Latest news as Hurricane Beryl approaches Houston, Texas

Hurricane Beryl is expected to make landfall somewhere in southern Texas near Matagorda Bay early Monday as a Category 1 hurricane. Houston could begin to feel the effects of Beryl as early as Sunday evening, including high winds, heavy rain and possible tornadoes.

JB Fernandez, his cousin Daniel Fernandez and his uncle Arthur Daniel Fernandez said they weren’t worried about Beryl early Sunday morning as the sun rose off the coast of Port Lavaca. They were just focused on casting their fishing lines into the Gulf.

JB Fernandez said they’ve been fishing there since he was a kid, catching trout and redfish in the waters off Port Lavaca. They’ve caught about 50 fish so far, though they’ve released a fair amount back into the water.

“I think it’s the storms that attract them,” Fernandez said.

Port Lavaca is a small coastal town in Calhoun County that is in the projected path of Beryl, a Category 1 hurricane in the United States. With a population of about 12,000, it is known for its world-class saltwater fishing and reputation as a low-key coastal community. It is located about 130 miles southwest of Houston.

They plan to head inland to Victoria when the storm hits, and don’t expect much damage when it arrives.

But even as stray raindrops began to fall, they continued to cast their lines from the pier at Bayfront Peninsula Park. They still had plenty of time to enjoy their Sunday before Beryl approached the Texas coast.

“We will continue to do this until that happens,” Fernandez said.

As Beryl prepares to strengthen into a hurricane, CenterPoint’s power outage tracking system remains down, leaving the Houston area without a handy map to track which neighborhoods are without power.

CenterPoint’s main public information site, its Outage Tracker map, went down in May due to a combination of high customer demand and widespread outages from the storms.

“CenterPoint recognizes the inconvenience this poses to its customers and will continue to provide general outage information in the interim, updated every 15 minutes,” the company said in a press release. “By the end of the month, CenterPoint plans to replace the outage map with a redesigned cloud platform that can more easily scale to accommodate increased customer traffic.”