Texas braced for the possibility of flooding from Hurricane Dean after the storm plowed into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula early today as the most intense hurricane to hit land in almost two decades.
Dean struck land just north of the Mexico-Belize border as a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 160 mph. It quickly lost some of that wind speed over land, but Dean was still the third most intense hurricane to make landfall since record keeping began in the 1800s, the National Hurricane Center said.
The atmospheric pressure in a hurricane's eye is one way to measure its strength: the lower the pressure, the greater its power to suck in air and drive winds. The only other storms to hit land with lower pressure were the Labor Day hurricane that hit the Florida Keys in 1935 and Hurricane Gilbert that hit Cancun, Mexico, in 1988.
Unlike the devastating hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Rita, Dean wasn't expected to swing far enough north to endanger the Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas drilling regions.