The devastation in Houston continues and now we have lost one of the blue family. The men and women of the LVPPA send our condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Sergeant Steve Perez, who drowned Sunday while driving on duty in the Houston floodwater. We will never forget!
At least 22 confirmed dead as Harvey pivots toward Louisiana
The biggest rainstorm in the history of the continental United States finally began to move away from Houston on Tuesday, as the remnants of Hurricane Harvey and its endless, merciless rain bands spun east to menace Louisiana instead.
A storm surge warning for the coast from Holly Beach to Morgan City, La., said water levels could rise two to four feet above normally dry land when the center of the storm approached for a second landfall Tuesday night, The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang reported. To the east, New Orleans was under a flash flood warning Tuesday morning.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) said in a news conference Tuesday to “prepare and pray.”
In Texas, the storm was still moving east, still deadly.
In Beaumont, Tex., 85 miles east of Houston, at least 10 inches of rain fell on Tuesday afternoon alone. In the deluge, a mother and child got out of their car on a flooded freeway service road and were swept away. The child clung to her mother for half a mile. Police and firefighters got to them just before they went under a trestle and were lost for good. Only the child survived, police said.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency — its most severe flood alert — into Tuesday night.
After more than 50 inches of rain over four days, Houston was less of a city and more of an archipelago: a chain of urbanized islands in a muddy brown sea. All around it, flat-bottomed boats and helicopters were still plucking victims from rooftops, and water was still pouring in from overfilled reservoirs and swollen rivers.
Between 25 and 30 percent of Harris County — home to 4.5 million people in Houston and its near suburbs — was flooded by Tuesday afternoon, according to an estimate from Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the county flood control district. That’s at least 444 square miles, an area six times the size of the District of Columbia.