Houston’s mayor kept facing questions Tuesday 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 in his advice to residents since the storm made landfall on 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 on 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 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 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.”

Associated Press writers Kevin McGill in New Orleans, Seth Borenstein in Washington and Will Weissert in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed. </s> Tropical storm Harvey lashed Houston over the weekend, leading to heavy flooding across the city. Several people are reported to have died during the storm and subsequent flooding with many more people needing urgent care and shelter. Texas governor Greg Abbott said the response to the disaster was just beginning in the city </s> Just days into one of the biggest storms to hit the U.S. in decades, authorities have rescued thousands of people in Houston alone. And as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical storm, continue to rise across southeast Texas and neighboring Louisiana, officials expect that still thousands more evacuees will need to be sheltered in the days to come.

"This is a landmark event," Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Brock Long said at a news conference Monday. In fact, it has been such a landmark event — with more than 3 feet of rain having already hit some regions — the National Weather Service has even had to revise its traditional methods of representing storms "in order to effectively map it."

So how does one respond to a catastrophe of such historic proportions?

For authorities, that has meant summoning a rescue and evacuation effort nearly as massive. "The goal is rescue," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters Monday. "That's the major focus for the day."

Here's how that rescue effort is taking shape, sketched in a few telling — and staggering — numbers.



Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters Monday that officers have rescued roughly 2,000 people in the city — out of about 4,000 water-related calls for assistance — since the storm came ashore Friday evening.

... rescues over a 12-hour span since midnight on Monday. But that number does not include the 185 critical rescue requests in the city still outstanding as of midday.

Police hope to work through that backlog of requests by nightfall, because they say their boats are not properly equipped to conduct rescue operations in the dark.

Many of those people who required rescue will also require a place to stay — which brings us to ...



"Once we move them, we're able to extract them from different areas and rescue them, we've got to get them into shelters," Long said Monday. "This shelter mission is going to be a very heavy lift. We're anticipating over 30,000 people being placed in shelters temporarily."

Already 5,500 people are staying in shelters in Houston, and Turner only expects that number to rise in a greater metro area of some 6.5 million people.

Even in San Antonio, which was largely saved from the worst of the storm's impact, Mayor Ron Nirenberg told NPR more than 1,000 evacuees have been sheltered — a number he expects to "increase sharply," as well.

"No one will be turned away," he said. "We will do whatever is necessary. The capacity is whatever is needed."

Still, authorities have been struggling to supply those evacuees. The Red Cross initially was unable to get their trucks to one shelter, and those evacuees, without food, had McDonald's breakfast Sunday morning.

But there might not be such scarcity for long. Vice President Mike Pence told KTRH the federal government has shipped out more than 1.2 million meals and a million liters of water.



Texas Gov. Greg Abbott activated the state's entire National Guard on Monday, saying roughly 12,000 guard members will be deployed to respond to Harvey. Initially, about 3,000 national and state guard members had been deployed

"It is imperative that we do everything possible to protect the lives and safety of people across the state of Texas as we continue to face the aftermath of this storm," Abbott said in a statement.

The governor noted that the guardsmen will be collaborating with FEMA and federal troops to "assist in the efforts already underway."

The U.S. Coast Guard has also been active in the response, deploying at least eight helicopters — and requesting 11 more from across the country — to conduct rescues. They say they have already rescued 100 people from the air.

"Every Coast Guard asset available" is being used to respond, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said. "But," he cautioned, "there are conditions where it is just not safe to fly."

All told, Pence said Monday there are more than 8,500 federal personnel on the ground in the area to help state and local officials, who are leading the rescue efforts.

Even officials with the Mexican government have offered Texas assistance in its recovery from the storm, Abbott said at a news conference Monday.

The extensive state and national response was motivated partly by the immense breadth of the storm's effects, apparent in the next number.



Long expects as many as 50 counties in Texas to be affected in some form by the storm's floodwaters, a situation that he says has demanded the agency "help bolster the efforts to do swift water rescue, search and rescue over a huge county jurisdiction."

Eighteen of those counties have been granted a federal disaster declaration, a move that triggers FEMA's support.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the top administrator in the county home to Houston, noted just what the size of the storm means for local officials.

