CNN 2010-07-06

And we begin with those heavy rains and tornadoes 1 that are pounding south Texas as Hurricane Alex comes ashore 2. The season's first hurricane actually made landfall in northeastern Mexico with 100-mile-an-hour winds. Alex has weakened and it's moved inland. It is now a tropical storm, but still got the potential to trigger flashfloods and mudslides. Alex is also having an impact on the oil spill cleanup hundreds of miles away. Aftereffects from the storm could keep the skimming operation from resuming until this weekend. South Padre Island, Texas escaped the brunt of that storm but still took a pretty big hit. Reynolds Wolf is there, Reynolds.

Well, Kyra, what we have here is still plenty of wind. The rain for the most part is gone. The waves continue to rock against the shores. Some of these things have just been monsters that have been coming along the coast here. The beach which used to stretch out towards the horizon, now the water is coming right up to the edge of these dunes 3 covered by the sawgrass on which I'm standing 4. This could have been far worse. This could have been much worse. What I mean by that is if this storm to make landfall about, about 100 miles to our south, in Mexico, if it had been out over the open water to the Gulf 5 of Mexico for a couple of extra days, this could have been a major hurricane. To put things into perspective, plain and simple, this could have been, say, another Katrina, it could've been an Andrew, could have been Hugo, possibly a Gustav, maybe even an Ike for that matter. But it didn't. It came onshore. All things considered, the damage was minimal 6. Here on the island, South Padre Island, there are times yesterday especially before it made landfall to the south but the water got up to about a foot in some places. There were a few scattered 7 power outages back in Brownsville. They had issues with tornadoes. In fact, they had confirmed reports of two tornadoes causing minimal damage. Thankfully no injuries and there are reports of other tornadoes in the area which, believe it or not, not unusual when you have these tropical systems making landfall that rotation 8, around the center of circulation, can pretty create a little bit of a twist in the atmosphere and cause some of those thunderstorms to rotate Heinsty -- the tornadoes that we get.

Flooding was a bit more of an issue over towards the Brownsville- Harlingen area. I can tell you the mayor there, the city actually put out some 60,000 sandbags so they were well prepared for it. Quite a few more power outages out there, but as we speak people are getting ready to get power restored.

I can also tell you that on the island, Kyra, the main bridge that goes across to the mainland, it was actually closed for two reasons. One, the winds exceeded 39 miles an hour which means no traffic either coming on or off the island.  But there's a little something extra that happened. There were two light poles right in the very middle of the island, both of them pushed over by the wind. That blocked traffic and could have gone either way, could have gone back and forth 9 anyway.  They were able to clear it now. Both lanes. Now the bridge is open so people will be coming over to see what's left of the island. And again, things here, all things considered, they are fine. Few places here and there, and some of the buildings, we had some tiles knocked out. Few places where, of course, we've had a little bit of sign damage. But other than that, they really lucked out. No question.  Much better than how they fared back in 2005 or rather 2008, 2008, with Hurricane Dolly. Cat 2 made a direct hit on South Padre Island. Let's send it back to you