Swollen rivers continued rising in Southeast Texas on Saturday after a night of evacuations and rescues from floodwaters that swamped roads, stranded cars and inundated homes in the region.
Emergency responders in airboats searched the flooded streets and subdivisions around Houston, rescuing 73 people and 42 animals from stranded cars and rooftops by Saturday morning, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.
Officials underscored the urgency of evacuation orders for residents in low-lying areas, warning that the worst was still to come.
“This threat is ongoing and it’s going to get worse,” said Judge Lina Hidalgo, Harris County’s top executive. “It is not your typical river flood.”
Ms. Hidalgo issued evacuation orders on Thursday for about 5,000 people living in a sparsely populated section of northeastern Harris County along the east fork of the San Jacinto River.
American Red Cross shelters across six Texas counties were housing 122 people, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Saturday.
North and east of Houston, small towns, including Cut and Shoot and Shepherd, were experiencing catastrophic flooding, FEMA said, and several rivers were yet to crest.
About a quarter of the 178 river gauges tracked by the National Weather Service in Houston were experiencing flooded conditions, and many were expected to crest over the weekend or early next week.
Areas north of Houston had received 12 to 20 inches of rainfall since Monday, Jeremy Justice, hydrological operations manager at Harris County Flood Control, said on Saturday.
“A lot of that area is in a flood plain,” he said, adding that some parts of Harris County could experience flooding near the record levels that were set during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, an event that claimed at least 68 lives and caused $125 billion in damages.
The Weather Service had much of Southeast Texas under a flood watch on Saturday and through Sunday afternoon.
Forecasters predicted another inch to 3 inches of rainfall from Saturday night into Sunday morning, exacerbating flood conditions as the soil was already saturated in the watch area.
The Weather Service said in a forecast on Saturday morning that it was watching the region for a cluster of storms “that bows out and spreads yet more rain into the area that does not need any more” through the weekend.
Mayor John Whitmire of Houston was surveying the flooding in the northeastern neighborhood of Kingwood, a community on Lake Houston, on Saturday, according to Mary Benton, a city spokeswoman.
“We have to guard against any false impression that we have been cleared,” Mr. Whitmire said at a news conference at Kingwood on Friday. “The water is coming this way.”
As of Saturday, there were no reported injuries or deaths.
Brent Taylor, a spokesman for the Office of Emergency Management in Houston, said that damage assessments would not begin until after the threat of flooding had passed.
Source Agencies
