As Beryl chugged toward the Texas Gulf Coast on Sunday, oil workers fled drilling platforms, tourist towns battered by previous storms shut down their ferries, and state officials urged people to evacuate at-risk low-lying coastal areas.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick warned on Sunday that Beryl would be a “deadly storm” that would bring significant rain, winds and flooding. He issued disaster declarations for 121 counties in recent days.
“It’s a serious storm, and you must take it seriously,” he said in a news briefing on Sunday. “You don’t want to be in six to 12 inches of rain. You don’t want to be in flooding.”
Mr. Patrick expressed concern that people were not paying enough attention to updates on Beryl — which is currently a tropical storm but is expected to intensify into a Category 1 hurricane — with thousands vacationing on the coast during the holiday weekend. Traffic data on Sunday afternoon showed the roads were not clogged with people evacuating. “The maps are still green,” Mr. Patrick said. “We don’t see many people leaving.”
Indeed, many locals were unfazed by the storm and decided to stay, gambling that they could survive its wind and rains.
“Those that have left have already gone,” said Alysa Jarvis, vice president of a community group in Seadrift, a coastal city of 1,000 people. “I’m staying, though.”
Ms. Jarvis said that she and other residents were paying close attention to the storm’s expected path as it curled northward, but that she wanted to stay at her waterfront home so she could run its sump pump to keep it from flooding.
The Sunday brunch rush was in full force at Bubba’s Seafood, a Cajun-style seafood restaurant in Seadrift. But it planned to close early on Sunday as staff members kept a wary eye on the bands of rain beginning to spray the coast. Tamra Flores, a manager at the restaurant, said she and her family had moved their boats into storage and put away their patio furniture. But she did not plan to evacuate.
“We’re a very small community, so a lot of our patrons are hometown people who aren’t going to go anywhere,” she said.
In Aransas Pass, a small hamlet near Corpus Christi, a volunteer evacuation notice was issued on Saturday, meaning residents were strongly urged but not required to leave. Paulette Alvizo, 32, watched a line of cars driving inland on Saturday but decided not to join them. She filled up two tanks of gasoline at a boarded-up gas station on Sunday morning, and said she was confident that she had enough water and food to ride the storm out with her husband and four children.
“This is not our first storm,” she said. “We are going to stick it out.”
The scenes at big-box stores along the coast reflected both preparation and nonchalance. At a Walmart in Galveston, supplies of bottled water were running low, as people prepared for possible power outages and boil-water notices. But at a Home Depot in Corpus Christi, many shoppers bypassed the sandbags and water bottles and instead went for garden supplies and outdoor furniture.
On Galveston Island, Cesar Laiva, 53, a construction worker, assembled his usual hurricane-preparation supplies: plywood, sandbags and screws. Mr. Laiva, who has lived on the island for 30 years, called the situation “not that bad.”
Others secured their patio furniture, took down umbrellas, gassed up their generators, covered their windows with sheets of plywood — and waited to see how bad the storm would be.
Miranda Rodriguez contributed reporting from Corpus Christi, Texas.