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Article snippet: MIAMI — The turning point came early Thursday morning. Bleary-eyed experts at the National Hurricane Center saw that Harvey, a tropical storm that they had been tracking for a week as it wandered westward through the Caribbean, was starting to build power quickly, as if gunning for hurricane status. Within 48 hours, it would become the strongest hurricane to hit the United States in more than a decade, smashing into the Texas coast, inundating the nation’s fourth-largest city and prompting some to question whether the public could have been warned earlier about the scale of the threat. Thursday, 4 a.m. “That was the day when we realized that it was going to be much worse,” said Michael Brennan, the branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the center. “We had aircraft data and saw the storm was beginning to rapidly intensify.” That was when the center, which is staffed around the clock, also went into overdrive. Getting information out about the storm was crucial, so six people at the center started helping to reach out to reporters, coordinate with media outlets and blitz social media. Mr. Brennan said the team recognized relatively early on that Harvey had the potential to slow down and stall over the Texas coast, where it could dump huge amounts of rain. By noon on Thursday, a hurricane-hunter plane had obtained wind data confirming that Harvey had strengthened to a Category 1 hurricane, and the airplane team could see that Harvey was not going to stop ... Link to the full article to read more