More told to flee in Houston

BEAUMONT, Texas -- A week after Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas, millions of people across the Gulf Coast struggled Friday with the destruction left behind, and tens of thousands were left without drinking water or forced from their homes.

In Houston, officials urged people living in an area of the western part of the city near two bulging reservoirs to evacuate because of flooding. First responders in that city and across Texas continued the grueling work of searching home after home, and state authorities warned that many overflowing rivers and basins continue to pose risks of life-threatening flooding.

Federal officials kept a tense watch at a storm-damaged chemical plant east of Houston where two trailers of highly unstable compounds exploded, the second fire there in two days.Some of the volatile organic peroxides stored at the plant had ignited a day earlier.

Thick black smoke and towering orange flames shot up Friday at Arkema, the France-based company operating the plant, and officials with the company said they expect the remaining containers of peroxides to burn in the coming days.

Authorities raised the death toll from the storm to 42 late Friday, and rescue workers conducted a block-by-block search of tens of thousands of Houston homes.

Late Friday, the White House asked Congress for more than $14 billion as a down payment on Harvey recovery efforts, sending Republican leaders a request for $7.8 billion in immediate aid that will be followed by a request for another $6.7 billion, administration officials said.

President Donald Trump is expected to make a pitch for quick passage of storm funding legislation when he travels today to the Houston area and to Lake Charles, La., his second trip to the region in the week since the hurricane made landfall near Rockport, the officials said.

Trump tweeted earlier Friday that "Texas is healing fast" due to the response from people there.

The latest statewide damage surveys showed the extent of destruction.

An estimated 156,000 dwellings in Harris County, or more than 10 percent of all structures in the county database, were damaged by flooding, according to the Harris County Flood Control District, which includes Houston.

District meteorologist Jeff Lindner called that a conservative estimate.

"This is going to be a massive, massive cleanup process," Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday on ABC's Good Morning America. "This is not going to be a short-term project. This is going to be a multiyear project for Texas to be able to dig out of this catastrophe."

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner pleaded for more high-water vehicles and more search-and-rescue equipment as the nation's fourth-largest city continued looking for any survivors or corpses that might have somehow escaped notice in flood-ravaged neighborhoods.

Search teams quickly worked their way down streets, sometimes not even knocking on doors if there were obvious signs that all was well -- organized debris piles or full cans of trash on the curb, for instance, or neighbors confirming that the residents had evacuated.

Authorities considered it an initial search, though they did not say what subsequent searches would entail or when they would commence.

Turner also asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide more workers to process applications from thousands of people seeking government help. Harvey victims expect FEMA to work "with the greatest degree of urgency," he told CBS This Morning for a segment broadcast Friday.

The mayor said he will request a preliminary aid package of $75 million for debris removal alone.

Before announcing plans to release water from two reservoirs that could keep as many as 20,000 homes flooded for up to 15 days, Turner at a Friday news briefing called on the people who live not far from the reservoirs and have water in their homes to evacuate.

"If you are living in a home where there's water in your home, I'm going to ask you in the strongest of terms," Turner said. "Because to remain in your homes for the next 10 or 15 days is simply not in your best interests and neither is it in the best interests of our first responders."

It could take three months for the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, which are normally dry, to drain. The Harris County Flood Control District said it had to continue releasing water to protect the reservoirs' structural integrity and in case more heavy rain falls.

The storm had lost most of its tropical characteristics but remained a source of heavy rain. By Friday evening, Harvey had dumped more than 9 inches of rain in parts of Arkansas and Tennessee and more than 8 inches in spots in Alabama and Kentucky. Its remnants were expected to generate another 1 to 3 inches over parts of Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia.

WATER SYSTEM DOWN

In Beaumont, about 100 miles east of Houston, residents and officials faced, among other crises, a water shortage.

The city lost its drinking water supply during wind-whipped floods. First the main pump station was knocked out, then a secondary source. And it was not clear when the network would turn back on.

"We will have to wait until the water levels from this historical flood recede before we can determine the extent of damage and make any needed repairs," the city said in a statement early Thursday. "There is no way to determine how long this will take at this time."

The situation persisted Friday, as officials still scrambled to figure out a way to restore the city's water system in the low-lying city.

On Friday, the city Police Department established a water distribution point near the city center, not far from the still rising and fast-moving Neches River. Each vehicle to visit the distribution point "will receive bottled water," the department said in a statement on its Facebook page.

Carol Riley, a spokesman for the Beaumont Police Department, said that "private industry and different entities ... have been working with our city workers" in an effort to restore the city's pumps. Riley said she heard that a National Guard unit had left Baton Rouge and was en route to Beaumont on Friday with more water and pumping supplies, but that so far most of the help had come from private industry in Beaumont.