"One of the issues, of course, that makes this situation even worse is all of the surrounding counties are experiencing their own difficulties," he said at a news conference Monday, "so we're not in this alone, but we can't really help each other."

And the size of the storm means it's not just Texas that must bear its blows. Some 15-25 inches of rainfall are expected in southwest Louisiana, and President Trump declared an emergency in the state on Monday morning.



By the time the region emerges from Harvey's aftermath, Long expects nearly half a million people will have requested help. Pence said 22,000 have already registered for disaster assistance.

And it's unlikely that aftermath will lift anytime soon.

"You've got rivers and bayous that are going to be reaching crest stage later in the week in and around Houston," NPR's Debbie Elliott pointed out, citing the head of the National Weather Service. "The floodwaters are going to be slow to recede. They're going to persist."

"This is going to take us months, years to get back to normal," Emmett said, "and so any help that people can send, we would certainly appreciate that." </s> Just days into one of the biggest storms to hit the U.S. in decades, authorities have rescued thousands of people in Houston alone. And as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical storm, continue to rise across southeast Texas and neighboring Louisiana, officials expect that still thousands more evacuees will need to be sheltered in the days to come.

"This is a landmark event," Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Brock Long said at a news conference Monday. In fact, it has been such a landmark event — with more than 3 feet of rain having already hit some regions — the National Weather Service has even had to revise its traditional methods of representing storms "in order to effectively map it."

So how does one respond to a catastrophe of such historic proportions?

For authorities, that has meant summoning a rescue and evacuation effort nearly as massive. "The goal is rescue," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters Monday. "That's the major focus for the day."

Here's how that rescue effort is taking shape, sketched in a few telling — and staggering — numbers.



Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters Monday that officers have rescued roughly 2,000 people in the city — out of about 4,000 water-related calls for assistance — since the storm came ashore Friday evening.

... rescues over a 12-hour span since midnight on Monday. But that number does not include the 185 critical rescue requests in the city still outstanding as of midday.

Police hope to work through that backlog of requests by nightfall, because they say their boats are not properly equipped to conduct rescue operations in the dark.

Many of those people who required rescue will also require a place to stay — which brings us to ...



"Once we move them, we're able to extract them from different areas and rescue them, we've got to get them into shelters," Long said Monday. "This shelter mission is going to be a very heavy lift. We're anticipating over 30,000 people being placed in shelters temporarily."

Already 5,500 people are staying in shelters in Houston, and Turner only expects that number to rise in a greater metro area of some 6.5 million people.

Even in San Antonio, which was largely saved from the worst of the storm's impact, Mayor Ron Nirenberg told NPR more than 1,000 evacuees have been sheltered — a number he expects to "increase sharply," as well.

"No one will be turned away," he said. "We will do whatever is necessary. The capacity is whatever is needed."

Still, authorities have been struggling to supply those evacuees. The Red Cross initially was unable to get their trucks to one shelter, and those evacuees, without food, had McDonald's breakfast Sunday morning.

But there might not be such scarcity for long. Vice President Mike Pence told KTRH the federal government has shipped out more than 1.2 million meals and a million liters of water.



Texas Gov. Greg Abbott activated the state's entire National Guard on Monday, saying roughly 12,000 guard members will be deployed to respond to Harvey. Initially, about 3,000 national and state guard members had been deployed

"It is imperative that we do everything possible to protect the lives and safety of people across the state of Texas as we continue to face the aftermath of this storm," Abbott said in a statement.

The governor noted that the guardsmen will be collaborating with FEMA and federal troops to "assist in the efforts already underway."

The U.S. Coast Guard has also been active in the response, deploying at least eight helicopters — and requesting 11 more from across the country — to conduct rescues. They say they have already rescued 100 people from the air.

"Every Coast Guard asset available" is being used to respond, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said. "But," he cautioned, "there are conditions where it is just not safe to fly."

All told, Pence said Monday there are more than 8,500 federal personnel on the ground in the area to help state and local officials, who are leading the rescue efforts.

The extensive state and national response was motivated partly by the immense breadth of the storm's effects, apparent in the next number.



