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Tropical Storm Bill hit the Texas coast with strong rains and high winds on Tuesday though no serious injuries were reported, relieving officials and residents just three weeks after floods killed about 30 people in the state.
The second named tropical storm of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season made landfall near the sportfishing town of Matagorda, then lost much of its punch, the National Weather Service said.
There were no reports of substantial damages, and oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico and near the coast were not impacted by the storm. Refineries and a nuclear power plant, the South Texas Nuclear Generating Station in Bay City, also operated normally.
But 209 flights were canceled at the two airports serving Houston, the fourth-largest U.S. city, according to tracking service FlightAware.com. Vessel traffic was also halted in the Houston Ship Channel, the biggest U.S. petrochemical port, and the ports of Galveston and Texas City.
"This is a rain event," Houston Mayor Annise Parker said at a news conference. "This is a normal rain event."
Despite the weakening storm system, forecasters said tornadoes were possible across much of Texas.
Flash flood watches were issued for six states. The watch area included Houston and central Texas, where floods over Memorial Day weekend last month swept over thousands of vehicles and damaged homes.
The storm was projected to churn through central Texas toward Austin and Dallas. It has maximum sustained winds near 50 miles per hour (80 kph).
Heavy rain had already drenched parts of Texas over the weekend, pushing high rivers closer to overflowing their banks.
The National Hurricane Center said the storm was expected to weaken into a tropical depression overnight, but it could bring up to 8 inches (20 cm) of rain to eastern Texas and Oklahoma and up to 4 inches (10 cm) to Arkansas and southern Missouri.
Voluntary evacuations were called for some low-lying areas south of Houston.
Flooding could snarl work in onshore oilfields, but producers including EOG Resources and ConocoPhillips said they were unaffected.
More than 45 percent of U.S. refining capacity and half of natural gas processing capacity sits along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Onshore, LyondellBasell deployed sandbags at its refining and chemical facilities.
BP Plc briefly shut its Mad Dog and Atlantis fields after a pipeline outage not caused by the storm was fixed by operator Enterprise Products Partners.
