Willacy prepares: Residents brace for Hurricane Dolly

RAYMONDVILLE - Mike Norrell was bracing for a rocky night in his boat as Hurricane Dolly slowly raised the waters in the Port Mansfield marina.

Like other anglers here, he was tying down his boat, bracing for 75 mph winds.

"I'm spending the night in there," he said as he pointed at the big boat harnessed in a boat slip. "I'm going to make sure everything's all right."

Dolly was expected to swell a 3-foot storm surge that was expected to push boats toward the ceiling of the dry storage boathouse, he said.

"If that water goes up, it'll loosen the lines and let the boat come up with it," he said."It's not going to be that bad. I think I'm probably safe. If it was a (Cataqtory) 2 or 3, I'd get out of here. I'd be in Port Aransas."

Like others, Billy Burgess put his boat into a storage shed.

But as Dolly got closer, he started thinking about evacuating.

"It's a brand new boat and I don't have insurance," he said. "They wouldn't give me insurance because the storm was already out there. If I go to McAllen, that boat's coming with me."

As winds slowly picked up Tuesday afternoon, Dean May was nailing plywood sheets over the windows of the Port Mansfield Sunset House hotel.

"Most people are staying," said May, a maintenance man. "We have customers who are sticking it out. But if it was a (Category) 3, 4 or 5, a lot of people would evacuate."

In Sarita, U.S. Border Patrol agents were stopping motorists at the checkpoint.

"It's business as usual," a supervisor only said.

Officials here expected Dolly to dump as much as 20 inches of rain in Willacy County, spawning flooding in this flood zone.

"We are in a flood zone. We're going to flood," said Frank Torres, the county's emergency management coordinator. "We expect a significant flooding event with sustained winds of 80 to 100 mph."

"We're prepared for flooding, tornadoes, loss of power and we're prepared to protect life and property," he said after a teleconference with Jack Colley, the state's emergency management coordinator.

"We've been getting calls all morning - for sandbags, shelters," City Manager Eleazar Garcia said.

Outside Raymondville City Hall, Hope Robles braced for flooding that pushes as much as two inches of water into her home on Rodriguez Street.

"Everything's too low," the secretary said as she filled bags with sand. "It gets bad. It gets pretty deep. You can walk and splash in there."