‘Flooding all over this city,’ police chief says
He said he expects the agency to be working in the area for years as Texas recovers from the storm.
By 7 a.m. Sunday (Central Time), the U.S. National Weather Service had recorded close to 25 inches of rain in Houston, with an additional three to seven inches expected. Warnings for flash flooding and tornadoes remained in place for a large swath of the state, and storm surges are expected along the coast, bringing flooding to typically dry areas. William H. Hobby Airport was shut down.
“There’s flooding all over this city,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said in a livestream video early Sunday morning. “We have one fatality, and a potential second fatality from the flood waters out here.”
As it scrambles to open shelters across Texas, the Red Cross command centre in Houston is now “physically isolated” because of flood waters, said Paul Carden, district director of Red Cross activities in South Texas, which includes Corpus Christi.
U.S. President Donald Trump sought to showcase the federal government’s response to Hurricane Harvey in a tweetstorm of his own Sunday, marvelling over its size like a TV host and announcing a visit to Texas with the natural disaster only just beginning to take its catastrophic toll.
In a series of tweets, Trump said his administration was handling its responsibilities well and, in a tangential aside, hawked a book on race and crime in America written by a supporter.
“Wow — Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood! We have an all out effort going, and going well!”
He later added: “Even experts have said they’ve never seen one like this!”
Trump, who spent most of the weekend at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., convened a Cabinet meeting by telephone Sunday which included Vice President Mike Pence. He tweeted a promise of a Texas visit “as soon as that trip can be made without causing disruption” — later announced by the White House as Tuesday.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott loaded heavy praise on Trump and the federal government, describing an “Aplus” effort.