“The hurricane was probably a good thing,” Tommy Hanka said on the morning after Hurricane Hanna passed through south Texas. The July 25-26 deluge “is really good for the soil. It flushes out the salt. Then, you get better crops.”

Hanka, the highly respected operator of Tommy Hanka Farms in Edinburg, TX, said that he and other regional growers had finished their harvest of watermelons and other crops. “As long as this stops for planting in September we should be in really good shape.”

Frank Schuster, a veteran of south Texas vegetable production and family lead of Val Verde Vegetable Co. in McAllen, TX, also heralded the value of flushing salts from the soil.

Tommy Wilkins' office at Grow Farms Texas in Donna, TX, was flooded with about five inches of rain after Hurricane Hanna ripped off part of the building’s roof on the night of July 25.“Crop-wise, we are just on the throes of starting to plant,” Schuster said. “This rain will do a good job of cooling off the ground temperature. We had a significant amount of rain in May, which washed a lot of salt down off the fields. This will have the same effect.”

Schuster said about a third of his fall vegetable seedlings are safely rooting in greenhouse beds. “In the next two weeks we’ll be planting,” Schuster noted.

At J&D Produce Inc. in Edinburg, TX, on July 26, Bret Erickson, senior vice president of business affairs, said the hurricane was forecast to go north of Edinburg, which would have been ideal for filling water reserves serving the rich growing area of the southern Rio Grande Valley. But instead, he said, the storm took a southward track into Mexico. That freshwater runoff will largely flow off north Mexican soil into the Rio Grande to be lost into the Gulf of Mexico.

Erickson added that J&D keeps only a small part of its refrigerated warehousing on in the summer because its only business is handling “in and out” business for Mexican produce importers. In the storm, J&D lost its warehouse power and had moved its limited volume into refrigerated trailers for protection.

Schuster said that rainfall from Hurricane Hanna began at his San Juan, TX, home about 3 p.m. on the 25th. It had rained eight inches by 10 a.m. on Sunday morning. He said the rainfall alternated between heavy sheets of pouring rain, followed by periods of drizzle. He and his wife, Debbie Schuster, on Sunday awaited restoration of their electrical power.

The storm was much fiercer several miles to the north at the Donna, TX, warehouse of Grow Farms Texas LLC. Tommy Wilkins, the firm’s director of sales and business development, said his facility, which was built in the 1940s, had parts of its rounded roof stripped off “and there are four to six inches of water in my office.”

Grow Farms lost power in its cold rooms, but not for long enough to create concern about damaged refrigerated produce. At noon on July 26, Wilkins said he had talked to nine other south Texas warehouse operators. None of them had auxiliary power to compensate for lost electric power. “We all asked each other why we don’t.”

Among the companies in the new Pharr Bridge Industrial Park is Harvest Best Inc. There, company CEO Nasser (Nass) Halim affirmed his cold warehouse operation enjoys a secondary power source.

Erickson of J&D said the experience from Hurricane Hanna may cause cold storage owners to reconsider investing in auxiliary power.

Erickson noted that “early estimates are that most of the valley got six to 10 inches of rain. Some areas got 15 to 18 inches.”

Schuster said the winds along the river at his home topped 35 miles an hour before he went to bed on the 25th. “There are palm fronds and limbs down everywhere,” but no major damage was apparent.

Without other storms, “in a couple of weeks it will be dry and planting. This won’t interfere with much,” Schuster said.

Dante Galeazzi, the president and CEO of the Texas International Produce Association in Mission, said early on July 26 that he could affirm that south Texas growers were pleased by the abundant rain.

Tony Incaviglia, vice president sales and marketing for GR Fresh in McAllen, said his firm, for the protection of its workers, uncharacteristically shut down on a Sunday, July 26. He expects that closed south Texas cold warehouses will bring some minor disruption of Mexican produce distribution in the last week of July. He added that the GR Fresh warehouse has a small amount of secondary power generation. The firm is building a new warehouse that should be operational late this year.

Wilkins saw winds approaching 90 miles an hour at his home on the north end of McAllen. A 25-year-old tree was blown over in his yard. Driving to his Donna warehouse at dawn on July 26, he saw a Walmart parking lot with a dozen cars flooded to the bottom of their windows.

(Seen at the top of the page is a photo taken by a kayaking neighbor of Dante Galeazzi, president and CEO of the Texas International Produce Association, on the morning of July 26.)