Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Houston grapples with Harvey mess
Crews fan out in city; Pence joins in cleanup
HOUSTON — Rescuers began a block-by-block search of tens of thousands of Houston homes Thursday, pounding on doors and shouting as they looked for anyone — alive or dead — who was left behind in Harvey’s floodwaters.
Also, figures now show that the water damaged more than 87,000 homes and destroyed nearly 7,000 statewide.
On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence helped clear storm debris in Rockport and comforted Texans grappling in the aftermath of Harvey’s destruction.
Also Thursday, the loss of electrical power at a chemical plant near Houston set off explosions, and the city of Beaumont, near the Texas-Louisiana
line, lost its public water supply.
Meanwhile, the remnants of Hurricane Harvey pushed northeast, raising the risk of flooding as far north as Kentucky.
More than 200 firefighters, police officers and members of a search-and-rescue team fanned out across Houston’s Meyerland neighborhood to search for survivors and bodies. The streets were dry but heaped with soggy furniture, carpet and wood pulled from damaged homes.
“We don’t think we’re going to find any humans, but we’re prepared if we do,” said District Chief James Pennington of the Houston Fire Department.
The confirmed death toll stood at 31, although it is expected to rise. By midday Thursday, the temporary command center in a J.C. Penney parking lot had received no reports of more bodies found during the searches, which are expected to take up to two weeks.
Rather than spray-painting neon X’s on the outsides of homes they checked, as rescuers in New Orleans did 12 years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, crews in Houston used GPS devices to log the homes. That avoids alerting potential thieves that the homes may be vacant.
Houston public schools Thursday pushed back the start of classes by two weeks. The nation’s seventh-largest district had been scheduled to reopen Monday but will now begin school on Sept. 11.
Houston’s two major airports were slowly resuming full service. Limited bus and light-rail service had also resumed, as well as trash pickup.
As floodwaters receded in the city, attention shifted a bit to a region near the Texas-Louisiana state line.
Some residents in Beaumont, Texas, grew anxious after the city of nearly 120,000 people lost water service when its main pump station became overwhelmed by the swollen Neches River. Also, officials said flooded roads were making it difficult to set up bottled-water distribution stations.
On Thursday, a procession of about 10 vehicles carrying people searching for water followed a pickup that was towing a trailer packed with bottled water for emergency workers. The truck circled a downtown Beaumont block before Letorisha Hollier hopped out of the first car in the procession. “Give us a case!” Hollier shouted. Her persistence paid off as a firefighter handed her the water.
Beaumont police spokesman Carol Riley said there were “some disturbances” in supermarkets because people were concerned about water.
The lack of water forced Baptist Beaumont Hospital to move patients by ambulances and helicopters to other facilities, including some who had been taken there from flooded nursing homes. Hospital spokesman Mary Poole said the hospital was able to discharge some other patients.
In nearby Port Arthur, the Coast Guard used baskets and harnesses to pull people out of a neighborhood where water was chest-deep. Many residents of second-floor apartments decided to stay.
Harvey initially roared ashore as a Category 4 hurricane in Texas on Aug. 25, then went back out to sea and lingered off the coast as a tropical storm for days, inundating flood-prone Houston.
The storm dropped close to 52 inches of rain, the heaviest tropical downpour ever recorded in the continental U.S.
Although it has been downgraded to a tropical depression, Harvey is still expected to dump heavy rain on parts of Louisiana, Tennessee and Kentucky through today.
Texas’ latest statewide damage surveys revealed the scope of the destruction. The figures from the Texas Department of Public Safety indicated that nearly 50,000 homes had minor damage and 37,000 had major damage. At least 6,800 homes were destroyed.
About 325,000 people have sought federal emergency aid in the wake of Harvey. More than $57 million in individual assistance has already been paid out, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said.
As rescues continue, so does the search for shelter among people left homeless by the storm. Emergency officials reported 32,000 people in shelters across Texas.
“The shelter mission is the biggest battle that we have right now,” FEMA Administrator Brock Long said.
A FEMA official in Harris County, which encompasses Houston, said the agency was looking for ways to house people who lost their homes. The priority is to get them into temporary housing, with hotels being one option, he said.
“Right now, nothing is off the table,” Tom Fargione said. “This is a tremendous disaster in terms of size and scope. I want to get thinking beyond traditional methodologies you’ve seen in the past.”
CHEMICAL WORRIES
In Crosby, Texas, 30 miles northeast of downtown Houston, at least 2 tons of unstable chemicals used in such products as plastics and paint exploded and burned at a flood-crippled plant early Thursday, sending up a plume of acrid black smoke.