Long expects as many as 50 counties in Texas to be affected in some form by the storm's floodwaters, a situation that he says has demanded the agency "help bolster the efforts to do swift water rescue, search and rescue over a huge county jurisdiction."

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the top administrator in the county home to Houston, noted just what the size of the storm means for local officials.

"One of the issues, of course, that makes this situation even worse is all of the surrounding counties are experiencing their own difficulties," he said at a news conference Monday, "so we're not in this alone, but we can't really help each other."

And the size of the storm means it's not just Texas that must bear its blows. Some 15-25 inches of rainfall are expected in southwest Louisiana, and President Trump declared an emergency in the state on Monday morning.



By the time the region emerges from Harvey's aftermath, Long expects nearly half a million people will have requested help. Pence said 22,000 have already registered for disaster assistance.

And it's unlikely that aftermath will lift anytime soon.

"You've got rivers and bayous that are going to be reaching crest stage later in the week in and around Houston," NPR's Debbie Elliott pointed out, citing the head of the National Weather Service. "The floodwaters are going to be slow to recede. They're going to persist."

"This is going to take us months, years to get back to normal," Emmett said, "and so any help that people can send, we would certainly appreciate that." </s> HOUSTON – There are at least nine deaths in the Houston area resulting from Tropical Storm Harvey.

A family of six is believed to have died after drowning in a white van Sunday afternoon while trying to escape the floods of Hurricane Harvey, relatives tell KHOU 11 News. It is thus far the single deadliest incident resulting from the storm. It happened while crossing a bridge on Green River Road in Greens Bayou.

On Saturday, a spokesman for the Houston emergency operations center said a woman appeared to have gotten out of her vehicle in high water on Werrington near S. Gaston in southwest Houston. She was found by neighbors about 30 yards away from her vehicle. Norman says she was pronounced dead at the scene by a doctor who was in the area, according to the Associated Press.

The sheriff’s office confirmed Monday afternoon a 60-year-old woman was killed when a tree fell on her home as she slept. The incident happened in the 17400 block of Louis Lane in Porter. The victim's husband told authorities he went to get help after the tree crashed into the home because he could not get to her. When authorities got into the home, they found the woman was already dead.

A man between the ages of 60 and 70 reportedly drowned around 11:30 p.m. Monday night. Montgomery County officials said the man was seen trying to swim across the flood waters located at Spring Park Ridge and SH 99. Witnesses tried to help the man after he went into distress. They were however unsuccessful.

Outside of Houston, the first death from Harvey was confirmed in a coastal community in Aransas County. That person died in a fire at a home during the hurricane. Harvey made landfall in Texas on Friday night as a Category 4 hurricane, but it has since been downgraded to a tropical storm as it weakens while inland.

WATER RESCUES: HPD says more than 2,000 rescued from flood waters </s> (CNN) The toll that Harvey is taking is staggering.

It dumped an estimated 27 trillion gallons of rain over Texas and Louisiana during a 6-day period, says Ryan Maue of WeatherBell, a weather analytics company.

The rainfall has set a record for the most ever from a landfalling tropical cyclone in the continental US. Estimates put eventual total losses at as much as $75 billion . And the death toll continues to climb everyday.

"The word catastrophic does not appropriately describe what we're facing," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents much of Houston. "We just don't know when it's going to end." </s> HOUSTON (AP) - The Latest on Tropical Storm Harvey (all times local):

The National Hurricane Center says Harvey is back on land after coming ashore early Wednesday just west of Cameron, Louisiana. The tropical storm is expected to weaken and continue to the north.

The storm returned to land about 5 miles (8 kilometers) west of Cameron with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (72 kph).

Center meteorologist Dennis Feltgen said Tuesday that when Harvey came back to shore, "it's the end of the beginning."

Harvey is forecast to drop substantial amounts of rain on Louisiana before moving on to Arkansas, Tennessee and parts of Missouri, which could also see flooding.

Feltgen said there's still a lot of residents in multiple states "who are going to feel the impacts of the storm."

Harvey first made landfall Friday in Texas as a Category 4 hurricane.

The National Weather Service has issued flash flood emergencies for parts of Southeast Texas, including Beaumont and Port Arthur.

