AUSTIN, Texas -- Your Weather On The 1s team says the last drops of Tropical Storm Harvey's rain will finally stop in Houston Wednesday, allowing the Bayou City to start drying out.
- The killer storm made a third landfall overnight just west of Cameron, Louisiana, and will push up across the Lower Mississippi Valley (radar loop) during the next 36 hours.Several more inches of rain is expected to fall in Houston, upper Texas coast, SW Louisiana
- River levels in Central Texas have peaked, starting to fall
- President Trump is in Texas for breifings in Corpus Christi before flying to Austin
- Authorities have confirmed at least 20 deaths; unconfirmed reports of missing or presumed dead growing
- Over 3,500 people rescued from flood waters in Houston
- 17,000 people in Texas shelters as a result of storm
- Severe Weather Resources: Storm Season
According to the National Weather Service in Houston, 6 million people experienced 30+ inches of rain, with the highest total of 51.88 inches reported at Cedar Bayou yesterday.
So far, it's estimated that Harvey has dumped more than 21 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana, and still counting.
Closer to home, a River Flood Warning continues for the Colorado above La Grange where Monday there was a crest of 54.18 feet, the highest in over 100 years. Water levels are dropping back to minor flood stage this morning.
-- Harvey Strikes Louisiana --
The Texas community of Port Arthur found itself increasingly isolated Wednesday as Harvey's rains flooded most major roads out of the city and swamped a shelter for victims fleeing the storm that ravaged the Houston area.
The crisis deepened in the coastal city after Harvey rolled ashore overnight for the second time in six days, this time hitting southwestern Louisiana, about 45 miles from Port Arthur.
Jefferson County sheriff's Deputy Marcus McLellan said he wasn't sure where the 100 or so evacuees at the civic center in Port Arthur would be sent. Most were perched on bleacher seats to stay dry, their belongings left mostly on the floor under about a foot (30 centimeters) of water, he said.
"People started coming to the shelter on Monday," McLellan said. "And now it's just all the rainfall that's coming in, and there's a canal by there also that's overflowing."
In the Houston area, meanwhile, some sunshine was finally in the forecast after five straight days of rain that totaled close to 52 inches, the heaviest tropical downpour ever recorded in the continental United States. But the crisis was far from over.
At least 20 deaths have been recorded, and authorities fear many more bodies may be found when the floodwaters start receding.
The dead include a former football and track coach in suburban Houston and a woman who died after she and her young daughter were swept into a rain-swollen drainage canal in Beaumont. The child was rescued clinging to her dead mother, authorities said.
Some 13,000 people have been rescued in the Houston area, and more than 17,000 have sought refuge in Texas shelters. With the water still rising in places and many hard-hit areas still inaccessible, those numbers seemed certain to increase, too.
Harvey initially came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane in Texas on Friday, then executed a U-turn and lingered off the coast as a tropical storm for days, inundating flood-prone Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city.
Early Wednesday, Harvey paid a return visit, coming ashore near Cameron, Louisiana, and bringing with it 45 mph winds and a heavy dose of rain.
Houston's largest shelter housed 10,000 of the displaced — twice its initial intended capacity — and two additional mega-shelters opened Tuesday for the overflow.
Louisiana's governor offered to take in Harvey victims from Texas, returning a favor done by Houston after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And televangelist Joel Osteen opened his 16,000-seat Houston megachurch after he was blasted on social media for not acting to help families displaced by the storm.
In an apparent response to scattered reports of looting, Houston imposed a midnight-to-5 a.m. curfew, with police saying violators would be arrested.
Houston has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for more supplies, including cots and food, for an additional 10,000 people, said Mayor Sylvester Turner.
In Port Arthur, Sheriff Zena Stephens told KFDM-TV that authorities were struggling to rescue residents from the flooding.
Mayor Derrick Freeman posted on his Facebook page: "city is underwater right now but we are coming!" He also urged residents to get to higher ground and to avoid becoming trapped in attics.
Harvey is expected to weaken as it slogs through Louisiana and makes it way northward, with Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri on alert for flooding in the next couple of days.
