of citrus growers in the state. He told AccuWeather that the herky-jerky nature of recent weather has left growers reeling.
"We need the rains to go ahead and stop," he said during a phone call with AccuWeather. "A little rain is a good thing, but enough is enough," he declared. "This is too much. It's feast or famine around here, and we’ve had anything from around 10 inches to 20 inches down here in the valley in the last three weeks."
Murden is talking about the Rio Grande Valley, which is the southernmost point in Texas, situated along the border with Mexico. He specifically pointed to the plight of watermelon growers, who have been trying to harvest crops. In the past week, he drove down from central Texas to the valley and saw plenty of crops standing in pooled water.
"They won’t tolerate that much longer if it keeps up," he said. "It could be a different story by this time next week."
In February, Murden told AccuWeather that the state's devastating freeze arrived just as citrus farmers were halfway through harvesting grapefruit and just starting to harvest the late Valencia orange.
Coupled with the severe weather, drought and now flooding that has occurred since the freeze, Murden could only estimate how devastating this year could be for farmers.
"Strictly citrus speaking, several hundred million" dollars in revenue could be lost, he said. "If you add up all the valley agriculture down here, it’d be in the billions -- between fruits and vegetables and other crops that might be harmed," Murden continued.
"The weird thing about the weather is that we went from droughts to June floods to hurricanes to drought to freeze back to drought and now to May floods," he said with exhaustion, rattling off the list of weather woes Texans have had to put up with over the last year-and-a-half. "It’s been a wild 18-month ride."
All of this has struck ahead of hurricane season, a daunting dynamic for residents in the southeastern portion of the state like Fuller and Murden.
And more rain is on the way. A lot of it.
The persistent deluge could produce rainfall totals up to 2 feet in spots into next week. While that total is less than the extreme figures produced during 2017's Hurricane Harvey and Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019, the memories of horrendous hurricane seasons still linger.
For Fuller and his family, he knows their escape plan would be carried out in the company truck that is equipped with a tent, solar panels and all the food, water and sleeping arrangements necessary for a last-second getaway.
"It's a really weird place to be at, mentally, because you see a storm start coming and you start wondering, ‘Am I prepared enough? Are we going to ride it out? If we are, what are we going to do with no other services around?’" Fuller said.
A hard hurricane strike could prove catastrophic, particularly for citrus growers.
Although Murden said citrus growers have been aided by the recent rain, which has eased the drought, the freeze forced farmers to prune back citrus trees and clear out the deadwood. The scaled-down trees would leave them ill-equipped to withstand the powerful winds of a hurricane.
"They could be in a very fragile state to sustain 100-mph winds, that’d be a real concern," he said. "Plus, any fruit that we hope to have on the tree could fall, and that would kind of curtail your season."
Murden has been a Texan his entire life, continuing a stretch of five generations. He remembers back to Hurricane Beulah in 1967 as one of the most devastating storms of his life, leaving floodwaters and mosquitos everywhere.
In recent years, he recalls the last couple of Junes being particularly potent in terms of flooding devastation.
Also a lifelong Texas resident, Fuller said this stretch of tumultuous weather ranks among the strangest he has ever seen.
"We’re used to crazy weather down here; it's always been crazy. The old saying is that if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes," he joked. "But it definitely seems to have ramped up in how almost eclectic it's been, from 40 degrees in April up to 90 the next day," he marveled. "It’s just been more crazy than it’s been in the past."