KFDM-TV reports the situation in Port Arthur is dire as homes were expected to fill with rising floodwaters and residents unsure of how to evacuate the city.

Jefferson County Sheriff Zena Stephens tells the station that county resources cannot get to Port Arthur because of the flooding and some residents have gone into survival mode.

Mayor Derrick Freeman said on his Facebook page that the "city is underwater right now but we are coming!" He also urged residents to get to higher ground, but avoid becoming trapped in attics.

Deputy Marcus McLellan says city's 911 system has been inundated with calls, which are bouncing to other law enforcement agencies. McLellan says the sheriff's office is working to relay those calls to the proper authorities in Port Arthur.

After five days of torrential rain, the latest weather forecast predicts less than an inch of rain and perhaps even sunshine for the Houston area.

However, the dangers remain far from over. Authorities and family members have reported at least 18 deaths from Harvey, while law enforcement agencies say more than 13,000 people have been rescued in the Houston area and surrounding parts of Southeast Texas.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner also implemented a curfew of midnight to 5 a.m. in an apparent response to scattered reports of looting. Police Chief Art Acevedo said violators would be searched and arrested.

Two additional shelters - the Toyota Center and NRG Park - opened to house displaced residents. Louisiana's governor also offered to take in Harvey victims from Texas, and televangelist Joel Osteen opened his Houston megachurch, a 16,000-seat former arena, after critics blasted him on social media for not acting to help families displaced by the storm.

Harvey is expected to come inland Wednesday near the Texas-Louisiana border.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. </s> HOUSTON, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Floodwaters from Tropical Storm Harvey, which has already killed at least seven people in Texas and was expected to drive tens of thousands from their homes, will likely rise in the coming days, officials warned on Monday as heavy rains continued to pound the U.S. Gulf Coast.

National Guard troops, police officers, rescue workers and civilians raced in helicopters, boats and special high-water trucks to rescue the hundreds of people still stranded in and around Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city.

The storm was the most powerful hurricane to strike Texas in more than 50 years when it came ashore on Friday near Corpus Christi, 220 miles (354 km) south of Houston, and the worst was far from over as the National Weather Service issued numerous flood warnings across the region.

U.S. President Donald Trump plans to go to Texas on Tuesday to survey the damage and may in the future visit Louisiana where the storm is now dumping rain.

Trump, facing the biggest U.S. natural disaster since he took office in January, has signed disaster proclamations for Texas and Louisiana, triggering federal relief efforts.

Harvey has killed at least six people in Harris County, where Houston is located, said Tricia Bentley, a spokeswoman for the county coroner's office, including a man who died in a house fire on Friday night and an elderly woman driving through flooded streets on the city's west side the next day.

A 60-year-old woman died in neighboring Montgomery County when a tree fell on her trailer home while she slept, the local medical examiner said on Twitter. With other people missing, the death toll could rise.

Both of Houston's major airports were shut down, along with most major highways, rail lines and a hospital, where patients were evacuated over the weekend. As of Monday evening 267,000 Texans were left without power in the southeast corner of the state.

One of three main rivers crossing Houston, the Brazos, was expected to crest sometime on Tuesday at 59 feet (18 meters), the National Weather Service said. The San Jacinto River was expected to crest over Interstate 10, the major east-west artery through Houston.

The Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management issued a "shelter in place" warning to residents of La Porte and Shoreacres, about 25 miles (40 km) east of Houston, after a chemical leak was caused by a ruptured pipeline.

As stunned families surveyed the wreckage of destroyed homes and roads flooded or clogged with debris, Texas Governor Greg Abbott warned Houstonians to brace for a long recovery.

"We need to recognize this is going to be a new and different normal for this entire region," Abbott said.

Harvey was expected to linger over Texas' Gulf Coast for the next few days, dropping another 10 to 20 inches (25 to 51 cm) of rain, with threats of flooding extending into Louisiana.

In scenes evoking the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, police and Coast Guard teams have rescued at least 2,000 people so far, plucking many from rooftops by helicopter, as they urged the hundreds more believed to be marooned in flooded houses to hang towels or sheets outside to alert rescuers.

