Tropical Storm Edouard comes ashore near Johnson Bayou with a Texas flood watch

Tropical Storm Edouard made landfall at 2:20 p.m. Central Daylight Time on Tuesday, 1 September, near Johnson Bayou, Louisiana, with sustained winds of 60 miles per hour. Gusts reached 71 mph near the Texas-Louisiana line, 52 mph at Calcasieu Pass and 46 mph in Cameron. Water stood 1 to 2 feet above expected tide in southwestern Louisiana. By the 4 p.m. advisory from the National Hurricane Center in Miami, the centre was at 29.9 north, 94.0 west, about 5 miles west of Port Arthur, Texas, and 40 miles west of Cameron. Maximum sustained winds had fallen to 50 mph. The storm was moving northwest at 7 mph and is forecast to keep that heading as it tracks inland across eastern Texas through Wednesday.

Edouard is the fifth named storm of the 2026 Atlantic season. It was a tropical depression on Monday afternoon and a named storm Monday evening. Hurricane hunters reported strengthening Tuesday morning, and the centre had held out the chance it could approach hurricane force before landfall. It did not. The hurricane watch from High Island, Texas, to Cameron was dropped after the storm came ashore below that threshold.

The rain problem

A tropical storm warning still covered Port Bolivar, Texas, to the Vermilion-Cameron parish line. A flood watch covers southeast Texas, including Houston, through Wednesday evening. The hurricane centre's 4 p.m. rainfall call was 3 to 7 inches on the upper Texas coast inland through east-central Texas, with local amounts up to 12 inches where storms train over the same ground. Southwest Louisiana could see 2 to 4 inches. The National Weather Service office in Houston had earlier warned that isolated 10 to 15 inch totals could not be ruled out.

That is the damage mechanism. Edouard is not a major wind event. It is a flood event over ground that already takes water badly. Harris County and the bayou network around Houston flood on lesser totals when the ground is wet and the drains are slow. Isolated 12 inch cells on a weekday afternoon are how underpasses fill.

Surge and the rest of the basin

A storm-surge warning had been in effect from High Island to the Vermilion-Cameron line. Forecast surge of 3 to 5 feet was the pre-landfall figure. Observed water of 1 to 2 feet above tide in southwestern Louisiana is below the top of that range and still enough to cover low roads and camps.

Elsewhere in the Atlantic, remnants of Tropical Storm Dolly were still wetting Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas. Edouard is a Gulf storm with a short open-water life. It does not change the seasonal count in a dramatic way. It does put Houston on a flood clock for 24 to 36 hours.

Power crews, school districts and the Texas Department of Transportation will spend Wednesday on the same list they use for every slow tropical rain: high water on feeder roads, stalled cars, and whether the reservoirs have room. The 4 p.m. advisory is the document that matters until the centre is farther north and the rain shield pulls away from the coast.