‘Just hoping it doesn’t get any worse’
Forecast offers little hope as Houston streets turn into rivers and thousands seek shelter
There is not much that Houston’s residents can do now other than hope it gets no worse. But even in that, they are likely to be disappointed.
Elaine Moore and her husband, Mo, sat in the garage of their single-storey home in northeast Houston Monday, with their two pit bulls, looking out on the street and the flooded underpass beyond. An abandoned car, almost entirely submerged, told its own story. Its passenger door, wide open beneath the water line, suggested a hurried escape.
She said this was the worst she had ever seen in a city she knows well.
“I’ve lived in Houston all my life,” she said. “My daughter lives on the east side and she’s been flooded out and taken to a shelter. We’ve been OK here so far, but we don’t have a plan. We’re just hoping it doesn’t get any worse.” She said her neighbours, too, planned to stay put.
Further down the road, residential streets were completely cut off by flood waters. Towards downtown, a Fiesta supermarket was open and a line of people snaked round the corner, queuing to get in. The rainbow of umbrellas — one a Texas flag — a striking splash of colour in an otherwise desolate scene.
Cars were driving the wrong way up the hard shoulder of I-69, one of the many arteries into Houston, the first signs that down the road the sheriff ’s office had installed a roadblock.
After the slightest break in the weather overnight, the rain had started again and by mid-morning was coming down in torrents once more.
The death toll rose to eight Monday night, including six people in and around Houston. But more rain is forecast and officials issued dire warnings of worse to come.
The National Weather Service forecasted that flooding would not peak until Wednesday or Thursday.
“While the hurricane force winds have diminished, I want to stress that we are not out of the woods yet,” Elaine Duke, acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, said at a news conference. “Harvey is still a dangerous and historic storm.”
Hurricane Harvey barrelled on to shore on Friday night with winds of more than 210 km/h. Since then it has slowed to a tropical storm, dumping record amounts of rain along the Gulf Shore of Texas.
Some places have already been hit by 76 cms of rain, with another 50 cms possible. The result was that America’s fourth largest city was criss-crossed by grey-green rivers where its streets used to stand.
In a rescue effort that resembled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, helicopters buzzed across the city plucking stranded motorists to safety while airboats patrolled submerged neighbourhoods.
Police said they had rescued more than 2,000 people from cars and homes by Monday afternoon. And the city was gearing up to accommodate 30,000 refugees in shelters. More than 2,600 had already arrived at the George Brown Convention Centre.
Sylvester Turner, the city’s mayor, said he expected that number to increase “exponentially” even as the Red Cross said it had run out of beds.
Monday, the state’s governor announced he had activated the entire Texas National Guard as part of the life-saving effort, bringing the total of deployed troops to 12,000.
The scale of the disaster has brought fresh scrutiny of Houston’s development into wetlands and the conflicting advice given to Texas residents as the hurricane moved toward shore at the end of last week. While the state’s governor urged people to flee their homes before Harvey hit, the mayor of Houston said people should shelter at home. Now, many of those people are trapped.
On Sunday, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, refused to blame his Democratic mayor.
“Now is not the time to second-guess the decisions that were made,” he said at a news conference. “What’s important is that everybody work together to ensure that we are going to, first, save lives and, second, help people across the state rebuild.”
Meanwhile, Turner said ordering 2.3 million residents to evacuate would have created chaos on the highways.
Houston has long been prone to flooding. The low-lying city is on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou and has a flat terrain which barely rises above sea level. Flooding has been a regular occurrence for centuries, but the problem has been exacerbated by the city’s explosive development.
Estimates suggests its population of 2.3 million is growing at about 100,000 people per year and that, in the past 15 years, 25 per cent more land has been concreted over, with wetland capable of draining the water being replaced by suburbia. A flood in 2015 caused an US$500 million damage and another, last year, claimed eight lives.