"Once we get this thing inland during the day, it's the end of the beginning," said National Hurricane Center meteorologist Dennis Feltgen. "Texas is going to get a chance to finally dry out as this system pulls out."
But Feltgen cautioned: "We're not done with this. There's still an awful lot of real estate and a lot of people who are going to feel the impacts of the storm."
Still, the reprieve from the rain in Houston was welcome.
Eugene Rideaux, a 42-year-old mechanic who showed up at Osteen's Lakewood Church to sort donations for evacuees, said he had not been able to work or do much since the storm hit, so he was eager to get out of his dark house and help.
"It's been so dark for days now, I'm just ready to see some light. Some sunshine. I'm tired of the darkness," Rideaux said. "But it's a tough city, and we're going to make this into a positive and come together."
-- Devastation in Houston --
Houston's mayor has faced questions about his decision not to order an evacuation of the notoriously flood-prone city ahead of Harvey's arrival, even as overflowing reservoirs led several suburbs to move people out.
Instead, Mayor Sylvester Turner remained resolute Tuesday in his advice to residents since the storm made landfall Friday: hunker down at home.
Massive flooding from Harvey forced thousands of rescues that overwhelmed emergency responders. The George R. Brown Convention Center nearly doubled its expected capacity of 5,000, with people seeking refuge from the waist-deep waters that had neighborhoods resembling lakes.
"I want to say this again, because I guess it's been missed, but you cannot evacuate 6.5 million people within two days," Turner said Tuesday, referring to both the city and its surrounding areas. "That would be chaotic. We would be putting people in more harm's way."
The situation is reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco both drew criticism for not ordering an evacuation sooner. Nagin did so one day before landfall, and levee failures led to disastrous flooding that plunged the city into chaos for days.
Experts said evacuating during a hurricane is a complicated decision with major ramifications, and none who spoke to The Associated Press second-guessed Turner. Harvey intensified quickly into a Category 4 hurricane Friday, leaving the mayor and others a tight timeframe to safely move out a large number of people.
"This is all the information that's coming into the mayor, and he's got to go, 'Oh my God, what am I going to do?'" said Susan Cutter, the director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina. "They're damned if they do, damned if they don't."
Questions started Friday when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested Houston residents get out while they could. At the time, Harvey was a powerful hurricane hours from landfall about 175 miles (280 kilometers) to the south near Corpus Christi. But the sprawling storm's outer bands promised heavy rains for Houston, long susceptible to flooding because of its flat terrain and runaway development that has paved over water-absorbing wetlands.
Hours after Abbott's remarks, Turner and other local leaders cautioned people to think twice before fleeing unnecessarily, especially when other communities more directly in the path of Harvey needed the same routes.
Once Harvey's rains turned torrential in Houston over the weekend and made conditions too dangerous for leaving, some residents began doubting Turner's decision.
Experts said Harvey presented a uniquely difficult decision for Houston officials because evacuations aren't typically done for flash-flooding from rains, but rather from storm surge concerns in less populated areas closest to the shore.
A study by the state of South Carolina this year estimated that the time needed to evacuate the Charleston area ahead of a similarly sized hurricane would be 27 to 30 hours at its fastest, if traffic lanes in both directions were used.
Moving people from an inland urban center like Houston — the city alone is about three times larger than Charleston — would require at least 36 to 48 hours, experts said. But Harvey took only 56 hours to intensify to a Category 4 hurricane.
Harvey strengthened into a hurricane by noon Thursday. Hours later, the National Hurricane Center predicted "devastating flooding" from the strengthening storm. The center started warning of "catastrophic flooding" across southern and southeastern Texas Friday morning, and the storm made landfall by 10 p.m.
"The problem with evacuations is, when do you call them?" said George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency who rode out hurricanes with his family in New Orleans. "You don't want to call an evacuation so early and the storms take a left and hits Galveston."
Ordering an evacuation, experts said, would've come with its own risks, such as highways clogged with motorists caught in severe thunderstorms or, worse, tornadoes that Harvey's outer bands might cause.
"I don't think they ever would have imagined having to evacuate the whole community in that amount of time," said Joe Myers, a former top emergency management director in North Carolina and Florida. "I think they did the best they could do under the situation."
