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Rescuers searched through flooded neighborhoods across southeastern Texas yesterday for people stranded by Hurricane Harvey’s deluge. President Donald Trump asks Congress for 7.85 billion dollar in federal disaster relief.
Southeast Texas residents emerged by the thousands from shelters, motels and friends’ houses to return to flood-damaged homes, others remained in the grip of the crisis on Friday, cut off by still-rising floodwaters and living without running water for a second day, reports NYT
In Houston and the surrounding area where the historic inundation from storm Harvey was mostly receding, people took to trucks and boats to get back into their neighborhoods, and many were appalled by what they found.
The storm, one of the costliest to hit the United States, has displaced more than 1 million people, with 50 feared dead from flooding that paralyzed Houston, swelled river levels to record highs and knocked out the drinking water supply in Beaumont, Texas, a city of 120,000 people.Trump to visit the region today.
In Harris County, which includes Houston, the county Flood Control District estimated that 136,000 structures were flooded, but the water was receding in most places. People were eager to return home to pick up medications and family photos, to see if they could move back in, and mostly to answer the question that had gnawed at them for days: How bad is it?
About 40 percent of the buildings estimated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to have been flooded in Harris County, Tex., are in areas considered to be “of minimal flood hazard.”
That finding, by a New York Times analysis of FEMA’s data from Harris County, Tex., is similar to a report Friday by researchers at the University of California-Davis. They used satellite imagery to determine that half of the land that flooded in the county, whose seat is Houston, was outside of official flood zones.
Meanwhile a new storm, Irma, had strengthened yesterday into a Category 3 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. It remained hundreds of miles from land but was forecast to possibly hit Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti by the middle of next week.
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