{"id":451369,"date":"2026-09-29T19:04:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T19:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/451369\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T19:04:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T19:04:08","slug":"texas-meteorologist-warns-el-paso-faces-dangerous-flooding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/451369\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas meteorologist warns El Paso faces dangerous flooding"},"content":{"rendered":"

The remnants of Hurricane Polo<\/a> could bring what one longtime meteorologist is calling \u201cdevastating\u201d amounts of rain to the far West Texas desert Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Polo \u2014 which made its first landfall in the Mexican state of Baja California\u00a0Sur late Monday night and was expected to make a second landfall in Sonora on Tuesday morning \u2014 will continue moving inland, eventually arriving in El Paso<\/a> as a tropical depression. And it\u2019s that that has Robert Bettes, chief meteorologist with KTSM 9 News, the Nexstar Media Group-owned NBC affiliate in El Paso, sounding the alarm.<\/p>\n

Bettes took to social media late Monday night to warn The Sun City that Polo\u2019s rains will be far different from the typical summertime monsoons that have been pouring rain across the desert in recent weeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been doing the weather in El Paso for 31 years, and I can tell you that there have only been a handful of events that deeply concern me, that I believe could actually end up being very devastating for our town,\u201d\u00a0Bettes said in a video on Facebook<\/a> just before 11:30 p.m. on Monday, September 28.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is one of those events,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Bettes previously spent a decade as a meteorologist at \u00a0KVEO NBC Local 23 in the Rio Grande Valley<\/a>, which is frequently impacted by tropical cyclones \u2014 most recently, when Hurricane Hanna dropped 8 to 15 inches of rain across the Valley in late July 2020. The veteran meteorologist called on his Valley forecasting experience to stress the seriousness of his warning to El Pasoans.<\/p>\n

\u201cI became very good at tropical weather and I can tell you these storms are different than monsoon thunderstorms,\u201d\u00a0Bettes said.<\/p>\n

The National Weather Service<\/a> at El Paso has issued a flood watch<\/a> and a flash flood watch<\/a> for all of far West Texas and portions of southwest New Mexico through 6 a.m. Wednesday. Polo\u2019s remnants are expected to bring excessive rainfall and flash flooding. But the key hazard will be in how the tropical rains will sweep across the region in repeated waves.<\/p>\n

\u201cHigh rainfall rates and repeated rounds of rain up to 4 inches may result in instances of flash flooding,\u201d reads a\u00a0NWS flood watch advisory issued just before 6 a.m. on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0Bettes illustrated during his Facebook video, bands of rainfall had already begun to move across the desert Monday night ahead of Polo\u2019s arrival. The tropical moisture is expected to collide with a \u201cvery powerful low pressure system\u201d from the west, further exacerbating precipitation in a region that has already been contending with the end of monsoon season.<\/p>\n

According to the El Paso Times<\/a>, the monsoon season typically brings 4-5 inches of rain to the desert between June and the end of September. But\u00a0Bettes fears Polo could bring as much as 6 inches of rain all at once in “a worst-case scenario.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat could be a devastating event,\u201d\u00a0Bettes said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The remnants of Hurricane Polo could bring what one longtime meteorologist is calling \u201cdevastating\u201d amounts of rain to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":451370,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2320,820,3091,82,84,83],"class_list":["post-451369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-mysasotx","tag-mysastaff","tag-mysawx","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}