THOUSANDS FLEE
Harvey’s rain, floods keep Houston paralyzed
of from single-story Floodwaterscould inside be as heard homes Harvey reached pleading Monday pouredthe rooflinesfor and rain help peopleon the Houston area for a fourth day after a chaotic weekend of rising water and rescues. The city was still mostly paralyzed by one of the largest downpours in U.S. history. And there was no relief in sight. With nearly 2 more feet of rain expected on top of the 30-plus inches in some places, authorities worried that the worst might be yet to come.
As historic rains inundate the nation’s fourth-largest city, the number of people requiring emergency shelter is swelling into the tens of thousands and creating a massive challenge for rescue and response teams.
Monday, more than 5,500 weary refugees packed the city’s cavernous convention center, and Mayor Sylvester Turner said he expects the numbers to rise sharply by Tuesday. FEMA Administrator Brock Long said more than 30,000 people ultimately could need shelter as the storm continues to pound the region with unrelenting rains and flooding.
“The sheltering mission is going to be a very heavy lift,” Long said. About 50 Texas counties and parts of Louisiana will face serious repercussions from the “landmark event,” he said.
Officials put out a call for boats, and Long said people across the nation could help with financial donations or by volunteering.
“We need citizens to be involved,” Long said. “You could not draw this forecast up. You could not dream this forecast up.”
Across much of the city, Harris County and southeast Texas, waters rose to new heights Monday, plunging the greater Houston area and more than 6 million people into uncharted chaos.
KHOU-TV, citing interviews
with relatives, said four children, ages 6 to 16, and their greatgrandparents drowned in a white van Sunday afternoon while trying to flee rising floodwaters. The report said the driver, another relative, survived.
Turner said 3,000 people were rescued from the overwhelming floodwaters. City Police Chief Art Acevedo said 185 rescue requests were pending. The city has grappled with 75,000 calls to 911; the system was backed up but hadn’t gone down.
The Coast Guard said it had conducted 300 air and 1,200 boat rescues and had 20 helicopters and more than 20 boat teams in the Houston area. Coast Guard Capt. Kevin Oditt called Harvey an “all-hands-on-deck event.”
Gov. Greg Abbott activated the state’s entire National Guard force, increasing to 12,000 the number of guardsmen deployed to flooded communities.
Some areas of southeast Texas already have seen more than 30 inches of rain, said Louis Uccellini, director of the National Weather Service. A wide swath of the region has been hit with 15 to 20 inches of rain, and that much more could be coming, he said.
In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers began releasing water from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs in west Houston. The release was necessary, officials said, to avoid a collapse of the reservoirs’ dam and inundate downtown Houston. But it put several thousand homes at further flood risk.
“The idea is to prepare . ... Pack up what you need and put it in your vehicle and when the sun comes up, get out,” Jeff Lindner of the Harris County Flood Control District said Sunday. “And you don’t have to go far, you just need to get out of this area.”
Harvey, spinning near Port O’Connor, Texas, was forecast to move back into the Gulf of Mexico before making a second landfall along the Texas/Louisiana border, probably on Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center said. Isolated storm totals may reach 50 inches in some areas around Houston.
Harvey is then likely to slowly move northeast across Louisiana and Arkansas as a tropical depression into Saturday.
President Trump, who was set to visit Texas on Tuesday, issued a federal disaster declaration Monday for many parishes in southwestern Louisiana. Gov. John Bel Edwards sought the declaration, saying he expects “significant damage” in his state.
In Houston, the George R. Brown Convention Center was outfitted to handle 5,000 evacuees.
More than a dozen smaller shelters have been opened across Harris County.
Desiree Mallard, who carried her toddler son to the center, said she initially heard that residents were advised not to leave the city, so she didn’t.
She said she finally fled her apartment by floating her son out on an air mattress.
“I could have (left), if I would have known it was going to be this bad, but I didn’t know,” she said. “And then when it got bad, they said, ‘It’s too late.’ ”
A Kroger Supermarket on Westpark Tollway in West Houston reopened at noon Monday. It quickly drew a long line of shoppers, who waited in the pelting rain outside and then endured one-hour checkout lines for a chance to stock up.
Shopper Donna Balin, 45, said her house in nearby Seven Meadows didn’t flood, but she was worried that plans to release water from reservoirs could push the flooding closer to home.
“There wasn’t a lot of warning, like in previous storms,” she said.
Outside Houston, communities scrambled to house the displaced residents fleeing the rising waters and heeding the increased calls for mandatory evacuations of flood-prone areas.
In Richmond, 30 miles south of Houston, the Red Cross was moving its shelter from a church community center to a bigger high school in nearby Rosenberg located further away from the floods. There were around 79 people at the shelter with another 10 on the way, officials there said.
Hector Marez, 34, had planned a 58th birthday party for his mother, who had driven last week to his home in Richmond from her house in the Rio Grande Valley. But as the water starting rising, Marez was forced to leave his mother behind — along with a sister, brother-in-law, 1-year-old niece and 2-year-old goddaughter — and wade down his street in waist-high water to look for help.
He arrived at a Richmond shelter Sunday night without them.
“I’m worried for them,” he said. “This has been crazy.”