Floodwaters drop in Houston as Harvey rolls north
HOUSTON — Harvey’s floodwaters started dropping across much of the Houston area and the sun came out Wednesday in a glimmer of hope for the stricken city, even as the storm doubled back toward land and battered communities farther east, near the Texas-louisiana line.
The scope of the devastation wrought by the hurricane came into sharper focus, meanwhile, and the murky green floodwaters from the record-breaking, 4-foot deluge of rain began yielding up bodies as predicted.
The confirmed death toll climbed to 23, 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.
Authorities are investigating at least 17 more deaths to determine whether they were storm-related.
“Unfortunately, it seems that our worst thoughts are being realized,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said after the van was found in 10 feet of muddy water.
While conditions in the nation’s fourthlargest city appeared to improve, authorities warned that the crisis across the region is far from over. The storm, in fact, took a turn for the worse east of Houston, close to the Louisiana line.
Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, struggled with rising floodwaters and worked to evacuate 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 45 mph.
Forecasters predicted that a wobbling and weakening Harvey will be downgraded to a tropical depression late Wednesday or early Thursday and completely dissipate within three to four days.
But it still has lots of rain and potential damage to spread, with 4 to 8 inches forecast from the Louisiana-texas line into Tennessee and Kentucky through Friday. Some spots may get as much as a foot of rain, raising the risk of more flooding.
For much of the rest 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 Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city’s two major airports would be up and running again in the afternoon.
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 drivethru restaurants and emerged from a store with groceries.
Xyrius Langston, 26, went fishing along with several family members at a pond in the Houston suburb of Missouri City.
“I’ve been waiting to go fishing for a while now,” he said. “Once the water went down this morning, we were out.”
At the same time, many thousands of Houstonarea 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 centers in the Houston area are getting more than 1,000 calls an hour from people seeking help. About 10,000 more National Guard troops are being deployed to Texas, bringing the total to 24,000, Gov. Greg Abbot said.
Altogether, more than 1,000 homes in Texas were destroyed and close to 50,000 damaged, and over 32,000 people were in shelters across the state, emergency officials reported.
“This is going to be an incredibly large disaster,” Brock Long, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in Washington. “We’re not going to know the true cost for years to come . ... But it’s going to be huge.”