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Hurricane Harvey: fatality confirmed as Texas battered by 'marathon' storm – rolling report

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At least one killed as most powerful storm to hit the US since 2005 hits the coast and flooding risk rises. Follow live updates here

 Updated 
in New York, and and
Sat 26 Aug 2017 16.02 EDTFirst published on Fri 25 Aug 2017 21.36 EDT
Texas coast battered by hurricane Harvey – video report

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Key events

One person died in a house fire as Hurricane Harvey roared across Rockport, Texas, overnight, mayor Charles J Wax said in a news conference on Saturday.

The victim was found after the storm passed inland, Wax said. He did not provide additional information about the victim.

Reporter Brett Buffington of Houston’s KHOU 11 News tweets more pictures of the destruction in Rockport.

The destruction left behind in Rockport, incrediable. Harvey's winds leveled buildings, tossed cars, and soaking rains sank sailboats. pic.twitter.com/ZYqLIP1DTh

— Brett Buffington (@BrettKHOU) August 26, 2017

Summary

Here’s a summary of where things stand following that press conference from Texas governor Greg Abbott.

  • Abbott said it was too early to say whether there had been any fatalities following Hurricane Harvey’s landfall in Texas on Friday night, after which it began pummelling the Gulf Coast with strong winds and heavy rain. Experts fear it could stay in place for days, causing extensive damage.
  • The primary concern now that the hurricane – initially the most powerful to hit the US in more than a decade – has been downgraded to a tropical storm is the possibility of 20-30 more inches of rain falling over the next few days in the area between Corpus Christi and Houston along the Gulf of Mexico, on top of the 20 inches that has already fallen. “There is the potential for very dramatic flooding,” said Abbott at a press conference in Austin, the state capital. Dozens of Houston-area roads were already reported flooded.
Harvey map
  • Tens of thousands of residents have fled inland. Abbott said a voluntary evacuation ordered had been issued for the Brazos river region and a mandatory one for San Bernard, to the southwest of Houston. All seven Texas counties on the coast from Corpus Christi to the western end of Galveston Island ordered mandatory evacuations from low-lying areas. Four counties ordered full evacuations and warned there was no guarantee of rescue for people staying behind. Abbott said the state had expanded its disaster declaration by 20 counties, to 50, and had activated 1,800 members of the military to conduct search-and-rescue operations, including with helicopters.
  • There were reports of significant damage are emerging in Rockport, which was directly in Harvey’s path when it came ashore. The mayor urged residents who chose to stay to write their social security numbers on their arms to make it easier for rescuers to identify them.
  • Corpus Christi police said that road debris and downed power lines were widespread and that an alleged intruder had been taken to hospital after being shot by a homeowner. The city of Victoria, 30 miles inland, was also badly hit. Shelters were set up as far north as Dallas.
  • The governor said there had been more than 338,000 power outages and it would take several days to resolve them. Researchers at Texas A&M University estimated that the storm would knock out power for at least 1.25 million people in Texas, with Corpus Christi and San Antonio hardest hit.
  • Key oil and gas facilities along the Texas Gulf Coast have temporarily shut down, virtually assuring gasoline prices will rise in the storm’s aftermath. Nearly one-third of the nation’s refining capacity sits in low-lying areas along the coast from Corpus Christi to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and there was concern about the environmental impact should any flooding cause toxic products to leak into Galveston Bay.
  • More than 960 flights were cancelled as of midday, according to FlightAware, nearly 800 of them scheduled to either depart from or land at Houston’s two airports.
  • The storm poses the first major emergency management test for Donald Trump, who signed a disaster proclamation on Friday night, releasing federal response funds and resources, and met with cabinet and administration figures on Saturday to discuss the response to the storm. On Twitter, the president praised his Fema chief, Brock Long, telling him “you are doing a great job”, an unfortunate choice of words that recalled George W Bush’s remark to his own emergency management director, Michael Brown, during Hurricane Katrina: “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie.” Long, a former Emergency Management Agency director for Alabama, has been praised as a good choice, but Trump has also been criticised for the proposed cuts to Fema in his 2018 budget.

Abbott talks about meeting the evacuees - “they were what I call typical Texans” - strong and resilient.

The governor, a Republican, says he is “so pleased” with Trump’s disaster declaration, which will help Texas deal with the financial consequences of the storm.

Questions. Will homes be swept away across riverbanks?

Abbott repeats that 20-30 more inches of rain may fall on top of what has already fallen in the area between Corpus Christi and Houston. He tells Texans their top priority is to save their lives.

He says he has no information about any fatalities as yet.

Abbott says more than 1,300 service members have been “activated” to help deal with the storm and 500 more are going to be added to that total.

