‘Massive cleanup’ under way
It will take years for Texas to recover from Harvey, but the immediate misery and danger are far from over.
A week after Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas as a Category 4 monster, millions of people across the Gulf Coast are struggling with the unfathomable misery left behind, with tens of thousands left without drinking water, forced from their homes or trapped in cities transformed into islands.
In Houston, officials yesterday urged people living in a swath of the western part of the city to evacuate due to flooding.
First responders in that city and across Texas continued the gruelling work of searching home after home, while state authorities warned that numerous rivers and basins, swollen after Harvey’s rainfall, continued to pose risks of ‘‘life-threatening’’ flooding.
As of last night, officials across Texas had recorded at least 45 deaths confirmed or suspected of being storm-related, a tally that may grow as recovery efforts unfold.
‘‘This is going to be a massive, massive cleanup process,’’ the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, told ABC’s Good Morning America.
‘‘This is not going to be a shortterm project. This is going to be a multiyear project for Texas to be able to dig out of this catastrophe.’’
In the city of Beaumont, about 160 kilometres east of Houston, residents and officials face crises on multiple fronts.
The city lost its drinking water supply during wind-whipped floods. First the main pump station was knocked out, then a secondary source. It is not clear when the network will be turned back on.
‘‘We will have to wait until the water levels from this historical flood recede before we can determine the extent of damage and make any needed repairs,’’ the city said. ‘‘There is no way to determine how long this will take at this time.’’
Officials are scrambling to figure out a way to restore access to water in the low-lying city. For a second day, those stranded in Beaumont had no way to drink, flush their toilets or even bathe after wading into murky floodwaters in search of safety or to rescue others.
The city’s police department yesterday set up a water distribution point near the city centre, not far from the still rising and fast-moving Neches River.
Carol Riley, a spokeswoman for the Beaumont police department, said she had heard that a National Guard unit had left Baton Rouge and was en route to Beaumont with more water and pumping supplies, but so far most of the help had come from private industry in Beaumont.
Beaumont had issued a voluntary evacuation order for its 118,000 residents. But for many of those still in the city, there was no way out, with murky floodwaters blocking roads in every direction. Police said some people tried to leave anyway, only to discover that this was impossible and turning back, driving the wrong way on Highway 90. We’re running low on water and on food. Our shelters are filling up. We are getting them food, for now, but . . . we are in trouble.
Water rescues in the Beaumont area continued yesterday, although the number of requests had subsided somewhat since Friday, said Halley Morrow, a police spokeswoman.
‘‘The areas of our city that are close to the main waterways like Neches, the village creek, some bayous, are not receding.’’
At Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas on College St, a parking lot became a helipad for a stream of medical helicopters. Spokeswoman Mary Poole said the hospital was in the process of transferring patients to other local facilities after the city’s loss of water.
‘‘That’s a game changer for us,’’ she said. ‘‘We have medical supplies, we had food, we had staff. But we never dreamed we would lose water supply.’’
About 35km south of Beaumont, the city of Port Arthur, Texas saw no respite even as the Sun came out and the immediate threat of rain was over.
Much of the city near the Louisiana border remains underwater as floods caused by Harvey’s rainfall continue lapping at the massive oil refineries and natural gas facilities that ring it. Water still covers many of the highways connecting the Gulf Coast community with the wider world.
Sergeant Lam Nguyen of the Port Arthur police estimated that 75 per cent of residents there lost their homes – including him. He and nine members of his extended family had to be rescued as floodwaters rushed in on Wednesday, and Nguyen said he was still worried about what was to come.
‘‘We’re running low on water and on food,’’ said Nguyen, who was wearing a red polo shirt instead of his usual police uniform, which was lost in the floods. ‘‘Our shelters are filling up. We are getting them food, for now, but we are running out of food. We’re doing all we can now.’’
Nguyen stood in a parking lot outside a Walmart store that had been turned into an operations command centre for local police and National Guard troops. He was in charge. The Walmart was still open, but there was line of more than 100 people waiting patiently with carts to get in before the shelves were stripped bare.
‘‘We are in trouble,’’ Nguyen said.
