The scenes from Houston were harrowing Sunday.
Residents
forging their way through furious floodwaters waist- and chest-deep in
some parts of the city, many gripping plastic trash bags stuffed with
their belongings. Trucks pushing through inundated streets as cars and
other parked vehicles quickly were becoming submerged.
Families urgently piling into canoes, rafts and anything inflatable to get to higher ground.
The
deluge from Tropical Storm Harvey was so intense that authorities were
urging residents to seek refuge on roofs as emergency crews struggled to
make their way through the city by land, water and air amid desperate
pleas for help.
Interstate 610, a freeway forming a
38-mile long loop around downtown Houston, was engulfed in floodwaters
that were creeping closer to overhead highway signs — another sign of
how dire the situation was becoming.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said authorities had
received more than 2,000 calls for help and would be opening the city’s
main convention center as a shelter.
"I don’t need
to tell anyone this is a very, very serious and unprecedented storm,”
Turner said at a news conference. “We have several hundred structural
flooding reports. We expect that number to rise pretty dramatically.”
Residents were being told to stay on roofs instead of climbing into attics — and to wave towels or sheets to flag down rescuers.
As
people fled to rooftops, the scene was strikingly similar to another
epic flooding event: 2005's Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural
disaster in U.S. history.
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