FLOODWATERS BEGIN TO RECEDE IN HOUSTON AS HARVEY TAKES SWIPE FARTHER EAST
Storm rolls ashore in Louisiana; confirmed death toll climbs to 25 but certain to rise
HOUSTON — Harvey’s floodwaters started dropping across much of the Houston area and the storm weakened slightly Wednesday but major dangers remained for the U.S. Gulf Coast area, including the threat of an explosion at a stricken Texas chemical plant and major flooding ear the Texas-Louisiana line.
The scope of the devastation caused by the hurricane came into sharper focus, meanwhile, and the murky green floodwaters from the record-breaking, 1.2-metre deluge of rain began yielding up more bodies, as predicted.
The confirmed death toll climbed to at least 25, including six family members — four of them children — whose bodies were pulled Wednesday from a van that had been swept off a Houston bridge into a bayou.
“Unfortunately, it seems that our worst thoughts are being realized,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said after the van that disappeared over the weekend was found in muddy water. The death toll is sure to rise. As the water receded, Houston’s fire department said it would begin a block-by-block search of thousands of flooded homes. Assistant Fire Chief Richard Mann said the searches were to ensure “no people were left behind.”
While conditions in the fourthlargest city in the U.S. appeared to improve, conditions deteriorated near the Texas-Louisiana border as Harvey again reached land.
Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, struggled with rising floodwaters and worked to rescue residents after Harvey completed a U-turn in the Gulf of Mexico and rolled ashore early Wednesday for the second time in six days. It hit southwestern Louisiana as a tropical storm with heavy rain and winds of more than 70 kilometres an hour.
Forecasters downgraded Harvey to a tropical depression late Wednesday from a tropical storm but it still has lots of rain and potential damage to spread, with 10 to 20 centimetres forecast from the Louisiana-Texas state line into Tennessee and Kentucky through Friday. Some spots may get as much as 30 cm, raising the risk of more flooding.
For much of the Houston area, forecasters said the rain is pretty much over.
“We have good news,” said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District. “The water levels are going down.”
Houston’s two major airports were up and running again Wednesday. Officials said they were resuming limited bus and light rail service as well as trash pickup.
At Hermann Park, south of downtown, children glided by in strollers and wagons, joggers took in midday runs and couples walked beside cascading fountains and beneath a sparkling sun. People pulled into drivethrough restaurants and emerged from a store with groceries.
At the same time, many thousands of Houston-area homes are under water and could stay that way for days or weeks. And Lindner cautioned that homes near at least one swollen bayou could still get flooded.
Officials said 911 centres in the Houston area are getting more than 1,000 calls an hour from people seeking help.
In Houston’s flooded Meyerland neighbourhood, hundreds of families emptied their homes of sodden possessions under a baking sun as the temperature climbed into the mid-30s C. They piled up couches, soggy drywall and carpets ripped out of foulsmelling homes where the floodwaters had lingered for more than 24 hours.The curbs were lined with the pickup trucks of cleanup contractors and friends.
Altogether, more than 1,000 homes in Texas were destroyed and close to 50,000 damaged, and more than 32,000 people were in shelters across the state, emergency officials reported. About 10,000 more National Guard troops are being deployed to Texas, bringing the total to 24,000, Gov. Greg Abbott said.
Confirmed deaths from the storm include a married couple who drowned after their pickup truck was swept away while they were on the phone with a 911 dispatcher asking for help.
Harvey’s five straight days of rain totalled close to 132 cm, the heaviest tropical downpour ever recorded in the continental U.S.
CALGARY — Canadian-owned refineries are expected to register higher profits as more U.S. Gulf Coast facilities are shut down due to ongoing extensive flooding from what’s left of tropical storm Harvey.
And some analysts say refinery outages in Texas that have already sparked higher gasoline prices in the U.S. and some parts of Canada will likely continue to affect North American fuel markets for months.
“Gasoline prices moving higher, it does help all of the refiners,” said Randy Ollenberger, managing director of oil and gas equity research for BMO Capital Markets in Calgary.
“Cenovus and Husky, because they have Midwest refining assets — as does Suncor in Denver — they’ll probably see more of the strength in product prices than we’ll see in Ontario or Alberta [refineries].”
According to a report from AltaCorp Capital in Calgary, mid-continent refining profit margins have jumped by about 20 per cent this week, a development it said will boost the bottom lines of Calgary-based Husky and Cenovus.
Husky owns one refinery and partners with BP in another in Ohio, while Cenovus owns a 50 per cent stake in Phillips 66 refineries in Illinois and northern Texas. All are well removed from Harvey’s path.
AltaCorp analyst Nick Lupick said Canadian refinery product pricing is up slightly “but nothing compared to what we have seen in the U.S.”
Ollenberger said the situation is more complicated for Canadian oil producers. The storm is preventing ocean tankers from delivering competing loads of imported foreign crudes in Houston, but it is also interfering with some of the 400,000 barrels of Canadian crude normally delivered daily to the Gulf Coast, about 11 per cent of Canada’s total oil exports. That could translate into more oil going into storage in the U.S. Midwest, which could mean temporarily lower prices.
On Wednesday, Calgary-based Encana reported it has restarted production and drilling at its Eagle Ford oil fields in southern Texas. It shut them down last Friday as a precautionary measure. “Our Eagle Ford assets did not incur any damage. We were well prepared for the hurricane and successfully limited any impacts to four days between Friday and Monday,” said spokesman Jay Averill.
Research director Jackie Forrest of ARC Financial in Calgary said she expects Harvey’s effect on the gasoline market could match that of Katrina 12 years ago and result in higher fuel prices in the U.S. and Canada that last well into November.
“Katrina did cause prices across the continent to increase, not just in the Gulf Coast. Those elevated gasoline prices did stick around for almost three months until those refineries were back on line,” she said.
IHS Markit said about 30 per cent of U.S. Gulf of Mexico refinery output is expected to be idled as the storm makes its way eastward toward the Port Arthur/Lake Charles refining hub on the Texas-Louisiana border.
The biggest refinery in the U.S., which was already running below halfspeed, began a complete shutdown Wednesday. The Motiva Enterprises plant in Port Arthur, run by a unit of the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia, was the latest domino to fall.