Beaumont had issued a voluntary evacuation order for its 118,000 residents. But for many of those still in the city, there was no way out with murky floodwater blocking roads in every direction. Police said some people tried to leave anyway, only to discover it was impossible and turn back, driving the wrong way on the highway.

"When you take water out of the picture, people start to panic a bit," said Halley Morrow, a police spokesman.

Water rescues in the Beaumont area continued Friday, although the number of requests had subsided somewhat since Thursday, Morrow said.

About 20 miles south of Beaumont, much of the city of Port Arthur remained flooded even as the sun came out and the immediate threat of rain was over.

Sgt. Lam Nguyen of the Port Arthur Police Department estimated that 75 percent of residents had lost their homes -- including him. He and nine members of his extended family had to be rescued as floodwaters rushed in late Tuesday and early Wednesday, and Nguyen worried about what was to come.

"We're running low on water and on food," said Nguyen, who was wearing a red polo shirt instead of his usual police uniform, which was lost in the floods. "Our shelters are filling up. We are getting them food, for now, but we are running out of food. We're doing all we can now."

Nguyen stood in a parking lot outside a Wal-Mart that had been turned into a command center for police and National Guard troops. He was in charge. The Wal-Mart was still open, but there was a line of more than 100 people waiting patiently with carts to get in before the shelves were stripped bare.

"We are in trouble," Nguyen said.

More than 42,000 people were housed at hundreds of shelters across Texas on Thursday night, Abbott, the governor, said at a briefing Friday afternoon. He also said another 3,000 Texans were in Louisiana shelters.

UNSTABLE CHEMICALS

In Crosby, northeast of Houston, wary eyes remained on the evacuated Arkema chemical plant that housed nearly 20 tons of organic peroxides.

The company had warned before the second fire Friday that the remaining trucks are likely to burn.

On Friday evening, Environmental Protection Agency spokesman David Gray said a preliminary analysis of data captured by the agency's surveillance aircraft did not show high levels of toxic chemicals in the air.

The EPA and local officials said analyses of the smoke after the Thursday explosion had also showed no reason for alarm. No serious injuries were reported.

A 1½-mile buffer around the plant was established Tuesday when Arkema warned that chemicals kept there could combust. Employees had been pulled out, and up to 5,000 people living nearby were warned to evacuate. Officials remain comfortable with the size of the buffer, Rachel Moreno, a spokesman for the Harris County fire marshal's office, said Friday evening.

Daryl Roberts, Arkema's vice president of manufacturing, told reporters Friday that "the water has begun to recede at the site." But he said that even if more of the site becomes accessible in coming days, company officials don't believe it will give them the ability to restart refrigeration needed to stabilize the peroxides. For starters, the electrical infrastructure on the site has been underwater for more than a week, he said, and will likely need extensive work.

"We're not in a position to quickly establish cooling," he said.

He said the company also does not want to put its employees or emergency officials in harm's way, when the remaining containers of volatile chemicals on the site could ignite at any time. "We believe that right now, the scenario that is available to us is to let that material burn out," Roberts said.

Elsewhere, the White House said Friday that the president hasn't finalized which aid group or groups will receive his pledged $1 million donation for storm relief efforts.

For the second-straight day, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders invited reporters to make recommendations for which groups should get the money.

"If you have suggestions, he is very open to hearing those," Sanders said.

The president met with three relief groups -- the Red Cross, Southern Baptist Relief and the Salvation Army -- in the Oval Office on Friday and pledged the nation's support to those affected by the storm.

As the storm tumbled northward, so did the scramble to get out of its way.

In Nashville, Tenn., more than 50 people were evacuated from flood-swamped streets. In northwest Alabama, residents were on watch for possible tornadoes after high winds damaged several homes near Reform.

Before noon Friday, the core of Harvey's storm clouds was located about 30 miles northwest of Nashville and was not expected to dissipate until late today over Ohio, the National Hurricane Center reported.

Information for this article was contributed by Jeff Amy, Juan Lozano, Jonathan Lemire, Marcy Gordon, Johnny Clark, Paul Weber, Will Weissert, Diana Heidgerd, David Warren, Jamie Stengle, Adam Kealoha Causey, Michael Kunzelman, Tammy Webber, Frank Bajak, Reese Dunklin, Emily Schmall, Michael Biesecker, Matthew Daly, Seth Borenstein, Luke Sheridan and Angeliki Kastanis of The Associated Press; by Abigail Hauslohner, Mark Berman, Todd C. Frankel, Lee Powell, Jorge Ribas, Arelis R. Hernandez, Avi Selk, Eva Ruth Moravec, Brian Murphy, Wesley Lowery, Lindsey Bever, Steven Mufson, Brady Dennis, David Fahrenthold and Angela Fritz of The Washington Post; and by Glenn Thrush of The New York Times.

A Section on 09/02/2017