Beryl is set to gain hurricane strength as it makes landfall on the Texas coastExBulletin

According to the National Weather Service, Beryl will make landfall early Monday morning along the Texas coast as the storm regains hurricane-level strength in the Gulf of Mexico. On Sunday, rain and winds from the storm's outer edges pounded the southeast Texas coast and left beach towns under evacuation orders.

Communities from Corpus Christi to Galveston Island to Houston are facing severe weather watches and warnings urging residents to prepare for 60 to 80 mph winds, power outages and flooding.

“We expect Beryl to intensify to landfall early Monday, and people should prepare for the possibility of a Category 2 landfall,” said Eric Blake, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, in a Sunday counseling. “There is a risk of life-threatening storm surge flooding along the Texas coast. Residents in those areas should follow any advisories issued by local officials and follow evacuation orders.”

Hurricane Beryl is the Atlantic's earliest storm in a calendar year, which strengthened into a Category 5 storm, leaving at least 11 people dead as it tore through the Caribbean last week. As the storm moves toward Texas, Governor Dan Patrick placed 121 counties under the state's Hurricane Beryl disaster declaration.

“It's going to be a deadly storm for people who are directly in that path,” Patrick said in one press conference Sunday afternoon. “Property can be rebuilt, but lives cannot be rebuilt.”

The lieutenant governor also shared his concerns about tourists visiting for the July 4 holiday, not being aware of how dangerous Beryl will be. “We've seen all the routes that leave the coast, and the maps are still green. So we don't see many people leaving. If you're moving, today is the day,” he said.

Texas Division of Emergency Management Director Nim Kidd echoed Patrick in pleading with the public to take him seriously.

“There will be inland flooding, and what we find is that this inland freshwater flooding tends to be more of a killer of our citizens than the actual storm surge,” Kidd said. “So please don't drive through the water. Turn around. Don't drown.”

In the coastal town of Aransas Pass, Texas, Johnny Guerra told NPR that while some are fleeing the storm, he will be lost.

[I] put up some boards, move anything inflatable in, into storage. The plants are in,” Guerra said. “Everything is taken care of.”

Waiting out the storm, the city of Galveston closed all city facilities on Monday. And the White House said Sunday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent emergency responders and resources to communities along the coast.

The record-breaking storm began as a relatively weak tropical depression in late June, but in just 48 hours it grew into a major hurricane that swept across the Caribbean and the Yucatan Peninsula last week. Beryl then weakened to a tropical storm, but is now regaining strength as it heads toward Texas.

It's the kind of extreme meteorological activity that scientists now expect with a rapidly warming planet due to climate change.

“In terms of the science, it's unfortunately consistent with what we expect when we were warming the planet and warming our oceans, especially,” Andra Garner, a hurricane expert at Rowan University in New Jersey, told NPR last week. When we were warming the planet with our fossil fuel emissions, it was making it more likely that we would have those warm ocean waters that could allow a storm like Beryl to develop and intensify really quickly.

Residents along the Texas Gulf Coast remember Hurricane Harvey, which hit the area hard in 2017 as a Category 4 storm. The storm ravaged the region with catastrophic flooding that killed at least 68 people in Texas.

Greg Allen contributed reporting.