Heavy rains in Texas led to water rescues and evacuation orders

Houston – Severe storms hit the Houston area again on Friday, expanding already dangerous floods in Texas and leading to several high-water rescues, including some from the roofs of flooded homes. Authorities doubled down on urgent instructions for residents in low-lying areas to evacuate, warning that the worst was yet to come.

“This threat is ongoing and will get worse. It’s not a typical river flood,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in the nation’s third-largest county.

She described the rising water as “catastrophic” and said several hundred structures were at risk of flooding. There had already been at least two dozen water rescues in the municipality, in addition to taking 30 pets to a safe place. Schools that were in the path of the floods canceled classes and roads were congested as authorities closed highways receiving water.

For weeks, torrential rains in Texas and parts of Louisiana filled reservoirs and saturated the ground. Floodwaters partially submerged cars and roads this week in parts of southeast Texas north of Houston, where waters reached the roofs of some homes.

More than 28 inches of rain fell during a 24-hour period that ended Friday morning in the north Houston suburb of Spring, according to the National Weather Service, which issued a flood warning through Tuesday for the region.

In the rural community of Pastor, Gilroy Fernandes said he and his wife had about an hour to evacuate after a mandatory order. Their home sits on stilts near the Trinity River, and they felt relief when the water began to recede on Thursday.

Then the danger increased while they slept.

“The next thing you know, overnight they started releasing more water from Livingston Dam. And this caused the river level to rise by almost one and a half or two meters overnight,” said Fernandes. Neighbors who left an hour later were stuck in traffic because of the floodwaters.

In Montgomery County, Judge Mark Keough said there were more high-water rescues than he was able to count.

“We estimate we’ve had a couple hundred rescues of homes, of homes, of vehicles,” Keough said.

In Polk County, located about 100 miles northeast of Houston, authorities have performed more than 100 water rescues in recent days, said Courtney Comstock, Polk County emergency management coordinator.

She said homes below the Lake Livingston dam and along the Trinity River were flooded.

“It will be when things calm down before we can do our damage assessment,” Comstock said.

Houston authorities reported no deaths or injuries. The city of more than 2 million people is one of the most flood-prone metropolitan areas in the country and has long experience dealing with devastating weather conditions.

Hurricane Harvey in 2017 evicted historic rain in the area, flooding thousands of homes and resulting in more than 60,000 rescues by the government rescue team throughout Harris County.

In Crosby, school officials said the driver of a school bus carrying 27 students stopped his vehicle just before entering floodwaters Friday. The students left through the back door and were taken to the campuses on another bus. “I am proud of our bus driver’s quick action,” said Crosby School District Superintendent Paula Patterson.

Of particular concern was an area along the San Jacinto River in the northeastern part of Harris County that was expected to continue to rise as more rain fell and authorities released extra water from an already full reservoir. Judge Hidalgo on Thursday issued a mandatory evacuation order for those living along parts of the river.

In some areas along the river, “it is too late to preemptively evacuate and people are being assisted from their rooftops,” Hidalgo wrote Friday afternoon in a post on X. She said residents to the west or south of the area still had time to leave or “otherwise, be prepared to remain in place for 2 to 3 days.”

Most of Houston’s city limits were not heavily affected by the weather, except for the northeastern neighborhood of Kingwood. Officials said the area had about four months of rain in about a week. Houston Mayor John Whitmire said rising floodwaters from the San Jacinto River are expected to impact Kingwood Friday night and Saturday.

“The water is coming here. … We have time to prepare. But in a few hours it will be impassable,” Whitmire said, speaking from a fire station in Kingwood.

Shelters were opened across the region, including nine by the American Red Cross.

The weather service reported the river was above 69 feet (21.03 meters) around noon Friday and was expected to peak at 78 feet (23.77 meters) Friday night. It is forecast to fall below the flood level of 58 feet by Tuesday afternoon, according to the weather service.

In the city of Conroe, north of Houston, rescuers drove boats into residential neighborhoods to rescue people and pets from their homes and then transport them from the boats to higher ground. In nearby Livingston, neighborhoods were flooded, with water rising to the windshields of moving vans and above the bottoms of windows in some buildings.

Last month’s storms in southeast Texas and parts of Louisiana dumped more than 24 inches of rain in some areas, according to the National Weather Service.

The Houston metropolitan area covers about 10,000 square miles – an area slightly larger than New Jersey. It is crossed by around 2,736 kilometers of canals, streams and streams that flow into the Gulf of Mexico, around 80 kilometers southeast of the city center.

The city’s system of streams and reservoirs was built to drain heavy rains. But engineering initially designed nearly 100 years ago has struggled to keep up with the city’s growth and larger storms.

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Associated Press reporters Ken Miller in Edmond, Oklahoma, and Jim Vertuno in Austin, and Valerie Gonzalez in McAllen, Texas, contributed to this report.