Tropical Storm Bertha has come to an end. The season's second named storm, which spent much of the week crawling along the northern Gulf Coast, degenerated into a trough of low pressure — an elongated area of low pressure without the organized circulation needed to qualify as a tropical cyclone — about 30 miles northwest of Houston late Thursday. The National Hurricane Center issued its final advisory at that point, with maximum sustained winds down to 35 mph and the central pressure risen to about 1008 millibars. All coastal watches and warnings have been discontinued, and no deaths have been reported.
The map above traces Bertha's actual path from the Gulf to its dissipation inland. What follows is a recap of where it went and what it left behind.
Where Bertha went
Bertha made two U.S. landfalls in as many days. The first came Wednesday afternoon in St. Bernard Parish, in southeastern Louisiana, with sustained winds near 45 mph. The storm then passed just south of New Orleans, slid back out over the water, and reorganized just enough to come ashore a second time on Thursday afternoon near the Texas–Louisiana line, roughly 75 miles northeast of Galveston.
Once inland over the upper Texas coast, it lost strength quickly, weakening to a tropical depression within hours and then to a trough by late Thursday evening as it moved to the northwest of Houston. The slow, wobbling track — east of New Orleans, back over the marsh, then across the state line — is why so many communities from the Florida Panhandle to southeast Texas felt some version of the same storm over several days.
The impacts, which stayed mostly minor
For all the ground it covered, Bertha was a relatively gentle storm. Rainfall along the central Texas coast generally totaled 1 to 2 inches, enough for minor flooding in poor-drainage areas but little more. The strongest winds stayed near the immediate coast, where utilities reported only isolated power outages and a few downed tree limbs; national outage trackers showed minimal disruption across the Gulf Coast. Storm surge peaked at around 2 feet in the most exposed spots.
The most visible damage actually came early and to the east, in Florida, where Pensacola officials closed off an area around a storm-battered beach boardwalk after part of its support structure was torn away and a nearby fence was damaged. Elsewhere, the story was heavy surf, dangerous rip currents and a few flooded streets rather than serious destruction.
What's left
The remnant trough was still expected to wring out another 1 to 3 inches of rain, with isolated totals near 4 inches, across coastal and south Texas — enough for localized flash flooding in the wrong spot, even without a named storm attached to it. Behind that, the more mundane forecast returns: the Houston area is bracing less for wind and water than for a stretch of summer heat as the moisture clears out.
With the final advisory issued and every watch and warning dropped, Bertha is now a matter for the record books rather than the forecast. As always, anything still affecting a specific neighborhood — lingering flood warnings, road closures — is best confirmed through the local National Weather Service office, but the storm itself is no longer a threat.