Harvey's center was about 100 miles (160 km) south of Houston and forecast to arc slowly toward the city through Wednesday, with the worst floods expected later that day and on Thursday.

Schools and office buildings were closed throughout the metropolitan area, home to 6.8 million people, as chest-high water filled some neighborhoods in the low-lying city.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Monday that it was releasing water from the nearby Addicks and Barker reservoirs into Buffalo Bayou, the primary body of water running through Houston.

"The more they release it could go up and it could create even additional problems," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner warned. But the release was said to be necessary to prevent an uncontrolled surge of water, which Turner said "would be exponentially worse."

Torrential rain also hit areas more than 150 miles (240 km) away, swelling rivers and causing a surge that was heading toward the Houston area, where numerous rivers and streams already have been breached. About 5,500 people were in shelters as of Monday morning, city officials said, with Federal Emergency Management Agency director Brock Long forecasting that 30,000 would eventually be housed temporarily in shelters.

Regina Costilla, 48, said she and her 16-year-old son had been rescued from their home by a good Samaritan with a boat. She worried until she was reunited with her husband and large dog, who had been left behind because they did not fit into the boat.

"I'm not complaining; we're alive," said Costilla. "When I saw the forecast of the storm I said I'll be happy if we get out with our lives."

In Rockport, National Guard troops passed out water to residents as utility crews worked to restore power in the city, amid reports of sporadic looting.

Houston did not order an evacuation due to concerns about people being stranded on city highways now consumed by floods, Turner said.

Abbott, who had suggested on Friday that people leave the area, declined to second-guess the mayor on Monday, telling reporters, "Decisions about evacuations are something that are behind us."

Gasoline futures hit their highest in two years as Harvey shut down multiple refiners, knocking out about 13 percent of total U.S. refining capacity, based on company reports and Reuters estimates.

Almost half of the U.S. refining capacity is in the Gulf region.

The nation's second-largest refinery was shutdown in Baytown, and the nation's largest refinery in Port Arthur was weighing shutting down with a final decision expected Tuesday, sources told Reuters.

The floods' path of destruction could destroy as much as $20 billion in insured property, making it one of the costliest storms in history for U.S. insurers, according to Wall Street analysts. </s> HOUSTON — A pair of 70-year-old reservoir dams that protect downtown Houston from flooding began overflowing Tuesday, adding to the rising floodwaters from Harvey that have crippled the city after five consecutive days of rain.

Engineers began releasing water from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs Monday to ease the strain on the dams. But the releases were not enough to relive the pressure after one of the heaviest downpours in U.S. history, Army Corps of Engineers officials said. Both reservoirs are at record highs.

The release of the water means that more homes and streets will flood, and some homes will be inundated for up to a month, said Jeff Lindner of the Harris County Flood Control District.

The county is trying to determine where the water will go, Lindner said.

Meanwhile, more than 17,000 people are seeking refuge in Texas shelters, the American Red Cross said. With rescues continuing, that number seemed certain to grow.

Calls for rescue have so overwhelmed emergency teams that they have had little time to search for bodies. And officials acknowledge that fatalities from Harvey could soar once the floodwaters start to recede from one of America’s most sprawling metropolitan centers.

More than four days after the storm ravaged the Texas coastline as a Category 4 hurricane, authorities had confirmed only three deaths — including a woman killed Monday when heavy rains dislodged a large oak tree onto her trailer home in the small town of Porter. But unconfirmed reports of others missing or presumed dead were growing.

“We know in these kinds of events that, sadly, the death toll goes up historically,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told The Associated Press. “I’m really worried about how many bodies we’re going to find.”

One Houston woman said Monday that she presumes six members of a family, including four of her grandchildren, died after their van sank into Greens Bayou in East Houston.

Virginia Saldivar told The Associated Press her brother-in-law was driving the van Sunday when a strong current took the vehicle over a bridge and into the bayou. The driver was able to get out and urged the children to escape through the back door, Saldivar said, but they could not.

“I’m just hoping we find the bodies,” Saldivar said.

Houston emergency officials could not confirm the deaths.

