Harvey Live Updates: The Storm Shifts and the Rain Keeps Falling
As water began to recede Wednesday in some parts of flood-ravaged Houston, Harvey, now a tropical depression, shifted its wrath to the Beaumont-Port Arthur area of Texas, hitting the region with record-breaking rainfall and devastating floods.
“Our whole city is underwater right now but we are coming!” Port Arthur’s mayor, Derrick Freeman, said in a Facebook message overnight, as desperate residents sent out calls for help on social media.
Water filled homes and submerged roads, evacuees crowded shelters, local officials urged people who needed rescue to hang sheets or towels from windows, forecasters warned that the storm could spawn tornadoes, and the Louisiana State Police closed Interstate 10 heading toward Beaumont, just a few miles from the state line. The rain was expected to continue until Friday.
In Houston, Mayor Sylvester Turner reiterated on Wednesday evening that he was pressing for the city to return to normal as quickly as possible. Several public safety officials said the city was beginning its transition from focusing on rescues to instead focusing on recovery.
Vice President Mike Pence is expected to visit four locations around Corpus Christi, Tex., on Thursday, to meet with storm survivors, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the trip were still being worked out.
Here is the latest:
• The storm was downgraded to a tropical depression on Wednesday night. It is expected move through central Louisiana on Wednesday night, then move through northeastern Louisiana and northwestern Mississippi on Thursday.
• Officials have reported at least 38 deaths that were related or suspected to be related to the storm. The victims include a police officer who died on his way to work; a mother who was swept into a canal while her child survived by clinging to her; a woman who died when a tree fell on her mobile home; and a family that is believed to have drowned while trying to escape floodwaters in a van.
• More than 32,000 people were in shelters in Texas, and 30,000 shelter beds were available, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said. Houston officials said the city’s largest shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center had 8,000 and was no longer accepting evacuees. New evacuees would be taken to NRG Center, a conference hall in Houston.
• Houston’s two airports reopened, and airport officials said on Wednesday night that United Airlines had boarded a flight from Los Angeles bound for Houston. Five more flights were on their way and three aircrafts were scheduled to leave the Houston area. International flights are expected to resume Thursday.
• The governor said 210,000 people have registered with FEMA for assistance.
• The National Guard has conducted 8,500 rescues since the storm began, Mr. Abbott said, and the police and firefighters in the Houston area have done a similar number. About 24,000 National Guard troops will soon be deployed for disaster recovery in Texas.
• Times journalists are chronicling the storm and its aftermath. Here is a collection of the most powerful photographs, and a guide to our coverage.
• Follow Times correspondents covering the storm on Twitter: Manny Fernandez, Alan Blinder, Julie Turkewitz, Jack Healy, Dave Philipps, Annie Correal, Rick Rojas, Monica Davey, Richard Fausset, Richard Pérez-Peña and Audra Burch. A collection of their tweets is here.
• Are you in an affected area? If you are safe, and are able to, share your story by email to hurricane@nytimes.com. And here are ways you can contribute to relief efforts.
Port Arthur and Beaumont in Texas were hit hard.
Those cities and other places in Jefferson County, Tex., east of Houston, were desperate for help after heavy rain caused floodwaters to rise precipitously.
“The town looks like a lake, it really does. It’s like the whole town got dropped into Lake Sabine,” said Michael LeBouef, a retired surgical assistant who lives in Port Arthur. “The houses that are under water, it’s unreal.”
In Beaumont, emergency workers rescued a young girl who was floating in the floodwaters, suffering from hypothermia and clinging to her mother’s body. The mother died, but the girl was in stable condition, the police said.
The mother, identified by the police as Colette Sulcer, 41, had been driving down a service road when she pulled into a parking lot and got stuck. Ms. Sulcer and her daughter left the car, but were swept away, floating about half a mile, the police said. A group of emergency officials found the pair just before they were swept under a trestle. Had they floated under it, the workers would not have been able to save the child, the police said.
Local news reports from Port Arthur showed that shelters and homes were flooded, and residents and reporters said that there were not enough people answering emergency calls.
Rain fell with astonishing intensity in the county, which is home to about 254,000 people. Between 2 p.m. Tuesday and 1 a.m. Wednesday local time, almost 19 inches of rain hit Jack Brooks Regional Airport, between Beaumont and Port Arthur.
“Water’s still rising in most locations,” said Jonathan Brazzell, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service. “I don’t know what else to say, it’s just bad. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The rainfall total since the storm began reached more than 47 inches on Wednesday, and will climb. Rain was forecast to continue steadily through Wednesday and Thursday, before easing off on Friday.
A chemical plant outside Houston was at risk of exploding.
Floodwaters shut down refrigeration equipment at the plant, about 30 miles northeast of downtown, that keeps its chemicals stable.
The plant’s owner, Arkema, shut it down last Friday in anticipation of the storm, and a skeleton crew of 11 was left behind to ensure that the chemicals, which are kept in cold storage, remained safe.
But Arkema said the plant had been without power since Sunday, and the torrential rains and flooding had damaged backup generators. With the storage warehouse warming up, the crew transferred the chemicals to diesel-powered refrigerated trailers, but some of those had stopped working as well.
The crew was evacuated on Tuesday. Richard Rowe, the chief executive of Arkema’s North American division, told the Reuters news service that the company expected that the chemicals would catch fire and explode within the next six days. He said the company could not prevent that from happening because of the flooding.
The Arkema plant manufactures organic peroxides, which are used in making plastic and other materials. 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.
Austin and Dallas prepare to absorb thousands of schoolchildren.
The cities of Austin and Dallas were expecting to absorb thousands of schoolchildren displaced by the storm, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of 68 large urban school districts. In both cities, school officials were waiving certain paperwork requirements, including immunization records and birth certificates, in order to quickly enroll displaced children, he said.
Robyn L. Harris, a spokeswoman for the Dallas Independent School District, said that the students would be classified as homeless and that the district was ready to provide psychological counseling and health services.
The Houston Independent School District remained closed, but announced that when school resumes, all students would receive three meals a day, regardless of a family’s income, for the school year.
Mr. Casserly has been working with urban districts in Texas over the last week and also assisted school officials after past disasters, including Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York. He said he expected Congress to pass special disaster relief legislation, but that after previous catastrophes, the federal funding provided for schools did not come close to covering the costs associated with getting classes back up and running.
Houston’s mayor pushes for a return to normalcy.
Mr. Turner, the Houston mayor, said Wednesday evening that a citywide curfew would take effect again from midnight until 5 a.m. He said heavy debris pick up began Wednesday and regular trash collection would resume on Thursday. “We’re going to do our very best to push the pace,” he said.
Mr. Turner said he wanted the Astros baseball team to play a scheduled home game on Friday.
But thousands of people remained in shelters, still seeking information about their families and friends, and about the state of their homes and their city.
Officials also said that about 75,000 CenterPoint Energy customers remained without power as of late Wednesday — down from about 100,000.
Though the inundation from days of record rainfall has begun to recede, swollen rivers still have not crested in some places. Art Acevedo, the police chief, said that 20 people who had been reported missing since the start of the storm remained unaccounted for.
Source:- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/hurricane-harvey-flooding-houston.html
