Texas rainfall tops record
With totals in some areas exceeding 50 inches, Houston declares a curfew. Death toll hits 18, including policeman.
HOUSTON — City officials in Houston imposed an overnight curfew to guard against opportunistic crimes as Tropical Storm Harvey continued to deluge southeast Texas on Tuesday, breaking the record for the most extreme rainfall on the U.S. mainland.
Authorities announced the curfew — midnight to 5 a.m. — after police arrested a crew of armed robbers who were hijacking vehicles, and officials warned residents of people impersonating Homeland Security investigators. There also were fears of looting as thousands of houses lay partially submerged and abandoned.
Since Harvey made landfall Friday night as a hurricane, some areas around Houston have seen in excess of 50 inches of rain — more than what they usually receive in a year. Authorities said the death toll had risen to 18, including a Houston police officer who drowned in his car on the way to work.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Mont Belvieu industrial suburb east of Houston recorded 51.12 inches of water since Harvey’s arrival, breaking the highest previous record of 48 inches for a single storm, from Tropical Storm Amelia in Medina, Texas, in 1978.
“It’s the heaviest storm on record anywhere in the U.S. outside Hawaii,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas state climatologist and a professor at Texas A&M University. “And it’s
still raining.”
With muddy brown water engulfing huge areas of the nation’s fourth-largest city and much of the Gulf Coast, tens of thousands were forced to seek refuge in shelters.
“In four days, we’ve seen a trillion gallons of water in Harris County — enough water to run Niagara Falls for 15 days,” said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District, who estimated that up to 100,000 homes in the 1,777-square-mile area may have flooded. “It’s beyond anything we’ve ever seen and will probably ever see.”
After moving slowly east Tuesday evening, Harvey was poised to turn northeast early Wednesday and make a second landfall, moving inland over southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana.
After assuring Texas on Monday that Congress would deliver swift federal assistance, President Trump visited the stormravaged state Tuesday, saying he hoped the region’s long road to recovery would be viewed as a model.
He did not venture to Houston, where rescuers continued to rove from neighborhood to neighborhood in motorboats and kayaks, desperately trying to pluck residents from waterlogged homes. As a light rain drizzled, a reservoir west of downtown Houston spilled over Tuesday morning for the first time in its history, pouring yet more water onto already sodden communities.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo broke down in tears Tuesday as he announced that Sgt. Steve Perez, 60, a 34-year veteran of his department, drowned during the weekend while trying to get to work through an underpass in the darkness.
“He laid down his life,” Acevedo said during a news briefing, noting that before Perez left for work he told his wife, who urged him to stay home: “I’ve got work to do.”
Later in the day, Acevedo said officers had rescued 4,100 people across the city and had more than 500 calls holding. The city’s fire chief, Samuel Pena, said his department had performed nearly 700 rescues.
“We’re still trying to get to folks,” Acevedo said. “Don’t give up on us. Seek the higher ground. We will get to you.”
But the death toll kept rising. Local authorities reported a man in Montgomery County, north of Houston, drowned Monday night while trying to swim across a flooded road. In Galveston County, Clear Creek Independent School District reported that a former track and football coach had died in the flooding.
Officials in Harris County, which includes Houston, had already reported at least six “potentially storm-related” fatalities.
A 60-year-old woman died in Porter, a small community north of Houston, when a large oak fell on her mobile home. Another person died in the small coastal town of Rockport, near where Harvey made landfall. A 52-year-old homeless man was found dead in La Marque, a small city near Galveston.
Local officials were also looking into reports that a family of six — four children and their great-grandparents — drowned Sunday near Greens Bayou in east Houston. Virginia Saldivar, 59, said her brother-in-law, Sam, was driving her grandchildren and her husband’s parents to higher ground when the current swept up the van.
In some areas in and around Houston, the water was so deep that rain sensors no longer were working. The Harris County Flood Control District, a government agency that works to reduce the effects of f looding in the area, announced that multiple water level and rain sensors were out of service because of flooding.
In Brazoria County, south of Houston, the Brazos River was beginning to overflow its banks. On Tuesday morning, a levee breached in the Columbia Lakes neighborhood.
“We are asking residents to please get out,” said Sharon Trower, public information officer for the county, which already has rescued hundreds of residents after severe flooding from heavy rainfall. “The additional river flooding is just going to be catastrophic.”
While flooding continued across southeast Texas, there was at least some good news: Flash-flood watches were dropped for western portions of the Houston area as light to moderate rain fell Monday night. The National Weather Service said the threat of flooding is gradually shifting east.
“They say this too shall pass,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said during an early evening news briefing as the sun appeared. “After the clouds pass, the sun will shine. In this city — regardless of the storm clouds, regardless of the rain — in this city the sun will shine.”
And as the sun finally returned to Houston, so did the unmistakable sight of traffic. Cars and trucks piled up at stoplights on roads that had only recently been totally abandoned as Texans waited out the storm in their homes. In the suburb of Rosenberg, there was even a pedestrian: a pale teenager in dark clothing, with a bowl haircut and headphones, who was dancing — doing the Robot, actually — on a street corner as traffic passed.
molly.hennessy-fiske @latimes.com Special correspondent Jarvie reported from Atlanta and Times staff writer Hennessy-Fiske from Houston. Times staff writers Matt Pearce in Houston and Melissa Etehad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.