In defending his decision, Turner has repeatedly invoked grim memories of Hurricane Rita in 2005, when problems from an evacuation of 3 million — roughly half of greater Houston — were blamed in many of the more than 100 deaths reported.
Massive traffic congestion toward Austin, San Antonio and Dallas caused delays of as long as 20 hours and even stranded out-of-gas motorists as Rita approached the Gulf Coast. In the worst incident, 23 nursing home patients were killed when the bus transporting them to North Texas exploded.
The region overhauled its evacuation plan after Rita and there was far less trouble when a quarter-million people were ordered out ahead of Hurricane Ike in 2008. Even so, Turner said he characterized a mass evacuation as a greater danger, especially since the city wasn't in Harvey's direct path.
"You cannot put 6.5 million people on the road two days before a storm that you don't know where it is going," he said Tuesday. "It is absurd."
But, some experts said, the option didn't need to be binary between the entire metro area staying or going.
A brief summary of the emergency operations plan for the county that is home to Houston covers evacuation of "all or any part," if that is determined the most effective way "for protecting the population." A full copy of the plan was not immediately available, and officials did not respond to requests.
The county's plan raises questions about whether targeted evacuations of susceptible neighborhoods were considered, even if only to higher ground in multi-story buildings, and possible to execute.
"It's really an impossible dilemma he was put into," said Shirley Laska, past director of the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology at the University of New Orleans. "But it shouldn't have to be groundless, and in the future, it won't be because of how horrible the event is to Houston."
-- 17,000 in Texas Shelters --
The American Red Cross says there are more than 17,000 people in Texas seeking refuge in shelters.
Red Cross spokesman Don Lauritzen said Tuesday that there are 45 shelters in the Houston area, along the Gulf Coast and elsewhere. He says more are opening in Louisiana.
The shelter in Texas holding the most people is the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston with upward of 9,000.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said Tuesday that the cavernous Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in that city is ready to hold upward of 5,000 people.
But Rawlings says it's not clear how many people will be housed at the Hutchison center because of the difficulty those in the Houston area are having finding dry roads and highways to travel along.
-- Central Texas Weather --
Winds averaged around 8 mph yesterday in Austin with a peak gust up to 27 mph in the metro and 36 mph at the Airport.
While there still might be a few gusts out of the north today, the sustained winds are back around 5 to 15 mph. At this hour:
We're in for lots of sunshine today and tomorrow, and low humidity will make it feel pretty good out there.
As the soil moisture slowly dries up a bit more, temps will nudge even higher by a few degrees as we get to the end of the week.
Then it's time for the big Labor Day holiday weekend and, as our luck would have it, the Lone Star State will likely be getting more rain.
Computer models continue to show a tropical wave coming towards the West Gulf, potentially crashing the Texas Coast as soon as Sunday and pushing inland through next Tuesday.
We'll go with an increasing 20 percent to 40 percent rain chance during that period, with skies turning mostly cloudy by the holiday itself on Monday. Another feature -- a weak disturbance from the Rockies -- is also predicted to drop into the Panhandle yet I don't think it'll have much, if any, impact on our weather.
But we are watching for another cold front from the north and it looks to arrive next Wednesday at the earliest, also with a chance of rain. If the front makes it, we're in for more slightly cooler, drier air here at home late next week.
See the 7 Day Forecast for more.
Current Austin Radar:
Current San Antonio Radar:
-- Disaster Relief --
The worst of times often bring the out best of people, and we've seen that throughout Harvey's tenure here in Texas.
As thousands of people from the gulf coast, Houston, Victoria and the South and Central Texas area have lost their homes.
Texans continue to step up.
See how you can help:
- Hurricane Harvey: How to help victims of the Texas disaster
- Austin businesses, musicians banding together to help Harvey victims
- Ways you can help Harvey victims
-- Stay Safe & Informed --
Check back often for updates here and on the 7 Day Forecast, as well as on Weather On The 1s.