There are more than 338,000 power outages and it will take several days to resolve that, the Texas governor says, because the wind speed has to decrease below a certain level beforehand.

Abbott says he has waived hotel occupancy taxes for evacuees and first responders.

A voluntary evacuation ordered has been issued for Brazos river region and a mandatory one for San Bernard.

As he is speaking, AP reports that the National Hurricane Center has downgraded Harvey from a Category 1 hurricane to a tropical storm.

No sign of sun in Rockport. Photograph: Nick Wagner/AP

He warns the public to be observant of rising water and notes that it could be far deeper than it seems or the current far stronger.

He talks about meeting evacuees from Corpus Christi. “They were happy to be alive ... but also concerned about what they had left behind, about the possibility that they had lost or would be losing the place they lived, or their property.”

He says he has increased the number of counties covered by the state disaster declaration and says the federal declaration issued by Donald Trump was extremely fast and important.

Texas governor Greg Abbott has begun his press conference on the hurricane.

He says his primary concern remains “dramatic flooding”.

Our biggest concern is the possibility of 20-30 more inches of rain on top of what has already fallen in the area between Corpus Christi and Houston.

Rain is still falling in Rockport, Texas. Photograph: Nick Wagner/AP

Texas governor Greg Abbott will be giving a press conference on the hurricane shortly in Austin, the state capital. You can watch it live here.

Trump's proposed cuts to Fema

Donald Trump proposed a 2018 budget in May that included severe cuts to social safety net programmes – and a $667m cut in funding for Fema, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is in charge of disaster response.

Trump’s budget stands no chance of becoming law in its current form and is in some senses an opening bid – the final federal budget for 2018 will be passed by Congress.

And $667m may be a relatively small cut to a Fema budget for 2017 of $16.2bn.

Nevertheless the programmes Trump wants to cut – such as the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program which is supposed to help states and local communities prepare for future disasters – will be missed by the states that use them.

“These cuts would cost the district close to $30m,” Brian Baker, director of Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management for Washington DC, told the New York Times in July. The office of the New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, also lamented the millions that would be lost, including in grants for counter-terrorism.

But there was more enthusiasm for Brock Long, former Emergency Management Agency director for Alabama chosen by Trump to be Fema director.

Kristy Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Guardian: “[Long] is certainly well qualified for the job and he was one of the rare appointments by the Trump administration that was widely hailed as reasonable and appointing someone with appropriate experience to the job.”

“Brock has relationships with state emergency managers across the country. He can put himself in their shoes,” Art Faulkner, the current director of the Alabama agency, told the New York Times. “He knows what we go through in dealing with these issues.”

Here are the full details of the Fema cuts proposed by Trump in his “budget blueprint”:

Eliminates or reduces State and local grant funding by $667 million for programs administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that are either unauthorized by the Congress, such as FEMA’s Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program, or that must provide more measurable results and ensure the Federal Government is not supplanting other stakeholders’ responsibilities, such as the Homeland Security Grant Program. For that reason, the Budget also proposes establishing a 25 percent non-Federal cost match for FEMA preparedness grant awards that currently require no cost match. This is the same cost-sharing approach as FEMA’s disaster recovery grants. The activities and acquisitions funded through these grant programs are primarily State and local functions.

Texas officials say they are evacuating about 4,500 inmates from three state prisons in Brazoria County south of Houston because the nearby Brazos river is rising from Hurricane Harvey’s heavy rain, the Associated Press reports.

The Department of Criminal Justice says inmates from the Ramsey, Terrell, and Stringfellow units in Rosharon are being taken by bus to other prisons in east Texas.

Additional food and water has been delivered to the prisons receiving the displaced inmates.

Worst I saw during short drive along Brazos River were these homes near Mann Lake. These yards frequently flood though. pic.twitter.com/CzA0F6ffIm

— Jacob Carpenter (@ChronJacob) August 26, 2017
Tom Dart
Tom Dart

Tom Dart is reporting from Houston, where there are fears of disastrous sustained flooding in the country’s fourth-largest city.

More than 300,000 people across Texas were without electricity early on Saturday as Hurricane Harvey trundled inland and threatened to stall, setting up for several days of heavy rainfall that could tally 40 inches by Wednesday in some spots.

Dozens of Houston-area roads were reported flooded on Saturday. At 10am, Houston’s airports announced 380 flight cancellations at George Bush Intercontinental and 114 at Hobby, though a break in bad weather allowed departures to resume at Bush.

Brock Long, the recently appointed administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), said on Twitter that the storm was transitioning into a “deadly inland event”.

