Tropical Storm Hermine crossed the Rio Grande River into south Texas with high winds and heavy rain after making landfall in northeastern Mexico hours earlier, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

The storm was about 65 miles (105 kilometers) southwest of Corpus Christi, Texas, at 4 a.m. local time moving north- northwest at 17 mph, the center said in a website advisory.

Hermine’s sustained winds dropped to 50 miles per hour from near hurricane-force when it crossed the coast about 40 miles south of Brownsville. The rain-laden storm is expected to weaken further as it moves from Texas northward into Oklahoma over the next day or so, the center said.

Hurricane watches for the coastal areas of Texas and Mexico were dropped after the storm made landfall near where Hurricane Alex came ashore from the Gulf of Mexico and dissipated in the first hurricane of the June through November season.

Hermine, the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, may bring as much as 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain to northeastern Mexico and southern Texas with isolated areas getting as much as a foot of precipitation, the center said.

“These rains could cause life-threatening flash floods” and isolated tornadoes, the center said.

Corpus Christi Operations

Heating oil for October is a “stronger” because Hermine may affect operations at three refineries in Corpus Christi, Carl Larry, president of Oil Outlooks & Opinions LLC in Houston, said yesterday.

Valero Energy Corp.’s Corpus Christi East and West refineries, with a combined capacity of 315,000 barrels a day, made “preliminary storm preparations” before Hermine’s landfall, Bill Day, a company spokesman, said yesterday in an e-mail. “No decisions have been made regarding changes in production.”

The hurricane center is also monitoring the remnants of Tropical Storm Gaston in the northern Leeward Islands, which the agency now says has just a 20 percent chance of re-forming into a tropical cyclone over the next 48 hours.

A low-pressure area about 300 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands and a larger one between the Cape Verde Islands and the west coast of Africa have a 10 percent chance of tropical cyclone formation over the next two days, the center said.

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