The blaze at the Arkema Inc. chemical plant burned out around midday Thursday, but emergency crews continued to hold back because of the danger that eight other trailers containing the same compound could explode, too.
No serious injuries were reported, although 15 sheriff’s deputies went to the hospital after inhaling fumes from the plant, the Harris County sheriff’s office said on Twitter. The officers were examined and released.
Company officials believed that the smoke inhaled by the deputies was “a nontoxic irritant,” the sheriff’s office said.
Long initially described the smoke as “incredibly dangerous,” although the agency later backed away from that statement, saying the administrator had spoken out of an abundance of caution.
The Environmental Protection Agency and Texas environmental regulators called the health risks minimal but urged residents downwind to stay indoors with windows closed to avoid inhaling the smoke. The Texas environmental agency called the smoke “especially acrid and irritating” and said it can impair breathing and inflame the eyes, nose and throat.
“It is not anything toxic; it is not anything that we feel is a danger to the community at all,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said at a news conference Thursday.
Two explosions in the middle of the night blew open a trailer containing the chemicals, lighting up the sky with 30- to 40- foot flames, authorities said. Aerial footage showed a trailer, its sides melted, burning in a flooded lot.
On Thursday, Rich Rennard, an executive at Arkema, said the chemical compounds had been transferred to refrigerated containers after the plant lost electricity. But he said those containers failed, too, causing the chemicals in one unit to burn. Rennard said more explosions are expected from the remaining containers.
Arkema had warned earlier in the week that an explosion of organic peroxides stored at the plant was imminent because Harvey’s floodwaters had engulfed the plant’s backup generators and knocked out the refrigeration necessary to keep the compounds from degrading and catching fire.
When the chemicals warm, they start to decompose, which creates more heat and can quickly lead to a rapid, explosive reaction. Some organic peroxides also produce flammable vapors as they decompose. The plant was shut down Aug. 25 as Hurricane Harvey neared, and a skeleton crew of 11 was left behind to ensure that the chemicals remained safe in cold storage.
All employees were removed from the plant before the blasts, and as many as 5,000 people who live within 1½ miles of the plant had been warned Tuesday to evacuate.
Texas A&M chemical safety expert Sam Mannan said the risk management plan that Arkema was required by state and federal law to develop did not address how it would deal with power and refrigeration failures or flooding.
A 2016 analysis that he conducted with university colleagues ranked the Crosby plant among the 70 or so facilities with the biggest potential to cause harm in greater Houston. That finding was based on such factors as the type and amount of chemicals and the population density.
Officials with Arkema, which is based in France, did not immediately return calls on the plant’s contingency planning.
Rachel Moreno, a spokesman for the fire marshal of Harris County, would not discuss details of the risk management plan, such as how high up the plant’s backup generators sit.
Arkema officials did not directly notify area emergency managers about the generator failure, Moreno said. The warning instead came by way of the plant’s workers, who told the Crosby Volunteer Fire Department about it when they were rescued during the storm, she said.
PENCE PITCHES IN
In Rockport, Pence donned blue work gloves to clear debris and dispensed hugs. The extent of the ruin was measured in the mounds of black garbage bags heaped outside nearly every home. Pence, wearing jeans and cowboy boots, worked up a sweat in the 90-degree heat as he helped clear tree limbs at one boarded-up residence.
“We’re going to stay with you every step until we bring southeast Texas back bigger and better than ever before,” Pence promised the crowd that gathered at a church damaged by Harvey. The vice president’s wife, Karen Pence, offered a prayer seeking blessings for those affected by the storm.
Brittany Naro of Corpus Christi, who was on hand at a home that Pence visited, said his presence meant a lot “because this is devastating.”
Speaking of Pence and President Donald Trump, she added: “They didn’t have to come. What more can you ask for?”
While Pence’s visit, which also included him touring the area aboard a V-22 Osprey military aircraft, was about making personal connections with storm victims and volunteers helping in the recovery effort, Trump’s Tuesday trip to Corpus Christi and Austin focused on meeting with state and local emergency management officials.
The president drew some criticism for not directly mentioning the loss of life and the suffering of hurricane victims during his visit. He tweeted Wednesday that after seeing “first hand the horror & devastation” wrought by Harvey, “my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!”
Trump, however, saw little damage during his visit to Corpus Christi. Mostly, he saw boarded-up windows, a few downed tree limbs and fences askew.
The president plans to return to the storm region Saturday, with stops in inundated Houston and Lake Charles, La.