Citizens of TX, this is now turning into a deadly inland event. Thoughts and prayers are with you. https://t.co/2qqTnl1Anj

— Brock Long (@FEMA_Brock) August 26, 2017

In a Saturday morning update, the National Hurricane Center said that though winds had slowed to a maximum of 80mph, Harvey was “moving slowly over Texas producing torrential rains … catastrophic flooding expected over the next few days”.

Houston, about 200 miles northeast of where Harvey made landfall, began seeing wind and rain from the storm on Friday. It is notoriously flood-prone and more than 6.5 million people live in its metropolitan area, though officials decided against ordering a mass evacuation. Levels in the city’s bayous were on the increase, giving rise to the prospect that they would burst their banks and water would inundate surrounding streets if the rain continued as predicted.

Happening now in #Houston: some roads flooded - this is near busy 69 freeway #hurricaneHarvey pic.twitter.com/KWh09LUuez

— Alyssa Pone (@AlyssaPone) August 26, 2017

Traffic was light in Houston on Saturday and many stores were closed, though an exception was a doughnut shop in the suburb of Katy, where Don Mach and his Keeshond dog, Bo, were having breakfast. Mach said he was “very concerned” about Harvey. “We got five-and-a-half inches of rain last night. That came down probably in about four hours,” the 70-year-old said. “That water can only go so many places.”

Oil companies began shutting down operations in and along the Gulf in anticipation of the storm, and gas prices rose.

Economic impact aside, there is anxiety that an unfavourable storm track could result in an environmental tragedy should Harvey provoke flooding that impacts the region’s vast refining and petrochemical facilities and unleashes toxic discharges that spill into adjacent communities or Galveston Bay.

Juan Parras, an environmental campaigner in east Houston, said he was worried that severe flooding or a storm surge could cause leaks or dislodge chemical tanks. “When they move off their concrete base all that oil, whatever’s in those tanks, just goes out into the community and we have a lot of tanks here. We have almost a 52-mile stretch of nothing but refineries and oil tanks,” he said.

The neighbourhoods closest to the plants are some of the least-affluent and most-polluted in the region. “The worst off will be hit the hardest,” Parras said.

Numbers of injuries and fatalities in the wider area were not clear on Saturday.

Corpus Christi police said that road debris and downed power lines were widespread and that an alleged intruder was taken to hospital after being shot by a homeowner. Hundreds of people headed to shelters set up away from the coast. The city of Victoria, 30 miles inland, was also badly hit.

Harvey is the first major natural disaster of Donald Trump’s administration. Trump’s proposed federal budget calls for cuts of $667m to Fema’s funding, but the president was eager to give the impression that he was ready for the challenge. He issued a slew of tweets about the storm. “Closely monitoring #HurricaneHarvey from Camp David. We are leaving nothing to chance. City, State and Federal Govs. working great together!” he wrote on Saturday. A day earlier Trump said he signed a disaster declaration to speed Texas’ access to federal help.

Coastal areas remained vulnerable to storm surge on Saturday while the storm risked spawning isolated tornadoes. One was reported to have struck the Houston suburb of Missouri City early on Saturday, ripping the roofs off dozens of homes.

In Louisiana, preparations were underway in New Orleans as a precaution. Despite billions of dollars spent on rebuilding and protecting the city since it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, heavy rain earlier this month caused flooding that exposed problems with its drainage system.

Just boarded last flight of the day from #Houston to #Seattle. Everything else cancelled. Never happier to be headed home. #HurricaneHarvey pic.twitter.com/bXAVTounYx

— Bill Wixey (@BillWixey) August 26, 2017

Accuweather meterologist Reed Timmer posts these clips of serious flooding south of Rockport:

Second floor of home with walls and roof gone just south of Rockport, TX from Hurricane #Harvey @breakingweather pic.twitter.com/RHXxcaGUkI

— Reed Timmer (@ReedTimmerAccu) August 26, 2017

Major flooding is blocking business 35 south of Rockport, TX. Search and rescue teams combing through rubble @breakingweather #Harvey pic.twitter.com/R2Kh95gI0s

— Reed Timmer (@ReedTimmerAccu) August 26, 2017

The National Hurricane Center, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is warning of “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding” across the middle and upper Texas coast from now until Thursday.

The area could see rainfall of 15 to 30 inches, with isolated maximums of 40 inches, the agency warns.

In addition, the flooding will be slow to recede “due to the slow motion of Harvey and a prolonged period of onshore flow”.

Here are the key messages for #Hurricane #Harvey for the 10 am CDT advisory. https://t.co/tW4KeGdBFb pic.twitter.com/2BlWar7MMU

— NHC Atlantic Ops (@NHC_Atlantic) August 26, 2017

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