A spokeswoman for a Houston hotel said one of its employees disappeared while helping about 100 guests and workers evacuate the building.

The disaster is unfolding on an epic scale, with the nation’s fourth-largest city mostly paralyzed by the storm that parked itself over the Gulf Coast. With nearly 2 more feet (61 centimeters) of rain expected on top of the 30-plus inches (76 centimeters) in some places, authorities worried the worst might be yet to come.

Early Tuesday, Harvey continued to drench Houston and the surrounding area. Rain fell at about half an inch (1 centimeter) per hour over Harris County — home to Houston — and up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) per hour to the east.

The Houston metro area covers about 10,000 square miles (25,900 square kilometers), an area slightly bigger than New Jersey. It’s crisscrossed by about 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers) of channels, creeks and bayous that drain into the Gulf of Mexico, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) to the southeast from downtown.

President Donald Trump was expected Tuesday in Corpus Christi and Austin for briefings on the first major natural disaster of his administration. Vice President Mike Pence said in an interview with Corpus Christi radio station KKTX that he will visit southeast Texas later this week.

Forecasters expect the storm to linger over the Gulf before heading back inland east of Houston sometime Wednesday. The system will then head north and lose its tropical strength.

It could creep as far east as Mississippi by Thursday, meaning New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina unleashed its full wrath in 2005, is in Harvey’s path. Foreboding images of Harvey were lighting up weather radar screens early Tuesday, the 12th anniversary of the day Katrina made landfall in Plaquemines Parish.

Rescuers meanwhile continued plucking people from inundated Houston neighborhoods. Mayor Sylvester Turner put the number by police at more than 3,000. The Coast Guard said it also had rescued more than 3,000 by boat and air and was taking more than 1,000 calls per hour.

Chris Thorn was among the many volunteers still helping with the mass evacuation that began Sunday. He drove with a buddy from the Dallas area with their flat-bottom hunting boat to pull strangers out of the water.

“I couldn’t sit at home and watch it on TV and do nothing since I have a boat and all the tools to help,” he said.

Nearly 6,000 inmates displaced by flooding have been moved from prisons in the Houston area to other facilities in South and East Texas, according to the state Department of Criminal Justice.

A mandatory evacuation was ordered for the low-lying Houston suburb of Dickinson, home to 20,000. Police cited the city’s fragile infrastructure in the floods, limited working utilities and concern about the weather forecast.

In Houston, questions continued to swirl about why the mayor did not issue a similar evacuation order.

Turner has repeatedly defended the decision and did so again Monday, insisting that a mass evacuation of millions of people by car was a greater risk than enduring the storm.

“Both the county judge and I sat down together and decided that we were not in direct path of the storm, of the hurricane, and the safest thing to do was for people to stay put, make the necessary preparations. I have no doubt that the decision we made was the right decision.”

He added, “Can you imagine if millions of people had left the city of Houston and then tried to come back in right now?”

By Tuesday morning, more than 9,000 people were at the city’s largest shelter set up inside the George R. Brown Convention Center — which originally had an estimated capacity of 5,000.

Red Cross spokesman Lloyd Ziel said that volunteers made more space inside the center, which also was used to house Hurricane Katrina refugees from New Orleans in 2005, in part by pushing some cots closer together. A shortage of cots means some people will have to sleep on chairs or the floor.

The center settled down at night, after an occasionally chaotic day that saw thousands of evacuees arrive in the pouring rain. Officers and volunteers at times rushed to attend to those with medical needs.

Before the storm is gone, up to 20 more inches (51 centimeters) of rain could fall, National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini said Monday.

That means the flooding will get worse in the days ahead and the floodwaters will be slow to recede once Harvey finally moves on, the weather service said.

Sometime Tuesday or early Wednesday, parts of the Houston region will probably break the nearly 40-year-old U.S. record for the biggest rainfall from a tropical system — 48 inches (120 centimeters) — set by Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 in Texas, meteorologists said.

Associated Press writers Juan Lozano and Nomaan Merchant in Houston and David Warren in Dallas contributed to this report.
The death toll from Hurricane Harvey reaches 30 as Sylvester Turner, the mayor of Houston, Texas, introduces a curfew to deter looters.