More than 42,000 people are being housed at hundreds of shelters across Texas, Abbott said. He also said another 3000 people from Texas were in Louisiana shelters.
In some cases, the storm has been chasing people from shelter to shelter.
A Jasper County judge said about 350 people were being housed at Buna High School, which opened on Thursday as a makeshift shelter for people from other counties – mainly Orange County, after its own shelters became flooded. was safe, but had no power.
The soggy remains of Harvey, meanwhile, have spilled further to the northeast – still carrying fearsome rain a week after surging ashore in Texas. Flash flood warnings have been posted for mountainous central Kentucky, and nearly all the state and neighbouring Tennessee have been advised by the National Weather Service to be on the watch for possible flooding.
The Trump administration, in a letter to Congress yesterday, has asked for a US$7.85 billion appropriation for response and initial It recovery efforts. US President Donald Trump is planning a second visit to the region today.
As the storm tumbled northward, so did the scramble to get out of its way.
In Nashville, Tennessee, more than 50 people were evacuated from flood-swamped streets. In northwest Alabama, residents were on watch for possible tornadoes after high winds damaged several homes near Reform.
Harvey was not expected to dissipate until today over Ohio, the National Hurricane Centre reported.
Most of the confirmed deaths linked to the storm occurred in Harris County, home to Houston. The National Weather Service reported that Houston’s total rainfall in August – just short of a metre – was more than double its previous record for rainfall in a single month.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner yesterday called on some people who live not far from the city’s reservoirs and have water in their homes to evacuate, describing this as a ‘‘strong’’ voluntary request – and warning that a mandatory order could follow.
Turner’s comments came after the US Army Corps of Engineers said it expected to continue releasing water from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, both located west of downtown Houston, for the next 10 to 15 days.
‘‘If you are living in a home where there’s water in your home, I’m going to ask you in the strongest of terms,’’ Turner said. ‘‘Because to remain in your homes for the next 10 or 15 days is simply not in your best interests, and neither is it in the best interests of our first responders.’’
Turner called on people across part of western Houston to leave their homes if water had already entered. ‘‘If you have water in your home today, the odds are you’re going to continue to have water in your home over the next 10 to 15 days.’’
The Houston fire chief said there could be between 15,000 and 20,000 homes in the area where authorities were urging people to evacuate, though he noted that most people had already fled that area.
Jeff Lindner, of the Harris County Flood Control District, put it into staggering perspective: at the height of the flooding, 70 per cent of the county’s 4600 square kilometres were covered with at least 45 centimetres of water. That is an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. An estimate released by the National Weather Service said that more than 72,000sq km were covered in at least 50cm of rain.
Next comes the reckoning. People now have begun to return to their homes to get a first, sobering view of what was lost and what can be saved.
Authorities are still trying to tally the number of homes damaged or destroyed in the disaster. Texas localities have reported that as of Friday, more than 185,000 homes had suffered damage due to Harvey, including more than 9000 that were destroyed, according to a Texas Department of Public Safety report.
But that figure is a preliminary estimate, and does not include figures from heavily populated Houston, which suffered intense flooding. The real number is likely to be far higher once authorities are able to assess areas that are currently unreachable.
Thousands of people – the luckier ones – have returned to homes that are waterlogged but salvageable.
‘‘We raised up everything,’’ said Susan Rath, who returned to a home in south Houston where she and husband Jim had tried to place valuables higher before evacuating. The water got higher still. They returned to sodden drywall, destroyed furniture, and a wardrobe full of blouses soaked up to the elbow. ‘‘It didn’t matter,’’ she said. The Raths had just rebuilt the house, after it was destroyed in a 2015 flood. Now, they will have to decide whether to rebuild again.
‘‘The main thing is, this is just stuff,’’ Jim Rath said. ‘‘And the more stuff you have, the more you’re controlled by it.’’
There are early indications that yet another tropical storm may form in the western Gulf of Mexico next week. Yesterday, the National Hurricane Centre described it as a tropical wave that had the potential to strengthen as it drew moisture from the gulf.
‘‘If this system does develop, it could bring additional rainfall to portions of the Texas and Louisiana coasts,’’ the centre said.