Harvey aftermath:
A week after the hurricane slammed into Texas, millions struggle with the unfathomable misery left behind.
BEAUMONT, Texas — A week after Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas as a Category 4 monster, millions of people across the Gulf Coast struggled Friday with the unfathomable misery left behind as tens of thousands had no drinking water, were forced from homes or were trapped in cities transformed into islands.
Federal officials are keeping a tense watch at a stormravaged chemical plant east of Houston, where some of the volatile organic peroxides stored there had ignited a day earlier. Officials with Arkema, the French company operating the plant, said neighbors had reported hearing additional blasts at the plant, and later Friday towering flames erupted at the site. The company had predicted that the remaining containers of peroxides would ignite.
The Environmental Protection Agency and local officials said an analysis of the smoke that came from the plant Thursday showed no reason for alarm. No serious injuries were reported. Still, authorities evacuated an area around the plant.
In Houston, officials 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 grueling work of searching home to home, while state authorities warned that numerous rivers and basins, swollen after Harvey’s rainfall, continue to pose risks of “life-threatening” flooding.
As of Friday, 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,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “This is not going to be a short-term 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 100 miles east of Houston, residents and officials faced 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.
On Friday, city police opened a water distribution point near the city center, not far from the still rising and fast-moving Neches River. Each vehicle to visit the distribution point “will receive bottled water,” the police department said in a statement on its Facebook page.
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, only to discover that this was impossible and turn back, driving the wrong way on Highway 90.
About 20 miles 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 remained underwater as Harvey’s rainfall continued lapping at the massive oil refineries and natural gas facilities that ring it.