"The levees are not going to hold that much water," Cameron County Emergency Management Coordinator Johnny Cavazos told The Associated Press.
Bill Irwin of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also spoke at the press conference and explained that the main levee system in the Rio Grande Valley is actually controlled by a joint U.S.-Mexican organization, the International Boundary and Water Commission, which employs its own engineers capable of responding to the crisis.
According to Irwin, there are no other large protective levees in the endangered areas.
"There are small flood control works in the area," he said, "but none protecting large populations."
For all their preparations, many of FEMA's officials are in stand-by mode, however, as "the state of Texas has no gaps and no specific requests for federal support," Johnson said.
One federal agency that is not on stand-by as the storm batters the coast is the department of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
During the FEMA news conference, Deputy Commissioner of the CBP Jayson Ahern announced that today customs officials made three unrelated seizures at the same checkpoint on the Texas-Mexico border.
Officials stopped two attempts to smuggle illegal immigrants into America and another to bring in an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 pounds of marijuana.
According to Ahern, "criminal enterprises" may be trying to exploit these "tragic circumstances" to take advantage of distracted officials. As the seizures show, however, U.S. officials are not too distracted to leave borders unsecure.
"We do not want to open up a pathway for criminal organizations to further their enterprise," Ahern said. "We're still operational."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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