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Follow live updates from your Weather On The 1s Meteorologists, and those in the path of Harvey, who are monitoring and reacting to the storm (Mobile Users Click Here):
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Continuing Coverage:
- Hurricane Harvey: How to help victims of the Texas disaster
- President Trump to visit Corpus Christi, Austin
- George H.W. Bush: 'Houston, and Texas, will come together and rebuild'
- Abbott, National Guard respond to Rockport
- Friends, neighbors use own boats for rescues near Houston
- South Texas Blood & Tissue Center in need of donations
- Port Aransas residents begin returning home
- Harvey temporarily displaces Houston teams
- Dell Seton takes in 27 evacuated patients
- At least 9 believed dead in Houston amid Harvey's destruction
- 'Need help': Harvey victims use social media when 911 fails
- Photo of mother and baby's rescue becomes symbol of storm
- Gov. Greg Abbott praises feds' response to Harvey
- VIDEO: Cattle move to 'higher ground’ following Tropical Storm Harvey
- FEMA calls for 'all citizens to get involved' in Texas flood relief
- Louisiana's Cajun Army arrives in Houston to help with rescue efforts
- Battered by Harvey, Houston braces for even more flooding
- San Antonio to Harvey evacuees: We're here for you
- Caldwell County takes a beating from Tropical Storm Harvey
- Rising flood waters pouring in through walls, doors of many Smithville homes
- San Antonio Food Bank in need of donations to help Harvey evacuees
- Fayette County expands evacuation order to all residents living on Colorado River
- Austin area school cancellations for Monday
- Five reported dead as water rescues mount in Houston; death toll expected to rise
- What to do, who to call if you lose power
- Bastrop declared disaster area as Harvey continues to deliver pounding rainfall
- Smithville mayor on catastrophic flooding: 'Whole town is absolutely devastated'
- Texas creates hotline to target Harvey-related price gouging, scams
- Rain, wind from Harvey downs trees across Austin
- Alamo Drafthouse offers free movies for Harvey evacuees in San Antonio
- All Austin waterways closed due to heavy rainfall from Tropical Storm Harvey
- One confirmed dead in Rockport after Harvey
- Harvey spins deeper inland, but scope of damage is unknown
- Strong winds down powerlines, trees in Bexar County
- San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg briefs city on status of Tropical Storm Harvey
- Rivers in Wharton County expected to overflow
- Coast Guard rescues at least 20 people after Harvey
- Austin groups say volunteers needed to help people affected by Hurricane Harvey
- Texas officials say storm shelters won't ask about immigration status
- VIDEO: Corpus Christi battered by Harvey as hurricane starts to move in
- 10 ways to keep your cell phone alive during Hurricane Harvey
- UT Austin invites University of Houston football team to practice amid storm
- Texas Gov. Abbott calls on President Trump for Hurricane Harvey help
- List of Central Texas shelters for Hurricane Harvey victims
- San Antonio River Authority preps for Hurricane Harvey, urges caution
- Leon Valley braces for flooding
- San Antonio crews ready to respond in case of emergency as Harvey moves closer
- San Antonio Red Cross in need of volunteers
- Officials: Ready South Texas, FEMA apps must-haves for Hurricane Harvey
- Checking in from Corpus Christi, Victoria, Bay City as Hurricane Harvey fast approaches
- San Antonio, Bexar County under disaster declaration
- Texas counties on Gulf evacuating before Harvey's landfall
- Salvation Army prepares for Hurricane Harvey
- Officials urge safety, advanced preparedness for Harvey
- Red Cross urges Central Texans to prepare for possible floods
- Austin Pride parade and festival rescheduled due to Harvey
- Hurricane Harvey: In Pictures
Storm Season Resources:
- HURRICANES 101: Frequently Asked Questions
- STORM SEASON: Hurricane Preparation Guide
- STORM SEASON: Hurricane Supply List
- STORM SEASON: Glossary of Hurricane Terms
- STORM SEASON: Wind Speeds for Tropical Systems, Tornadoes
- STORM SEASON: Protecting Your Home or Business
- STORM SEASON: Wind Damage Research Helps Homeowners, Businesses Owners
- Nocturnal Tornadoes: Dangerous Twisters in the Night
- What You Need to Know About NOAA's New Generation of Weather Satellites
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The Associated Press contributed to this report